Word: shields
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Creator Shawn Ryan says he was inspired to write The Shield by L.A.'s Rampart police scandal. "At the same time," he says, "I was reading about all these politicians crowing about how crime was down. I drew the connection that maybe these guys were dirty but successful." Ryan, a veteran of CBS buddy-cop show Nash Bridges, hired another network-cop-series refugee as his lead: Michael Chiklis, who in ABC's The Commish was a cop as plump and sweet as a powdered doughnut. For The Shield, he shaved his head, hit the gym and gave...
...nudity, extreme violence and, instead of the standard TV euphemisms, nearly every curse word short of the big F. "Whenever I hear somebody on a cop show say, 'Get on the ground, dirtbag,' I think, 'Oh, for Christ's sake, I'm an adult,'" says Chiklis. More important, The Shield did what network cop shows have lately abandoned: it created a richly imagined world with continuing story lines, driven by L.A.'s roiling racial politics--achieving a payoff far bigger than solving the murder of the week...
...Mackey, though, is definitely not a cop you've seen on TV before. In the pilot of FX's astonishing The Shield (Tuesdays, 10 p.m.), he brutalized a suspect to find a kidnapped girl, then murdered a fellow Los Angeles cop who was about to rat on him and his antigang Strike Team for corruption. By this week's season finale, he has become the most memorable, divisive and hard-to-pin-down character of the TV season--and his series, a lesson in the difference between network and cable TV making...
...that they're pawns in a game (chess metaphors are always a reliable DIDACTICISM ahead sign). But it slowly develops into an engrossing look at the methodical nature of police work and the limits of individualism. Cop dramas are dispatches on America's relationship to authority, and like The Shield, The Wire is a daring and timely one. We responded to 9/11 with a national narrative of teamwork: unite behind our institutions, and let's roll. (Waco? Diallo? Old news.) The rhetoric of good and evil was ascendant; anything in between smacked of moral equivalence. And yet the news since...
Read this way, the network whodunit is like the mainstream post-9/11 superego, telling us that the system may make mistakes but it works. Evil is knowable, crime solvable, justice swift and attainable. The Wire and The Shield arrive like an unconscious (and just as American) response: It's O.K. to doubt, to question, to acknowledge the bad among the good. Decades of cop shows have schooled us on our Miranda rights, chief among them the right to remain silent. Cheers to these cable cops for exercising their right to make some noise...