We've learned a lot over the past few years but one big thing is that cops kinda suck. Not just in a "gives too many traffic tickets" way, but in a "do we really want these kinds of people protecting our city" way. This makes The Shield a remarkably interesting series, as it was the first big show to portray the police in a really unflattering way. While as early 2000s as you can get, it really is ahead of its time in a lot of ways.
The Shield is about Vic Mackey, a cop who is a part of the LAPD's experimental Strike Team division. Strike Team is entirely composed of corrupt cops, willing to break the law to stop criminals. At its core, this is another anti-hero drama not unlike The Sopranos, where you follow an awful and unsympathetic main character and watch as he suffers the consequences of his decisions. However, I found the Strike Team particularly unlikable even by the standards set by these kinds of shows. Not unfun to watch, mind you. Michael Chiklis makes a great lead and Walton Goggins will always be a fantastic actor, but I just find these guys hatable in a way I don't for someone like Tony Soprano or Dexter. Maybe it's because, unlike most of these anti-heroes, the cops in Strike Team are supposed to be the good guys. They're supposed to defend Los Angeles and yet they act like the mafia a lot of the time. And it's not just the Strike Team, The Shield really doesn't pull its punches in making the LAPD a pretty scary and miserable place. It also doesn't help that there is a lot of crime in Los Angeles, too much for the LAPD to feasibly do by the book, which ends up causing both criminals and the public to criticize the police for uselessness. There's a lot of moral complexity in the world of The Shield and nothing is anything close to the black-and-white morality of most cop shows.
However, despite all of these differences, The Shield is also a bit of a procedural. Each episode deals with its own storyline and there are more competent cops like Dutch, Claudette, and Danny who have their own investigations that they try to solve by the book. While the concept of a "dark cop procedural" does sound pretty novel, it leads to the season feeling a bit scattershot both tonally and in terms of its story-telling. While much of the Strike Team stuff feels like the part of a standard drama, the material regarding the other detectives can range from just as dark and dramatic to reasonably light-hearted and filled with pun-heavy black comedy. It also doesn't help that the season doesn't really have a concrete overarching story (outside of maybe Captain Aceveda looking into Strike Team), instead balancing its episodic storylines with its many subplots. The subplots are actually all pretty great, with the Strike Team dealing with the fallout of killing a fellow cop, Dutch's investigation of a serial killer, and Julian dealing with his homosexuality. On the other hand, the episodic storylines range in quality drastically, and the fact that many of them seem to wrap up pretty neatly doesn't mesh with the show's theme of consequences all that well.
While this season was fairly consistent in quality so far, there were definitely some episodes that were better than others:
Cherrypoppers: Cherrypoppers did a really good job of showing off what makes The Shield different from your standard procedurals, and probably had Mackey at his most oddly sympathetic. There's something kind of funny about Dutch asking the Strike Team to help stop a criminal, only for them to stop a completely different (though no less horrifying) criminal. It also led to a pretty downbeat ending where the killer pretty much gets away, an effective subversion of most neat and tidy procedurals (not to mention some episodes of this very show).
Dragonchasers: While I didn't love every storyline in this episode, Dutch's interrogation of the serial killer he spent a third of the season chasing easily makes for the highlight of the season. Every single interrogation scene in this episode was electric, and seeing Dutch finally score a victory was very satisfying.
Circles: This finale was definitely the best episode of the show so far. The cop killers were a truly scary threat that put every character in danger, the final confrontation with Gilroy was great, and Aceveda and Mackey end up having to work together for once. The ending where Mackey's family left him was a really surprising twist given how early in the show it happens, and seems to set up an exciting new status quo for Season 2.
Overall, this was a solid first season of The Shield, with an interesting and well-acted cast and an unflattering yet morally intriguing depiction of the police. However, the half-procedural-nature of the show leads to some weak episodic storylines and a fairly inconsistent tone.
3/5 Stars
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