TNT's new LA cop drama from Bruckheimer is stylish
By Tom Conroy Jul 15, 2009
An adequate undercover-cop drama from the big-name producer Jerry Bruckheimer, “Dark Blue” attempts to go beyond mere action-suspense and draw viewers into the morally complicated lives of its main characters, but it keeps us at a distance by straining to give everything a slick feature-film look.
The series, premiering tonight at 10 p.m. on TNT, concerns the adventures of a team of cops in Los Angeles who are so deep under cover that no one except a highly placed police chief knows of their team’s existence. Dylan McDermott (“The Practice”) plays Carter Shaw, the driven but complex head of the crew.
(The show apparently has nothing to do with the 2002 movie of the same title, which starred Kurt Russell as an L.A. cop leading a team that worked the gray areas of law enforcement.)
When we first see Carter, he is striding toward the camera sporting sunglasses, a long black coat and a four-day growth, which are probably meant to seem fierce but mainly make him look like someone dressed up for Halloween as a Cop Who’s Willing to Get His Hands Dirty in the Pursuit of Justice.
Perhaps in recognition that this getup is a little much for broad daylight, the script has Shaw say to a couple of beat cops, “This better be good. I haven’t seen 7 a.m. since 1992.”
It is good. The cops have found the nearly dead FBI agent who was shown being tortured brutally in the episode’s opening scene. (That scene may make viewers nostalgic for the days when TV violence was largely implied.)
It turns out that one of the men in the room during that torture is a member of Shaw’s crew, Dean (Logan Marshall-Green). He’s managed to infiltrate the gang led by a criminal mastermind named Franzine (guest star James Russo), who is working on a job so big that it’s drawn the attention of the FBI. The buttoned-down agent leading the investigation (Kyle Secor) begins to suspect that Shaw knows more than he’s telling.
The FBI probably doesn’t need to worry about him. “Two things to know about Carter,” his colleague Ty (Omari Hardwick) tells a newbie named Jaimie (Nicki Aycox). “There’s nothing he wouldn’t do to protect us. And there’s nothing he wouldn’t do to get his man.”
Dean’s situation is a little trickier. “Sooner or later,” Ty tells Jaimie, “you’re gonna forget what parts are the cover and what parts are you.” The suspense in the premiere largely derives from the question of how far Dean has gone to the dark side.
Whether viewers will be emotionally engaged is another matter, as the overly stylized art direction of the show often overwhelms the characters. In this respect, “Dark Blue” is of a piece with such previous style-over-substance Bruckheimer productions as “Beverly Hills Cop,” “Pirates of the Caribbean” and “C.S.I.”
Everyone in the crew is attractively scruffy and is always dramatically lit. The office where they meet is one of those vast, run-down loft spaces with a decorated ceiling and lots of natural light. It comes complete with a babe computer whiz (Christianna Carmine) who always looks business-sexy with her glasses and pinned-up hair. (She’s unnecessarily distracting—we keep expecting her to reveal her hotness by whipping off those glasses and letting down her hair.)
Even more absurdly, Ty meets a contact by going into an electronics store that turns out to be the secret entrance to a picturesque old theater that’s being used for illegal boxing matches.
The episode’s plot, meanwhile, takes familiar turns, and the big reveals of the characters’ secrets fail to surprise us.
“The Shield” showed that it’s possible to make an involving, gritty police drama on a cable budget, but it did so by deciding that looks don’t matter. If “Dark Blue” learns that lesson and starts concentrating more on its character development and scripts, maybe it will prove to be a little more arresting.
Tom Conroy is a Connecticut writer and longtime TV critic.
