Prashant Gupta / FX
Because FX is generous enough to send episodes of The Shield far in advance, I have now watched through two episodes short of the finale. Through seven seasons, I’ve struggled to put my finger on just what it is that makes the show so disturbing to me. I mean, there are the obvious factors. The brutality, the gore, the way the characters talk about the brutality and gore (which is one reason that, even though its content can’t be quite as extreme as that on an HBO show, it often seems more extreme). The bigotry. The generally bleak view of life.
There’s all that, but there’s something more. Vic Mackey is as despicable, or more, than Tony Soprano, yet The Shield makes me sad—even for him, but especially for those around him—in a way The Sopranos never did.
One theme of The Sopranos, after all, was how, for all the drama and misery, Tony and his family were largely insulated from the worst consequences of his actions. (You may disagree if you believe he got whacked in that final blackout, but in any case we never saw it.) Carmela may be sad, but she still gets her Porsche Cayenne. Meadow will probably be a successful, if shady, lawyer; A.J. will get by with some peripheral career in showbiz. There’s no, as they like to say in the debates, “existential threat” to them: that all happens at the margins.
In The Shield, though, Vic Mackey and the rest of the Strike Team have no such cosseting. In the end, they’re union cops, corrupt ones, but ones without the safety net Tony has. Which may be fine for Vic and Shane et al.; they made their own bed. But lying in there with them are their undeserving families, especially their kids. Vic’s autistic children, Shane’s kid—to say nothing of the even more miserable and deprived lives we see left in their wake, victims of the street crime that they profit from when they’re not fighting it.
Where The Sopranos shows you life at the top of a criminal organization (because among other things it’s a critique of the corruption of systems and the powerful), The Shield is a horrible, unflinching picture of individuals scrabbling for existence. In one of the upcoming episodes, an associate remarks that Vic lives “on the edge.” Everybody lives on the edge all the time, Vic responds. It’s just that some people deceive themselves that they don’t. It’s The Shield’s willingness to look long and hard over that edge—and not to cut away when you wish it would—that makes it so harrowing to watch.
The finale airs November 25; I’ll try to blog more about the series as it gets closer to wrapping up. Are any Tuned Inlanders still with it?