The cop show that changed them all

Michael Chiklis as Vic Mackey in The Shield.Credit:AP

The Shield ★★★★
7plus - streaming season one.

If you haven’t watched the groundbreaking drama The Shield since it first aired in 2002, or if it’s your first viewing, strap in â€" this police drama about corruption in the fictional LA suburb of Farmington is the very definition of gritty. Even the theme music is mildly assaulting.

It opens in fairly standard police procedural style â€" plain-clothes cops chasing a “perp”, a drug bust, some wisecracks as they make their arrest â€" but by the end of the first episode, there’s been a homicide, a drug addict selling his child to a paedophile, and, most scandalously, a police officer murdered by a fellow cop. This is not Blue Heelers.

Created by screenwriter Shawn Ryan, a former producer of Nash Bridges and Angel, The Shield, which ran for seven seasons, was unlike any cop show that had come before, and left a legacy still evident today.

Inspired by real-life police corruption in Los Angeles in the 1990s, it focuses on an experimental LAPD department in an area ridden with gang violence, drug trafficking and racial tension.

So far, so procedural. But at “the barn”, as this division is known, some of the worst offending comes from within.

The division’s Strike Team, a four-man unit tasked with controlling the gangs, is led by Vic Mackey (the bulldog-like Michael Chiklis ) in what seems to be a typically hard bitten, “unorthodox manner”, and their status within the station sees them largely left alone. But Mackey and his team â€" best mate Shane (Walton Goggins in his pre-Justified days), Curtis “lemonhead” Lemensky (Kenny Johnson as the almost good-natured member) and Ronnie Gardocki (David Rees Snell) â€" have gone far beyond “dodgy”, able even during their worst moments, to justify their behaviour.

Their captain, David Aceveda (Benito Martinez), has his suspicions, a hunch that escalates rapidly when his attempt at investigating them comes undone.

There were corrupt TV cops before The Shield, but Mackey, inhabited so wholly by the Emmy award winning Chiklis, takes the anti-hero trope to new levels. Brutal, manipulative and violent, he’s still somehow endearing; even when he’s pocketing drugs or framing a criminal. And not only because before he was Mackey, Chiklis was the lovably chubby Tony Scali in the ’90s comedy-drama The Commish.

The Shield’s Strike Team, led by Vic Mackey, are dodgier than the criminals they’re tasked with catching.

He’s almost unredeemably awful, committing robbery, bribery, murder and more, but he still loves his family (in the first season he grapples with his son’s autism diagnosis), he’ll rush to the defence of a sex worker, even looking after her infant son while she kicks the crack, and has his own moral code, albeit a twisted one.

Even after their most heinous of crimes, watching Mackey and the team stay a step ahead â€" of superiors, internal affairs or gang members â€" you’re inclined to find yourself, perversely, barracking for him. It’s rare for such an irredeemable character to be the centre of the narrative â€" but you can’t look away.

But the sub-plots are just as engaging, as is the rest of the cast, among them the always strong C.C.H. Pounder as Claudette, Jay Karnes as her partner Dutch and Michael Jace as Julien, the new recruit struggling to reconcile his sexuality and his knowledge of the team’s corruption with his faith.

As well as the writing that brings this morally ambiguous world to life â€" writers included Kurt Sutter, who later created Sons of Anarchy, The Walking Dead’s Glen Mazzara and NYPD Blue co-executive producer Charles H. Eglee â€" the use of shaky, handheld camera work gives a sense of complicity, and echoes the low-rent atmosphere.

And yet The Shield was also one of the first television shows to attract A-list film actors â€" first Glenn Close as the hands-on Captain Monica Rawling, and later Forest Whitaker as Jon Kavanaugh, an internal affairs detective who leads an investigation into Mackey and his henchmen.

By the end of the first season you may feel as grubby as the Strike Team â€" but just as eager for more action. Good news: season 2 will be available on Thursday, with new seasons going online fortnightly thereafter.

The Shield is on 7plus.

Find out the next TV, streaming series and movies to add to your must-sees. Get The Watchlist delivered every Thursday.

Kylie Northover is Spectrum Deputy Editor at The Age

Share this post