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CRITIC SCORE DISTRIBUTION | ||
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Positive:
14
Mixed:
14
Negative:
2
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Critic Reviews
Jan 8, 2016
Season 1 Review:
The whole cast is pretty much perfect for the story Shades of Blue is trying to tell. Lopez makes a fine lead--she's tough and unsentimental here, and even though they've made her look gorgeous, you don't necessarily think of her as a glamorous character. But it's Liotta's show.
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Jan 20, 2016
Season 1 Review:
Yes, this is "The Shield," with more gloss and less shock, and the story starts to strain as Harlee's FBI handler Warren Kole (Robert Stahl) shows an unhealthy interest in his undercover agent and the series worryingly starts to veer into "Enough"/"The Boy Next Door" territory. But the increasingly fraught dance between Harlee and Wozniak is absorbing and even occasionally nail-biting, and certainly reason enough to give Shades a shot.
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Jan 6, 2016
Season 1 Review:
The worse things get--and they get very bad--Lopez gets much better, withdrawing into herself, growing ever more still, as her character must spin lie after lie to stay ahead, to stay alive. Academy Award-winner Barry Levinson directed the first two episodes, and they are unusually taut. De Matteo makes a welcome return to series TV, but her character’s escalating marital woes seem a distraction.
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The Daily BeastJan 7, 2016
Season 1 Review:
You begin to accept, even adore, these wooden aspects of the show as a litany of twists begin entering at whiplash pace.... [Lopez] and the rest of the show’s creative team make you care about what happens to Harlee while still making you feel like she’s in real danger.
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Jan 6, 2016
Season 1 Review:
Shades of Blue certainly isn’t shy about hauling out some of the tropiest tropes about cops who find themselves wearing a wire. Still, there’s something compelling and worth watching here--mainly Lopez’s enthusiastic and determined performance. Liotta also has a lot left to give.
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Jan 5, 2016
Season 1 Review:
It has the occasional police chase, shooting and so on, because even dirty cops have to enforce the law now and again. But it’s about gray-area choices, not about catching perps. Ms. Lopez and Mr. Liotta pair well, and the early episodes certainly have a pulse. The key will be how long the conceit holds up.
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Jan 5, 2016
Season 1 Review:
Created by Adi Hasak, with the first two episodes directed by Barry Levinson (whose previous NBC cop show, "Homicide," helped inspire the likes of "The Wire" and "The Shield"), is competent but uninspired, and often more concerned with flattering its glamorous star than telling the best possible version of this story.
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Jan 7, 2016
Season 1 Review:
Throughout everything, Lopez gives a solid performance — perhaps the best dramatic work she’s done since her first-rate film, Out of Sight (1998). Liotta is excellent as well.... But Shades of Blue’s biggeset problem is this: beyond Lopez and Liotta, the rest of the cops are bland clichés (de Matteo’s marital-woes subplot is particularly trite), and as the series proceeds, Harlee’s efforts to keep her FBI-informant status a secret from her co-workers becomes very strained.
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Jan 5, 2016
Season 1 Review:
Shades of Blue is reasonably compelling by that measure [helping lure viewers into the program’s serialized plot], and clips along smartly enough (eight episodes were made available) that the show should inspire some return business if it can generate the requisite sampling. Nevertheless, it’s too bad Blue couldn’t bring at least a few new, more colorful hues to a crime drama that paints, ultimately, with a rather familiar palette.
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ColliderJan 21, 2016
Jan 8, 2016
Season 1 Review:
These cops are not even particularly good at corruption, with Harlee and her colleagues frequently making up clumsy lies that instantly fall apart, in order to cover their tracks from previous, flimsy fabrications. The subplots about the other detectives in the unit (aside from Harlee and Woz) are especially thin, and anything about the characters’ personal lives is a tedious waste of time.
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Jan 6, 2016
Season 1 Review:
Shades of Blue moves at a brisk pace, like “Scandal” and “How to Get Away With Murder,” so that you don’t have time to think through the details. And the script is filled with bits of wit that, like ad slogans, fly by and entertain even when they’re not particularly fitting or informative.... But as the serialized plot thickens and the characters become inconsistent, the show’s flaws become unavoidable and its excesses absurd.
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Jan 2, 2016
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