Interrogating The Shield

5. Quality, Controversy, and Criminality

87 Quality, Controversy, and Criminality The Shield as Post-Sopranos Cop Show Glyn White This essay discusses how the links between quality television and controversial questions of morality pioneered by the HBO series The Sopranos (1999–2007) are developed in the FX series The Shield (2002–2008). Each program asks its audience moral questions about its central protagonist and tests the limits of their empathy with these protagonists’ illegal or unethical practices. The key shift made by The Shield, however, is that such questions are posed in the more generically recognizable field of the cop show. Unlike Tony Soprano’s mob activities, Vic Mackey’s job is one we insist is performed “for us”—protecting or “shielding” us from the dangerous world that is notionally “out there.” The Shield builds on The Sopranos’ challenges to its audience from the beginning to the end of its eighty-eight episode run. I start by discussing the initial impetus for The Shield to adopt its dynamic, controversial mode. The second section examines the show’s pilot episode; the third section gives an overview of The Shield’s skewed morality; the fourth section 5 I have discussed The Sopranos and The Shield with many friends and colleagues at various points and apologize for being unable to name them all here. But I thank in particular Justine Ashby, Silvia Barlaam, Kate Henderson, Bob Hysek, John Manley, Alan Rice, and Michaela Schoop for their productive input. Any deficiencies in the chapter, however, remain mine. 88 | Glyn White analyzes selected characters who offer alternatives to Vic Mackey; and the conclusion takes in the series’ final episodes. Quality and Controversy As David Lavery (2006) has noted, controversy about The Sopranos—from its alleged defamation of Italian Americans and New Jersey to accusations of misogyny and hype—has been abundantly registered in the show’s journalistic as well as academic reception. But such attacks on and resistance to The Sopranos’ success clearly indicate that it is television worth taking seriously, genuine “must-see TV” that succeeds in not being treated as merely trivial and marginal. The Sopranos goes some considerable way to justifying Peter Krämer’s point about TV being better than film (Jancovich and Lyons 2003, 1) because the serial form allows it to deliver real narrative depth (Ryan 2008) and to present weighty characters and themes (Lavery 2002) in ways that appeal to a mature audience: “Here are shows for grownups, who want paradox in their characters, moral ambivalence in their plots, and a sense we are seeing life as those fascinating people [who populate the shows] would live it” (Yacowar 2003, 14). Although The Sopranos has been hugely significant in establishing HBO as a channel that delivers quality television for grownups, it has been something of a one-off (see Epstein, Reeves, and Rogers 2006, 16). Nevertheless, cable television production more generally has learned lessons from it, and “FX in particular has stolen some of HBO’s thunder with edgy programs like Nip/Tuck, The Shield, and Rescue Me” (Epstein, Reeves, and Rogers 2006, 18). When FX, once mainly known for reruns and sports broadcasting, was looking to rebrand, the success that HBO had achieved through The Sopranos was clearly a model, but as a basic-cable package channel dependent on advertisers rather than on subscriptions, FX commissioned as its headline show a series formulated within a well-defined television genre with a long history. The Shield, a cop show, thus appears superficially more conventional than The Sopranos, a gangster drama. But The Shield is a post-Sopranos show not only in terms of quality cablefunded production, but also in the way The Sopranos’ moral edginess inspired it to push the established boundaries of its genre. Douglas L. Howard’s essay on the representation of law enforcement in The Sopranos Quality, Controversy, and Criminality | 89 argues that “in order to evaluate The Sopranos’ legacy and its place in television . . . we certainly do need to consider it within the tradition of law and order (and Law and Order) drama, the cop shows, and the private detective thrillers . . . and judge it and them accordingly.” He marks The Shield as part of that legacy, noting that The Sopranos “paved the way” for The Shield’s challenges to the old televisual certainties of the cop show genre (2006, 176, 177). The central character of The Shield, Vic Mackey, is not simply a maverick detective like Andy Sipowicz...