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The Shield

This weekend I finally finished the seven season odyssey that is The Shield, with its emotionally destroying finale meaning that once again I am talking TV.  I started watching the Shield when I first moved to York and found the first season on special offer in HMV.  Often unfairly this show has been compared to the genius of The Wire, but while this shares a gritty and uncompromising feel with David Simon's epic, it is more of an unhinged and deranged cousin, utterly insane in its premise and execution.

If you are not familiar with The Shield, it centres around one Police district in run down Los Angeles, and in particular the exploits of Detective Vic Mackey and his Strike Team, a gang of ruthless police officers hell bent on their own destruction.  Mackey, played with earnest violence throughout by Michael Chiklis, is a one man armageddon, capable of just about anything, from murder to facilitating drug deals, to sacrificing anyone close to him. 

But the true beauty of this show is that within the first episode you realise that this is not the cop show cliche of 'one man who will bend the rules to get things done.' No, this is a stone cold psychopath who is utterly devoid of morals who is willing to do anything to fulfil his agenda. And that agenda is to make as much dirty money as he can, and to make sure he doesn't get caught doing it.  And we the viewer are forced to watch, to identify with this monster and by the end of the first season, pray he doesn't get caught.

Over the course of seven seasons we have slowly seen every member of the cast infected by Vic and his dirty morals. Nobody gets off lightly, and the supporting cast (particularly Jay Karnes as talented but socially inept Homicide detective Dutch Wagenbach and CCH Pounder as his hard nosed partner Claudette) each excel in portraying their own personal demons, reflecting the cold hell of the streets and what it means to deal with them on a day to day basis.

Whereas the Wire is relentlessly real, with all the flawed personalities that entails, The Shield is reality turned up to a thousand.  Whenever there is a perp who will not break, VIc is there to beat the life out of them while everyone turns their backs on their morals in order to get a win. Nobody gets off clean.

The finale itself was possibly the tensest hour and a half of television I have ever seen, as seven years of twists and turns finally come to a head and it becomes clear that there is no way to finish the story with a happy ending. When it had finished I sat dumbfounded for a good five minutes, utterly unable to move, so emotionally draining it was that I couldn't bring myself to change to another channel.  And I am not ashamed to admit that there were times when there were tears, big fat man tears.  Anyone who has seen it will probably know to what I am refering, an event so shocking that I'm not sure how it was allowed to be broadcast.

Unflinching, brilliant, disturbed.  One of the most original shows on TV, and unlike so many shows that have a long overreaching story arc, it concluded so intensely, so maddeningly that it has reached the pantheon of those TV shows that can genuinely be called brilliant.