It could be that the producers of the TV series, which happened to include Jennifer Lopez and Ryan Seacrest, played it safe during the first season of the American crime drama TV series “Shades of Blue” on NBC when it aired early this year.
Because after 13 episodes, the TV series seems to have tied up most of the loose ends as if it was one long movie that ran for over 10 hours and it ended.
Harlee Santos, played by Jennifer Lopez, was a New York Police Department detective who agreed to work with the FBI anti-corruption task force that was out to get her boss, Lt. Matt Wozniak, played by veteran actor Ray Liotta, notes Premiere Date.
She had no choice but to work with the FBI as she was caught red-handed accepting bribe. Harlee agreed to become the mole of the FBI in Wozniak’s team in exchange for immunity because she wants to give her 16-year-old daughter a good future.
But things got a little messy for her since Wozniak also suspected her as the mole in his team. It only subsided when one of his team members, David Sapperstein, got busted by the FBI and Wozniak thought it was him alright so he pushed him off a four-storey building during a hostage-taking situation.
Sapperstein still survived the fall so Wozniak decided to end his life by killing him while still in a coma in the hospital. That prompted Harlee to finally agree to give Wozniak to the FBI for good.
However, the plot further thickened when it was revealed that Wozniak was actually working with a bigger fish in the NYPD and the DEA. It turns out that an Internal Affairs officer of the NYPD, who happens to be the boyfriend of Wozniak, is also involved in the corruption and so is a DEA agent.
They planned to rob the confiscated DEA money from an armored van and it all went south as one Wozniak team member’s got shot accidentally while he and Harlee got ambushed and the money was taken away.
Harlee was the biggest schemer
It turns out that more than Wozniak, Harlee Santos is the biggest schemer in the NYPD as she was actually the one who plotted the ambush and the stealing of money.
When everybody knew that the FBI was already hot on their tails, the DEA man flew out of the country. The Internal Affairs officer meanwhile was killed by the rookie member of Wozniak team and he and Wozniak cremated his body to destroy any evidence.
Eventually, Harlee decided to come clean to Wozniak and told her that she staged the ambush in order to protect her team members from being arrested by the FBI. She also showed him the money, minus a couple of thousands which she gave to her former lover to stay away from her and their daughter.
Harlee also killed her former lover as she broke into their house and threatened to blackmail her for framing him and had him serving 10 years in jail even though he was not guilty of such crime. But he was an abusive partner to Harlee before so he also deserved his sentence in a way.
The biggest surprise for Harlee happened at the end when she went back to the money and found it all gone with a couple of thousands left to her. Her plan was to turn it over to the FBI, but not before giving some to Wozniak and allow him to flee. Apparently, Wozniak turned the tables on her scheming.
She called up Wozniak, who said that he was surrendering to the FBI and the money he left was for her and her daughter to start off new. Thus, Season 1 ended with hardly a cliffhanger and the few loose ends can already be answered through a simple narration come Season 2.
Something frightening
“Shades of Blue” has some elements of surprise and thriller to it but certainly not horror. But triple threat celebrity Jennifer Lopez seemed to have teased that something frightening will be coming to her character in the upcoming second season of “Shades of Blue” when it officially returns to NBC on February 5 next year.