Put Some Respect on The Shield

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Among those who know ball, the pilot of The Shield is the stuff of TV legend. Critics and fans alike speak reverently of the way it cleanly sketches out an entire universe, the tensions within it, and the core complexities of our protagonist, top cop and maybe-lawless thug Vic Mackey. In an especially thrilling late-episode interrogation scene, Vic sums up his entire being: “Good cop and bad cop left for the day," he says. "I’m a different kind of cop.” Then, the jaw-dropping final scene locks you in. Any viewer with a pulse into will want to watch rest of the series immediately.

It’s an all-time great hour of television, for sure. But whenever I tell a Shield neophyte about the show, I always point ahead to season four, when Anthony Anderson was cast against type for a season-long arc as a crime lord. He settles into role in by episode five, when he does some truly heinous shit, which at that point is about the show's 15th or 20th holy-shit-did-they-just-do-that-on-TV-moment.

The Shield is the rare contemporary cable series that keeps upping the ante over its seven-season run, and the closest it comes to a lull is season six, when the plot grounds to a halt to save all the fireworks for the climactic final go-round. Search any list of television’s best pilots and series finales and you’re likely to see the The Shield, a feat many of its contemporaries failed to achieve.

For the uninitiated, the series follows Michael Chiklis as Vic, who runs a special Strike Team unit within a fictional LA precinct that specializes in gangs and organized crime. Ruling the roost, though, has corrupted Vic himself, who at best deploys tactics that would be a PR nightmare in the body cam era and, at worst, participates in some of the same criminal behavior he’s meant to thwart. The precinct and its conniving, upwardly mobile captain need to gas up crime reduction stats; that same captain is slowly building a case against Vic to take him down for good. With that cat-and-mouse game serving as the story's propulsive hinge, the series also functions as a broader look at the nuances and rhythms of big-city policing. The ensemble is rounded out by two beat cops often facing misadventures on the street level and two detectives (one of which is played by the great CCH Pounder) who are usually embroiled in season-long arcs chasing a different serial killer. But all of it connects back to Vic’s web and his team’s internecine struggle to stay one step ahead of the criminals and suits out to get them. (Vic’s right hand is played by Walton Goggins, doing arguably career-best work in his least-known role.)

Debuting the same year as The Wire and three years after The Sopranos, The Shield exists in an exciting kind of liminal space between its more critically beloved contemporaries. Vic is every bit as magnetic, compelling and morally indecipherable as Tony Soprano, but because he’s just a cop and not a mobster, he reads more traditional. The show makes astute observations about the tired rhythms, constant failures, and political undercurrents of the American police system, but unlike The Wire, it’s proudly pulp, almost to a fault. The bad guys Vic goes up against are practically supervillains; at one point early in the series, he and the Strike Team plot to rip off an “Armenian Money Train.”

But when the time invariably comes to rank the best or most “important” shows of our generation—as The New York Times recently did, leaving the timeline shook for days—The Shield is routinely disrespected. On the NYT list of the best television shows of the 21st century, as determined by a mix of writers and industry cognoscenti, The Shield placed number 70. Seventy. The top spot went to Breaking Bad.

With all due respect to Vince Gilligan, Bryan Cranston, and that great series, Breaking Bad is the student to The Shield’s master. (Coincidentally, Chiklis, much like Cranston, was mostly known for comedic work before completely changing people’s perception of his range and abilities.) Breaking Bad sets up a core tension in its pilot—what happens when Walter White’s family discovers he’s a drug dealer—and withholds the fallout until its final run of episodes with elite pacing and duly appropriate apocalyptic fallout. Which is to say, it’s following The Shield blueprint.

Another now-commonplace trend was ushered in by The Shield: movie stars coming down from their silver screen Mount Olympus to mix it up with mere mortals on the tube. In 2005, Ari Gold was probably still scaring Vince to death by comparing television to career death on Entourage, but The Shield creator Shawn Ryan lured Glenn Close for a one year-commitment in season four, perhaps incidentally the show’s best. (Within two years, she would join the FX family with her own acclaimed series, Damages). The only season to give it a run for its money is the show's fifth, when Forest Whitaker followed suit around the same time as Last King of Scotland.

So why is The Shield so often an afterthought on lists typically dominated by Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and The Wire. For one, it’s kind of ugly. Breaking Bad may have adopted some of Shield’s narrative rhythms, but it staged some of the most gorgeous and cinematic images and sequences in television history. The Shield, by contrast, looks like CCTV footage. There were some good directors in the mix helping to establish the show’s visual language, like Clark Johnson and Paris Barclay, but their decision to make the show look more Cops than HBO wasn’t exactly aesthetically inviting.

You can say the same for the subject matter. Vic Mackey certainly helped set the antihero mold that would put prestige television in a vice grip, but the character doesn’t have the redeeming or deceptive charms of a Tony Soprano or Don Draper. (Chiklis won a well-deserved Best Actor Emmy for season one, scored a nomination for season two, and wasn’t recognized at all for the rest of the show’s run). Vic is a bad guy—and to uphold the “hero” of that equation, Ryan and his writers routinely had him face off against much worse guys who did some of the most heinous things FX’s Standards and Practices Department would allow. Upsetting things happen on this show, and almost every character is irredeemably compromised. The third season features the assault of a main character that still ranks as quite possibly the most disturbing thing I’ve seen on television, topped only by events on Sons of Anarchy, FX’s spiritual successor to The Shield.

But that assault—which happens to the character most obsessed with the pursuit of political and cultural “power”—isn't merely about shock value. Instead, it goes on to inform one of the show’s most potent storylines, altering that character’s arc in intriguing ways that reverberate throughout the remainder of the series. It’s hard to watch, but damn if it isn't rewarding.