As momma always said,... when you tell the truth you can always repeat the same story since you don't have to remember any of the lies you may have otherwise told. In Shades of Blue you have an entire team of a police division involved in police corruption. The two lead characters on this corrupt police team are Harlee Santos played by super star Jennifer Lopez and Detective Matt Wozniak, played by Ray Liotta. Harlee plays a veteran cop who is also a single mom raising her 16 year old daughter. Her daughter Cristina Santos (played by Sarah Jeffery) who is a cellist prodigy requires a substantial financial contribution to enrol in a private school for music prodigies. This is the main reason that mom and police woman Harlee Santos is part of a corrupt team of police officers. The team leader is Detective Matt Wozniak, played superbly by the legendary crime genre star Ray Liotta. Ray Liotta is one of my guaranteed good performance actors. Just think of the starring role he had in the crime films Goodfellas, Identity, Cop Land and/or Narc which were all good performances by Ray.
With only the first episode televised at the time of my review it is a tad bit early to tell how the main characters roles will evolve, and if the television series writers will lean more in developing the main characters in the direction of a television crime series like The Shield, or more in mind with the strategic crime series and multiple Emmy winning series The Wire.
I will say though the director of the pilot series is the seasoned director and producer Barry Levinson who has ensured we understand that Harlee Santos is a very busy cop and mom. Within the first 60 minutes in no particular order, we witness Harlee run down and handcuff single handedly a very quick and agile street thug, set up an alibi for a rookie cop who kills a low life drug dealer without thinking first, deliberately smash her daughters car up to back up an alibi she created (remember what momma said about lies versus telling the truth?) earlier with Detective Matt Wozniak, gets caught by the FBI trying to take a bribe form a bookie (who is an FBI agent) and Harlee still finds time to work out in a boxing gym both in and out of the ring with her boy toy (no surprise here) trainer boyfriend. Whewww, Harlee accomplished all that in less than 60 minutes.
So now we see we have a team of corrupt cops trying to do their job of protecting the good citizens of New York City and at the same time make a few bucks off the backs of the bad guys by skimming a little kick back in protection money. We have the FBI closing in on this team of corrupt cops who are now under surveillance, and we have the corrupt team leader Matt Wozniak trying to figure out who the snitch is in his own unit before the FBI can close in on them all and break up this happy little family of close knit corrupt cops.
There is a lot going on in Shades Of Blue and I remain optimistic with this stellar cast of Grade 1 movie and television stars such as Jennifer Lopez, Ray Liotta, Drea de Matteo (The Sopranos), Warren Kole and Lolita Davidovich the series will have a strong first season performance. Mrs Shullivan and I were impressed with the pilot episode. So far I will give the series a positive 9 out of 10 rating for the stellar cast, and the excellent directing and cinematography of the series pilot.
