This is an edition of the weekly newsletter Tap In, GQ senior associate editor Frazier Tharpe’s final word on the most heated online discourse about music, movies, and TV. Sign up here to get it free. 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.
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