“Good cop and bad cop have left for the day. I'm a different kind of cop.” –Vic Mackey
Antiheroism has rarely looked as good as it does on Michael
Chiklis’s Vic Mackey in The Shield.
The series’s surprisingly assured first season about a corrupt cop who’ll keep
crime at bay by any means necessary is thoroughly compelling, and compulsively
watchable television. Chiklas’s portrayal of Mackey and the writing for the
character continually provide layers to the individual to the point where he’s
not merely some loathsome brute. In fact, much of what Mackey does feels like
it’s in the interest of the greater good of his precinct.* Or as CCH Pounder’s
Det. Claudette Wyms puts it in the Pilot, people don’t care how crime is
prevented so long as their streets feel safe. Though Mackey does a number of terribly
egregious things (notably stealing drugs from a crime scene, to make money off
of later), many of his illicit activities make him feel more noble or at least
sympathetic. He helps out the prostitute Connie as she struggles with
addiction; he turns a blind eye to certain drug trafficking in order to
decrease gang violence. Vic is also a family man, and on a number of occasions
is deeply disturbed by criminal activity related to the abuse or mistreatment
of children. Vic Mackey isn’t always a good person (I haven’t even mentioned
how he strayed from his marriage from his always loving and concerned wife Corinne),
but he certainly is one of the most entertaining and fascinating television
characters in recent memory.
*(NOTE: I realize this is may perhaps an unpopular opinion. Yes, Vic is on one level a bad person. He does some awful things, especially at the end of the Pilot, which I'll get into later. But Vic is not merely the villain as protagonist. He's much less a one-note character than that. Vic, unlike other members of the strike team, particularly Walton Goggin's Shane Vendrell, doesn't purely beat up on people and plant drugs for the pure thrill of it. He takes little pleasure in killing Terry. But he knows there was probably no other way around Terry without jeopardizing the Strike Team.
Acevada is often times just as bad as Vic, but in a very different way. He's so thoroughly interested in political gain and appearances that it clouds all of his judgement. He doesn't even particularly care about taking Mackey down because he's corrupt, but because it will look good for him when he runs for political office. And he only sides with Vic against Gilroy due to him being a bigger fish to fry)
*(NOTE: I realize this is may perhaps an unpopular opinion. Yes, Vic is on one level a bad person. He does some awful things, especially at the end of the Pilot, which I'll get into later. But Vic is not merely the villain as protagonist. He's much less a one-note character than that. Vic, unlike other members of the strike team, particularly Walton Goggin's Shane Vendrell, doesn't purely beat up on people and plant drugs for the pure thrill of it. He takes little pleasure in killing Terry. But he knows there was probably no other way around Terry without jeopardizing the Strike Team.
Acevada is often times just as bad as Vic, but in a very different way. He's so thoroughly interested in political gain and appearances that it clouds all of his judgement. He doesn't even particularly care about taking Mackey down because he's corrupt, but because it will look good for him when he runs for political office. And he only sides with Vic against Gilroy due to him being a bigger fish to fry)
As tv critic Alan Sepinwall points out, “The Shield ended HBO’s monopoly on this
kind of drama”. This is partially part of the reason why it’s a series worth
discussing (although clearly not the only one). Prior to its debut in 2002, HBO
had Oz and The Sopranos, and no other network was attempting this type of
serialized, ensemble narrative. Like both Oz
and The Sopranos before it, The Shield built a series around an
antihero protagonist surrounded by a larger cast that in their own right were
often just as fascinating as the lead. The
Shield doesn’t have any major character I don’t find myself at least
slightly interested in. Rookie police officer Julien Lowe’s (as played by
Michael Jace) struggles between his Christian values and his budding
homosexuality is incredibly heartbreaking and was often just as interesting and
powerful to watch as Vic’s attempts to preserve the integrity of the Strike
Team.
What’s perhaps even more astonishing than a series breaking
HBO’s monopoly on this type of drama was that FX was the channel to succeed in
achieving this. Early on its existence FX aired some forgettable original
programming before turning to primarily airing reruns. The Shield came out of nowhere. To quote Sepinwall again, “it's one
of the classic cases of a pilot changing everything you think about an actor, a
genre, a network, etc., and forcing you to watch it every week.” The Pilot is a
great piece of television that after watching I don’t know how you couldn’t be
sold on the need to watch more of the series. While the episode is a solid hour
of television, it’s the twist ending where Vic kills newly added Strike team
member Terry Crowley (who we find out earlier in the episode was working with
new Farmington police captain David Aceveda to take down Mackey) that truly
elevates the episode and the series to a new level of storytelling that it
would continue to excel at over the course of the 1st Season.
The series would often tell procedural stories (in many instances
these cases would carry over across episodes), but the show had its officers
and detectives handle cases that were incredibly gruesome and violent yet
frighteningly plausible and realistic. Sure, Vic’s detainment of a professional
basketball player so he misses a game or rappers leading a gang war stretch credulity.
But the pedophile holding a kid hostage or a prostitution ring that makes child
porn are cases that feel sickeningly believable. The series exposed the
underbelly of LA in all its gritty, dark glory, and never once attempted to
soften the picture.
When stories came to a head in the penultimate and final episodes,
the raised stakes had incrementally been raised over the course of the season so
that it felt well-earned as well as highly intense. When Gilroy stepped foot in
Vic’s home, I was supremely nervous about his family. Not just because I’ve
come to like Vic, but because no matter the argument against him, his family
has proven to be nice and completely innocent.
More and more the show forced me to ask, “How is Vic going to get out of this one?” Just how deeply marred could Vic get himself and the Strike Team before he’d reach a point of no return? Every time he got out of a mess, the series never made me doubt for a second the plausibility of it. Vic Mackey lived to fight another day again and again. With multiple forces continually rallying against him and the brutality of the Strike Team, it was always great television to see him maneuver his way out of one tight spot after another.
More and more the show forced me to ask, “How is Vic going to get out of this one?” Just how deeply marred could Vic get himself and the Strike Team before he’d reach a point of no return? Every time he got out of a mess, the series never made me doubt for a second the plausibility of it. Vic Mackey lived to fight another day again and again. With multiple forces continually rallying against him and the brutality of the Strike Team, it was always great television to see him maneuver his way out of one tight spot after another.
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