Dark Blue (TNT)

DARK BLUE examines the thin line between cops and criminals. When an agent spends too much time on an assignment or seems to be doing too good a job maintaining cover, Shaw and his colleagues sometimes start to worry that he or she might have flipped completely. It's an intriguing gray area that makes for complicated moral questions and exciting television. As Shaw explains to a teammate, “There’s going under, and then there’s stepping over. I get scared when I don’t know the difference.”

Unlike other cat-and-mouse police dramas that alternate between showing the bad guys and their pursuers, Dark Blue focuses on the criminals’ world. This is an environment where nobody trusts anyone -- a point made even clearer by that fact that one member of the crew is secretly an undercover cop. As such, there’s plenty of casual violence, and many scenes that feature callous, calculated brutality. Some of it is tough to stomach, but it often seems realistic considering that the main characters are trying to get as close as they can to some of the city’s most dangerous mobsters and gang lords.