Dark Blue, the latest police drama from Jerry Bruckheimer’s seemingly bottomless well, takes you deep undercover, following a top-secret unit in the LAPD.  Dylan McDermott plays Lt. Carter Shaw, a loner street-wise cop almost completely disconnected from the world.  He pushes his team as hard as he pushes himself and the strain they are all under is palpable.

In the pilot, Carter is summoned by the FBI to view a surveillance tape which shows a nearly dead FBI agent being dumped on a deserted access road by a group of men that includes Dean Bendis, one of Carter’s crew, who has infiltrated the inner circle of an organized crime boss.  Carter must learn if Dean was simply doing his job or if he has flipped to the other, more profitable, side.  To do so, he tears ambitious cop Ty Curtis from newlywed bliss to go undercover in an old alias to get information on Dean.  When Dean says he will need help, Carter recruits Jaimie Allen, a patrol cop with such talent for lying that she has hidden a nasty-looking juvenile criminal record and replaced it with a pristine background solid enough to fool the police academy.

Elaborate cons follow as the team tries to gather information about both Dean’s status and his boss’s intentions while FBI doggedly investigates on their own.  It was nice to see that, for the most part, the FBI was treated with respect.  Too often, when a show centered on police brings in the FBI as an adversary, the agents are shown as near buffoons.  That was not the case here, and it was a welcome development.  After direct contact with Dean leaves questions unanswered and intentions unknown, the show climaxes with an attempted  trap where you don’t know which direction Dean’s gun will be aimed.

There were a few heavy-handed or clichéd moments, such as Carter watching video of him and his wife from a time when he was happy, but was overall engrossing with its exploration of straddling the line between true identity and undercover identity—a line that will get crossed many times during the series, I expect—and how that can shape a cop and change a person.  It is violent, so much so that it opens with an electrocution torture scene, so it’s not for the squeamish.  It is also almost unrelentingly dark with precious little comic relief.  

The cast is Dark Blue’s biggest selling point.  It took a bit for me to get used to Dylan McDermott as the brooding and tough-minded Carter, but I love him as an actor and think he will suit the role well as it is fleshed out.  Jaimie is the newbie, so we didn’t see much of Nicki Aycox, but she seems perfectly cast as an ambitious and defiant redemption-seeker.  Omari Hardwick is excellent as Ty Curtis, playing a loving husband and cop conflicted by relationships he developed undercover with equal skill.  Logan Marshall-Green was a standout with his perfect portrayal of a cop so undercover it is impossible to tell where his loyalties truly lie.  The cast’s chemistry is outstanding, especially that of Hardwick and Marshall-Green.  Though the premise of the show seems to lend itself to the team being split up on assignments, I hope to see much more of them together as they all mesh well.

Dark Blue is being paired with Leverage, a show which also features dynamic leading men and stellar ensemble casts, identity changing, and rule and law-bending to find some measure of justice.  The similarity to Dark Blue ends there, as Leverage is a fun and frothy caper dramedy and Dark Blue is all gritty drama.  The two can be seen as two sides of the same coin, with Leverage providing the laughs, intrigue, and criminals with hearts of gold and Dark Blue featuring higher stakes, more potent emotional impact, and morally ambiguous cops. Whether those high stakes and emotional impact can be maintained as a long-term series remains to be seen, but Dark Blue shows promise and should be an interesting partner to Leverage.