Shades of Blue is a cop drama series about a police officer woman person who has access to the Fountain of Youth. At 47 years of age, Jennifer Lopez still looks younger than your daughter, playing New York detective Harlee Santos. Her appearance also goes unaltered even when being shot at or engaging in presumably sweaty activities. Not a single hair on her head moves and her pulchritudinous skin glistens like it’s been fucking laminated. If it weren’t for the stark contrast of Ray Liotta’s old Boxer dog face, I might have forgotten there was actually a story to follow.
As it happens, Harlee is a single mum who works with a corrupt group of cops led by Matt Wozniak (Liotta). When she’s caught carrying out a bit of innocent racketeering, she’s forced to become an informant for the FBI and betray her colleagues. But because Liotta’s been in plenty of gangster films before, it doesn’t take him long to smell a rat. That leads to a season’s worth of instances in which Wozniak points his finger at Harlee, only for her to repeatedly slither her way out of the accusations. That’s more like a snake than a rat, isn’t it? Maybe the reason she never ages or becomes dishevelled is because she’s actually a rodent-reptile hybrid that sheds its skin.
Anyway, Lopez bounces off Liotta well, which is no doubt down to the tightness of her newly encased body. In fact, she holds her own as a backward member of the NYPD so admirably, it’s almost hard to believe she ever sang ‘I Luh Ya Papi’. If nothing else, her screen presence is enough to set Shades of Blue apart from shows like The Closer and whatever else your nan watches during the middle of the day. Sure, it’s a lot like Martin Scorsese’s The Departed, which is also being turned into a TV series because someone misunderstood the meaning of ‘redundant’, but what else are you going to watch when the thirty seven other crime-based shows aren’t available?