Over the past couple of months, my husband and I have gotten really, really into the early 2000s FX show The Shield. Watching makes me long for the halcyon days of “peak TV,” and makes me mourn a way of making television that seems to be going extinct.
The Shield is a perfect television show, and it could have only existed at the time that it did. Part of that is because the show itself is a reaction to the environment in which it was created. Creator Shawn Ryan was inspired by the LAPD “Rampart” scandal of the late 90s—The Shield was almost named after it. While the scandal was complex, spanning for years, the gist was that the LAPD was letting teams of cops basically ignore the law they were supposed to be upholding. It was a level of corruption that was as shocking as the Wikipedia page about the scandal is long.
After The Sopranos proved a critical and financial success for HBO in 1999, the fledgling FX network was in the market for a Tony Soprano-esque anti-hero. Enter Vic Mackey, played by Michael Chiklis, a corrupt cop working with an LAPD strike team of equally corrupt cops.
Mackey is a fascinating character to follow because, despite how often he flagrantly commits crimes, he is convinced he does everything for the greater good. If he doesn’t monitor and take a cut from the local drug dealers, how can he be sure they're not selling to kids? If he doesn’t have an on-again off-again affair with a local sex worker, how can he be sure she’ll actually get clean? If he doesn’t plant evidence on a suspect he is 100% sure committed a crime, how can he be sure they’ll end up behind bars?Often, the tension is built by wanting to know how the fuck Mackey is going to wriggle out of the consequences of his actions. You almost root for him despite yourself.
Alongside Mackey and his strike team are detectives Claudette Wyms and Holland "Dutch" Wagenbach, played by C.C.H. Pounder and Jay Karnes, respectively. While Claudette and Dutch abhor Mackey’s methods, the image of “good” policing they provide is also disgusting. They lie to and manipulate suspects in custody, hold people in interrogation rooms without charging them, deny them access to lawyers to coerce confessions, even lie about what evidence they have or have not found. It’s lucky, through the magic of television, that we know these characters are all guilty of their crimes.
While Claudette tries her best to do her job in a corrupt system, Dutch is just a smug piece of shit in an entertainingly different way than Mackey. Dutch is a criminal profiler; he’s obsessed with catching serial killers and is often indifferent to their victims. He does put killers behind bars, but it’s the moments when he and Mackey find camaraderie that are most interesting to me. They’re both fans of gallows humor, especially gallows humor about the dead people whose cases they’re trying to solve. After a few episodes of The Shield, the show makes it clear that even “good” cops are bad cops, that the kinds of people who choose police work are often too vain and violent to actually protect anyone.
But what really strikes me as interesting about The Shield are the mechanical aspects of the show. First and foremost, you can see and feel how much the show benefits from having 13 to 15 episodes a season. It allows for room for characters like Julien, who wants to be a good cop but struggles with his sexuality—which makes him a target for both hate crimes and blackmail. Every episode has an A-plot and B-plot, sometimes even a C-plot, allowing several different characters to get at least a little screen time every episode, and for those characters to develop and evolve as the show moves forward. Members of Mackey’s strike team get filled out as actual characters instead of just caricatures. Shane Vendrell, played by Walton Goggins in his first breakout role, gets more interesting as he’s given space to be around, as both Goggins and the writer’s room get a feel for what kind of a person Shane is.
These days, it feels like shows with the same tone and mission as The Shield run for 8 to 10 episodes—and if you’re not an instant hit, you can’t count on ever getting another season. If The Shield could only count on 10 episodes, I don’t think it would be able to support full narrative arcs for all the characters, which is often the complaint I have about eight episode television shows. No matter how hard you try, something is going to feel rushed.
Creator Shawn Ryan has had the opportunity through his career to work in a collaborative environment to create his television shows, a kind of environment that is rapidly disappearing. Before The Shield, Ryan worked on Nash Bridges and Angel, where he worked in full writers' rooms. Joss Whedon, sex pest and showrunner for Angel, often made it clear how important the environment of a writers' room was to the success of his shows; his former collaborators, like Jane Espenson and Drew Goddard, have gone on to become extremely successful Hollywood writers and showrunners. During the Writer’s Strike of 2023, one of the things writers often talked about was the practice of “mini rooms,” instead of full writers' rooms. Mini rooms are popular because they cut down on costs—instead of hiring a bunch of writers to work throughout the season, a studio will hire a handful of writers to break out an entire season in a few weeks. According to writers who spoke to Variety, even if the show is picked up, the writers in the mini room often don’t continue on with the show. Newer writers, who need credited work to get more jobs, are especially impacted here.
You can feel this when you watch TV today, especially streaming TV with short episode runs. Everything feels rushed, and sometimes characters, plot points, and tone feel inconsistent from episode to episode.
Studios are also more reactive than they were when The Shield was new. In a conversation with TheWrap, a writer said that they were told to change gears on a script they were working on because of Twitter trends. It is hard to imagine any network picking up The Shield as it exists now, if only because of the abuse the cast and crew would face for daring to make a show about cops being corrupt. I mean, spoilers for a twenty year old television show, but this is how the pilot episode ends. Even on a “prestige” network like Max, it’s hard to imagine this making it to air:
Ryan did get pushback from FX while The Shield was on the air, but also enough room to push back against criticisms from executives. In particular, FX wanted Ryan to drop Walton Goggins, but Ryan wanted to prove to the network that Goggins was a capable actor. Shane Vendrell is now considered the breakout role of Goggins’s career.
“Little did I know, after that pilot, the executives wanted to fire me,” Goggins said in the Entertainment Weekly oral history of The Shield. “Shawn didn't tell me until the end of season 1 during a DVD commentary recording, and I said, ‘How?! I had two lines!’ He said to them, ‘I know what this guy's capable of, let me prove it,’ and he focused the second episode on Shane. I'm glad he didn't tell me because I may have f---ed that up.”
Going to The Shield after an eight episode television show feels like taking a sip of cold, clear water after a drought. There is television as good as The Shield still on the air—Ryan Murphy’s 9-1-1 is a delight—but I’m afraid that the economics of television are too fraught for more talent to emerge. I used to dream of working in a writers' room like the one The Shield had, where you could take real world politics and create something shocking and enlightening. I don’t know if that kind of room still exists, and I mourn its loss with each episode of The Shield that I watch.
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