If one was to look up "groundbreaking women-centered 80s TV shows", one would likely find "Cagney & Lacey", "The Golden Girls", and "Murphy Brown", but never "Lady Blue", and that makes sense. Cagney ran for 125 episodes, Girls for 180, Murphy for 247. Lady ran for 14. And yet...

"Lady Blue" was a gritty violent cop drama that starred Jamie Rose (if that's not the most 80s headshot ever, please prove us wrong) as Lady Blue... err... Kate Mahoney, a tough detective from the mean streets of Chicago. According to Wikipedia, her "father, brother, and married lover were killed in the line of duty". That is one cop you wouldn't want to cross!

So why did it only last 14 episodes? Well, it was a tad too gritty and too violent for its time. 18 characters were killed in the pilot. Watchdog groups kept complaining, not enough people watched, and the show was cancelled after one season.

Sadly for Rose (who was raised Jewish), "Lady Blue" was her acting peak. Roles since then have been limited to television movies and one-off episodes... including one on "NYPD Blue", a gritty violent cop drama that came a decade after "Lady Blue" and was definitely groundbreaking...

But it wasn't groundbreaking enough to be made in the 80s... and wasn't woman-centered.