I’ve been wanting to watch this show ever since I started watching The Wire back in 2009. I heard that fans of one are usually the fans of the other. Once upon a time I loved The Wire like it was my own child, but I’m not expecting something nearly as dense or nuanced with The Shield. I’m also nervous that something that started over 20 years ago might not hold up, but I’ve had a good track record of finding shows from the early ’00s satisfying. The golden age of television started in the ’00s after all.

That’s enough blithering. Here’s Season 1 of The Shield.

The Premise

Another show about the LAPD. We follow Detective Vic Mackey (Michael Chiklis), a dirty cop with a bad attitude! He does things his way and only his way, and no fucking white shirt in charge is going to tell him otherwise! Boy howdy! Yes sir!

One of the members of Vic’s little rogue troupe is Shane Vendrell (Walton Goggins, the worst name I’ve ever heard). He’s one ugly motherfucker. At times he’s even worse than Vic, who at least tries to handle his work with dignity. Shane will fuck strippers and pee on people.

You’ve got rookie Julian (Michael Jace) paired up with training officer Danny (Catherine Dent). This gets complicated because Julian kind of sucks at his job, has too much integrity to work with the system, and faces a few emotional breakdowns do to his homosexuality fighting against his strong religious beliefs. She’s nice to him.

You’ve got detective partners Claudette (CCH Pounder) and Dutch (Jay Karnes), the former being a no-nonsense, seasoned vet and the latter being the whitest guy on Earth. They’re both the best at what they do, it seems, even though Dutch gets nothing but ridicule from most of the rest of the precinct. He takes it in stride though, but at one point a serial killer taunts him and he cries in his car.

Then there’s Captain David Aceveda (Benito Martinez) who barely manages the precinct. He’s gunning for a council position, which means he wants to make a positive difference in the city by removing the corruption in his precinct and there’s no way that’s going to happen. Aceveda doesn’t like Vic because Vic is a dirty cop. Vic doesn’t like Aceveda because Vic is a dirty cop and he doesn’t want Aceveda to bust him. There’s a lot of tension between these two.

There are other main-ish characters, but they don’t seem to be as important in this leg of the series. Fuck ’em.

The main plot points of Season 1 are as follows:
-Vic kills a guy named Detective Crowley, who was chosen by Aceveda to dig up dirt on Vic. Ramifications abound.
-Julian witnesses Vic and his men stealing cocaine during a drug bust. After Vic learns he’s gay, he uses that information against him to intimidate him into keeping quiet.
-Vic’s son has autism.
-Vic keeps helping a crack-addicted prostitute named Connie, a woman who is not his wife.
-Dutch chases down a serial killer who has been murdering prostitutes.
-Dutch has the hots for Danny, who is fucking Vic. This actually isn’t that important.

My Half-Baked Thoughts

This holds up pretty for something that is actually older than it seems. This season was over 20 years ago. Time flies when you’re jerking off.

Right at the top, I’d like to express my utter contempt and disgust with Shane. Boy, I’d to crack him in his ugly face with a baseball bat. Just swinging it as hard as I possibly can. He always carries himself as Vic’s weaselly lackey, being an over-the-top tough guy to impress the actual tough guy. There’s a part where he pisses on a guy during a minor drug infraction that made me want to make him eat his teeth.

Dutch is someone I can relate with since I’m also a lame white guy who is good at his job, although he does have sort of a resting smug face and he constantly gets shit from the rest of the department. The funny thing is, he brushes off all the ridicule like it’s nothing, but the one time that he gets a standing ovation he immediately cries in his car! Go figure. That might have something to do with the serial killer nailing him down to a T during an interrogation, though. Father issues and all that, you know the drill.

I found the whole Julian gay-Jesus-freak arc uncompelling and off-putting. At least for now, but maybe it’s more of a product of its time. Six Feet Under did a similar arc at around the same time where David Fisher (Michael C. Hall) was trying to come to terms with his homosexuality with respect to his devout Christian beliefs, although I’m pretty sure that David Fisher didn’t attempt any sort of conversion therapy. By the end of this season of The Shield, Julian is all sorts of talking to religious figures and getting testimonies from “converted” homosexuals and praying for a love of the vagina. I predict his character arc will involve getting into a relationship with a woman he’ll barely kiss, marry her, have a baby, and hang himself by his belt in the office bathroom. He won’t even do it at home, he’ll do it at work where everyone will point at his limp body and go “hey, look, Julian hanged himself”.

The autistic son angle is interesting. Vic seems like a guy who would want his son to grow up to be some sort of football player / domestic abuser / confirmed heterosexual, so I can imagine how awful it must be for the chip off the ol’ block to have a developmental disability. I predict that Vic will starting really taking this out on his wife, making her feel guilty for producing a defective child. The season ends with his family temporarily moving out of the house anyway, perhaps Vic will never see his family again! Just one less thing to worry about, honestly. It would do this guy some good.

Special shout-out goes to Benito Martinez who I think is a godawful actor. His character is right out of a subpar Law & Order franchise where he’s all like “I wanna get a dirty cop off the streets” my “my honor and integrity will not be compromised”. The statutory rape subplot at least gives him a sordid past and moral ambiguity. I’m looking forward to a David Aceveda “redemption” arc where he literally chokes Shane to death with a belt in front of his weeping mother. I’ll forgive all the bad acting in the world for that.

Worth the Watch?

This show started over 20 years ago! Not bad for an early installment in the contemporary Golden Age of TV, as it were. I think it comes off as more campy than gritty at times, but I hear the show only gets better from here.