The Shield Retrospective: Crime Doesn’t Pay Like It Used To

Yonder back in the winter of 2002, viewers of the FX network were treated to something unusual in between old episodes of Buffy and Married With Children. It was a promo for The Shield, an original scripted drama on *gasp* a basic cable channel! Everyone knew basic cable was just for reruns, cooking shows, and cartoons, right? The promo seemed exciting enough: a little cat and mouse drama between a bad cop on the take and a good cop infiltrating his crew. Where things got interesting was when the show premiered and the bad cop looked like the hero. And then at the end of the series premiere, the bad cop shot the good cop in the face and TV changed forever.

It’s undeniable that The Sopranos may have paved the way for The Shield and triggered a taste for amoral antiheroes in the dramatic landscape. But without the success of Shawn Ryan’s bold, gritty vision of L.A. rotting from the inside out with gang violence and corruption, basic cable would have never seen the likes of Mad Men, Damages, Breaking Bad, Rescue Me, or any other original programming not afraid to push the envelope or stray from the beaten path. At its heart, The Shield was the story of Vic Mackey: a street crime detective never afraid to bend and break the law to fit his own uber-cynical ideas of justice. Crack problem in your neighborhood? Vic will take down every dealer but one, keep an eye on distribution, and take 10% for himself. Collar an NBA star in a bust? Keep him “tied up in the system” while betting on the other team. The seven season epic followed Vic’s path of destruction as it affected his friends, his family, the LAPD, international organized crime, and the highest tiers of political power in southern California. Let’s look back.

The show’s first season focused less on serialized arcs and more on establishing its world and its characters. After killing Terry (the aforementioned “good cop”) and thus establishing exactly how black his heart can be, the writers daringly chose to depict Vic as a caring father, loving husband, and devoted protector of the streets who gets results. The other players in Vic’s world included Shane & Lem, fellow members of the Farmington strike team: an elite 4 man unit specializing in eliminating gangs and drugs in the very worst part of the City of Angels. Shane was an impulsive good ol’ boy who would go to hell and back to please Vic and tried to be just like him. Lem was the moral compass of the bunch, a good man with a conscience that came into frequent conflict with Vic’s ways, but not enough for him to be displeased with the results. Rounding out the squad was Ronny, a loyal tech whiz who never merited more than a few moments of screen time until season 6. Watching over the strike team was Captain David Aceveda, an opportunist with his eyes set on city hall who had little problem turning a blind eye to Vic’s exploits as long as they improved crime stats. Other MVPs in Mackey’s work world included Dutch, a self righteous but lovable detective with a keen sense for tracking serial killers, and his partner Claudette, a zero tolerance for BS master of interrogation and perhaps the only cop on the show with truly 100% noble ideals of law enforcement and justice. When he wasn’t busting gang banger skulls, Vic came home to his wife Corinne, a devoted nurse and loving mother to three children. Try as she might to overlook evidence of Vic’s misdeeds, it became too much to bear. She fled with the kids, and season 1 ended with Vic in a state of heartbreak and panic.

Season 2 saw the Strike Team diving deep into some questionable extracurriculars as it focused on Vic’s meticulous scheme to rob millions of dollars from an Armenian mob “money train.” Everything seemed to go smoothly enough save the unplanned murder of a few security thugs, but season 3 brought about the beginning of the end as the money became an unbearable burden. Marked bills, treasury investigations, Shane’s sticky fingered girlfriend, a desperate need for private school tuition for Vic’s autistic son, and a crazed Armenian executioner with a foot fetish and a messiah complex all culminated in a paranoid breakdown for Lem that led him to destroy the dirty money in a furnace, driving a wedge between the strike team that lasted across the hiatus.

Season 4 was something of an aberration: a story bordering on standalone that brought Glenn Close into the fray as Captain Monica Rawling, a take no prisoners kinda gal whose policy of seizing homes and property from drug offenders set her at odds with local kingpin Antwon Mitchell (Anthony Anderson). It was all pretty good; Anderson got to prove he’s more than the dipshit from Kangaroo Jack, Close put together a nice audition reel for Damages, and the strike team reunited to take Antwon down; but nothing felt especially resonant to the grand scheme of things.

Forest Whitaker brought a renewed sense of purpose to season 5 in his role as Jon Kavanaugh, an internal affairs detective hell bent on exposing every last nook and cranny of the strike team’s sins. His dogged and increasingly unethical pursuit for the truth put the team, especially poor Lem, on the defensive until Shane took the depressingly cowardly move of killing Lem with a grenade, all on the strength of faulty intel that Lem would betray his brothers in arms. A shortened season 6 would complete this particularly powerful arc with depictions of Kavanaugh’s downfall, Shane’s guilt, and Vic’s fight against forced retirement, not to mention a vow of murderous vengeance upon whoever killed Lem.

The final season brought together all the best elements of years past in a dense, tragic, and dramatically satisfying way that secured The Shield‘s legacy of quality. Tensions between those pesky Armenians and some heavies from a Mexican drug cartel (one of whom happens to be sponsoring Aceveda’s mayoral campaign) force an uneasy alliance between Vic and his old boss, and the exposure of the truth about Shane & Lem puts Shane and family on the run and Vic on the prowl. Meanwhile, Claudette convinces Corinne to work with the police to bring her renegade ex down. In the end, Shane kills himself and takes his wife & son with him, and a last minute deal with a federal drug agency grants Vic a pardon for every last one of his crimes. Everything from killing Terry and ripping off the Armenians, down to the meagerest mishandling of an occasional dime bag. While fans were convinced that the show could only end with Vic’s death, imprisonment, or total exoneration, Shawn Ryan came up with a more subtly horrific fate. Vic may never see the wrong side of prison bars, but he loses his family to witness protection, sacrifices Ronny, burns every bridge he ever built, and finds himself buried in a meaningless government desk job, a pit bull on the world’s shortest chain.

While it’s a pleasure to briefly recall the many fond hours I spent in Farmington, it’s only scraping the surface of a show that deserves to be experienced in full on DVD. Rich with recurring side characters, intriguing mysteries that put Law & Order to shame, and a dark sense of humor, The Shield sets a standard for both police action dramas and TV at large to aspire to. It will be missed.

The Shield, FX (2002-2008)

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Photographs courtesy of FX and IMDbPro

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