An Interview With <i>Shades of Blue</i> Creator Adi Hasak

t few years, there have been a plethora of different "cop shows" that have done well but are often criticized for being very contrived. After watching the pilot oflast night it is clear that it is not your average cop show.
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Sam: Over the last few years, there have been a plethora of different "cop shows" that have done well but are often criticized for being very contrived. After watching the pilot of Shades of Blue last night it is clear that it is not your average cop show. How did you go about making this show divergent from what is already on the air?

Adi: Well, you know I wasn't really writing a cop show. I was really writing a tale about morality, which is something that really interests me. So that's where it came from. You're taking good people, and putting them in very difficult environments and seeing how they respond. As a theme, that's really interesting to me. The other thing that interests me is when you're given a gun to maintain the law, ironically it is easiest to break it. It's really about the difficulty for police officers, soldiers, really anyone that we put into horrible circumstances. Those themes were very important to me, and the police genre was honestly an acceptable genre for those themes. In the past I've written some really interesting and unique television scripts and I've always been asked "gee, can't you just write a medical show or a Lost show or a police show?" So this time I thought I would take one of the themes that was of interest to me, corruption, and simply embrace a genre and tell it through a genre.

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Sam: As far as themes of corruption within the police force go, have recent events influenced the writing of the show? If so, how did they influence the conception of the plot?

Adi: Actually, they have not. This was a spec script, which we can talk about in a minute. I gotta tell you, this is not a show about police corruption. This is a show about corruption in general. I think a big problem we have in our country is social corruption, political corruption, but this is not a repudiation of the police force in any way. As you'll see as the series continues, the corruption stems from the personal lives and struggles of the characters rather than from their police-hood. But it's the corruption that we all do, we all check the wrong boxes on IRS forms and stuff like that. It's the slippery slope that we take. It's that opening monologue that Jennifer Lopez's character has in which she talks about how it started so small.

Sam: I heard that Shades of Blue was impressively picked up by NBC on spec and put straight to series. That almost never happens anymore in Hollywood. How did that come about? What were the initial conversations with NBC like?

Adi: You know, this is starting to become the new model. Just so you know, I work a lot with European companies and Europeans are a lot more frugal regarding production. They don't understand the American model of production, and why we would spend six to eight million dollars on a pilot and then just not pick it up. The Europeans go more straight to series, because it just makes sense from a financial point of view. Because for better or for worse, it gives the network an inventory, and something to sell. So this was a spec script that I wrote about two and a half or three years ago, and I got the script to Elaine Goldsmith Thomas who really is the hero of putting this together. Elaine was the biggest talent agent in the 90's and 2000's. She got the script and gave it to Barry Levinson, and the irony is that while I was writing this, Barry's show Homicide on my desk for inspiration. So she got it to Barry, and Barry really responded to it which was wonderful. In the process I had met Ryan Seacrest's company and we were looking to do something together. Elaine said that we should get Jen for the series, and Elaine being Elaine, two weeks later I was sitting in a conference room with Jennifer Lopez. So we decided that the model would be straight to series, because Jennifer was way too big of a star to do a pilot. So I sat down in a room with like 15 NBC executives and pitched them the show. I pitched the whole show start to finish, and 30 minutes later I got an email from CAA saying that we had an order for straight to series.

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Sam: What is the plan for Shades of Blue moving forward? I know there is currently a 13 episode season coming to NBC. Is Shades of Blue slated for a limited run or will it continue as long as there is support?

Adi: This is not a limited series, Shades of Blue will be ongoing for as long as the viewers respond. Jennifer has been really incredible in committing herself to be on the show. She's one of the hardest working people in Hollywood, and a force of nature. To see her showing up on set at seven in the morning, knowing all of her lines, is really unbelievable. You see actors walking around all the time with the script in their hands, but she just showed up fully ready to go. She's prepared to go for a run with the show. I've already moved on, I have another show that is going straight to series called Eyewitness, it's one of those Nordic noir type shows, which is amazing. We are also on the verge of packaging another show straight to series, which is in the Finnish format called Black Widows. So on my end, as you can understand, we feel very comfortable with this model.

You can watch Adi Hasak's Shades of Blue on NBC Thursday's at 10/9c.

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