The major beats of the undercover genre are all crystalized. You await the scene where the stern authority figure threatens to pull our hero off the case because he’s in too deep. You await the scene where the hero’s wife/girlfriend complains that she doesn’t know who she’s sleeping with anymore, because he’s in too deep. You await the scene where our hero has to cross that line and do something illegal, because he’s in too deep to let his cover slide. In a movie each of things things can happen two or three times, but in a TV series, you can be stuck playing out the same beats multiple times in every episode.
No matter how bland the genre has become, it can still be a showcase for some terrific performances. I watched CBS’ “The Handler” for Joe Pantoliano and Hill Harper. I watched A&E’s “The Beast” for Patrick Swayze.
While some of the performances in TNT’s new drama “Dark Blue” are solid, none of them are compelling enough to elevate what is otherwise an oppressively gloom, by-the-numbers entry that just pushes the genre deeper into its rut.
[Full review after the break...]
Dylan McDermott stars as Carter Shaw, a street-wise cop so consumed with law and order that he’s let his marriage, his family and his personal life slip away. Yes. He’s that street-wise cop.
He runs a team that includes Ty (Omari Hardwick), still trying to be the best husband he can be, in-too-deep Dean (Logan Marshall-Green) and newcomer-with-a-past Jaimie (Nicki Aycox). They’re an elite off-the-books undercover squad with mostly unlimited resources, getting close to Los Angeles’ biggest drug pushers, arms dealers and potential terrorists.
But there’s a catch. (more…)
