Interrogating The Shield

10. Cracking Ice

186 Cracking Ice The Shield and the Middle-Class Crisis of Social Reproduction Stephen Shapiro Uneasiness about “the end” has emerged in television narrative. David Chase’s The Sopranos (HBO, 1999–2007) is widely celebrated as marking the start of a highly productive period of value-added dramatic televisual narration. The series conclusion raised a different kind of attention. When The Sopranos finished with an ex media res black screen, which gave no cathartic sense of closure or any terminal perspective from which to judge past events and characters’ decisions retrospectively, critics and lay fans alike protested. Chase’s inconclusive ending was experienced as a betrayal of the viewers’ emotional and time investment, their willingness to become incorporated within the show’s lifeworld, language, and behavioral models. The ambivalent point of view articulated in Chase’s sudden blackout perhaps expressed an existential truth: Does the black screen connote death from Tony’s perspective or ours, an ambivalent point of view that may be simultaneously mimetic and diegetic? The screen may well be read as a reminder that one day each member of the collective audience will also individually be “boxed up” and that we will visualize the experience of demise by our eyelids closing, an iris shot that denies us the knowledge of what happens next to the other characters in our lives. With the retrospect of a few subsequent years, however, the form in which The Sopranos ended can also be read as a precognitive metacommentary on 10 Cracking Ice | 187 the fact that the economic boom period, from which the so-called golden age of television led by HBO and other pay-television cable channels benefited , was coming to an abrupt end. The furor over the ending of The Sopranos directly influenced executive producer Shawn Ryan’s own plans for the last episode of The Shield (FX, 2002–2008). The negative response to Chase’s cliffhanger meant that Ryan reviewed all prior seasons of The Shield in preparation for a more apt conclusion than the one Chase gave. Thanks to the period’s cable series, audiences learned to expand the scope of their narrative consideration beyond the limits of a single episode to take in an entire season’s story arc and then, because of the availability of DVDs and Internet piracy, the overall trajectory of a multiseason drama. David Simon’s claim that The Wire (HBO, 2002–2008) was best approached with the interpretive techniques developed for reading nineteenth-century novels or novel series (e.g., Émile Zola’s Les Rougon-Macquart) meant that writers increasingly faced the burden of showing how all the pieces matter by the end of a series. Ryan’s efforts paid off, for The Shield’s conclusion, unlike that of The Sopranos, was considered both skilled and satisfying. Yet the acclaim had less to do with the authorial equivalent of remembering to tie one’s shoelaces —leaving no loose narrative threads and supplying adequate character resolutions—than with how The Shield’s final scene reveals something about the truths that magnetized the show’s audience throughout its entire run. We see Vic Mackey revealed now in the costume of a low-level command manager in a soulless open-plan corporate office. With cheap suit and ill-fitting shirt and tie, a captive Mackey sits facing a ream of paperwork, long past the end of the workday. Stripped of his patriarchal powers—no official gun, no family, no team—and leashed by a female manager, Mackey can only plaintively listen to the sounds of the street’s freedom, knowing that his struggle for status as a caregiving father and autonomous leader of men has failed. Just as Chase’s last screen conflates the characters’ and the audience members’ points of view, so, too, does Ryan’s concluding scene. And true to the spirit of its cinema verité camera work, this last scene displays a reality that subcutaneously organized the show’s narrative throughout its entire run: the American middle-class implied viewer’s foreboding sense 188 | Stephen Shapiro that the seemingly assured comforts of the long economic boom, from the mid-1990s to roughly 2007–2008, was a sensationalist fiction and was coming to an unhappy end. The inconvenient truth that the period’s certainties of broadly shared economic wealth creation were fictional was registered in the very media—such as subscription television—whose rise was itself evidence of the boom...