Rug Burn Junky on 4/10/2009 at 14:37

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The Shield actually has redeeming qualities if you give it a chance. Whereas the Wire explores systemic amorality, the Shield focuses more on personal moral ambiguity, and the anguish that that causes. As such it is necessarily going to be a bit more melodramatic. It is also, at times, just a bit more fun. But while a lot of the gang stuff is just a macguffin, and only fleshed out as such, the team bending the rules the way they do ends up having true repercussions. The entire series is about that one cop being shot in the first episode, and every event subsequent stems from that one incident where a borderline cop truly goes over the line, which is why they make such a big deal about it at first.

The tragedy of Vic's character has to stem from the belief that even if he's doing bad things, he's doing them in service of the right reasons - so you have to believe that the bad guys are bad unquestioningly. Therefore there's no room for the character to really have doubts about why he's doing what he's doing, because there are already questions about the propriety of his methods. It simplifies some aspects in order to flesh out the key to the series.

A lot of it is over-the-top and cartoony, and some of the other characters are very cardboard, but Vic Mackey is one of the great characters on TV (I put him up with Swearengen on Deadwood as my two favorite singular characters ever), and the arc of his character is done extremely well, as are a few notable ones throughout the series (Forrest Whitaker's in particular, and the character of Dutch is a great arc).

The payoff in resolving all of the characters is one of the most simultaneously troubling and satisfying endings I've come across. The series as a whole is flawed, but there's enough there that it's worth a go, and really does work great in tandem with the Wire as flip sides of the same coin.

Rug Burn Junky on 4/10/2009 at 15:50

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I totally get you, and it's one of the problems I have with mainstream television and I feel the same way about the wire making other things seem weaker by comparison. I look at the Wire (and Deadwood/Sopranos) as visual literature, and most others as pulp, but once you get past the conventions of an artform, there are good and bad expressions of each.

The Shield is most definitely cheap pulp, but it's very well done cheap pulp. You can pick parts out that stand as impressive, and there are tons of moments where I rolled my eyes and said "Christ, I can't believe I'm sitting through this." But even in spite of them, I thought that the payoff was worth it.

The character interplay in the Shield covers both tracks: A lot of hamhanded things that they hit you over the head with, and just enough of the unstated subtle things that you have to keep an eye out for, with multiple parallel storylines that build to tie together in the end.

I've revisited and rethought the Shield a bit lately, because I just caught up from the beginning with Sons of Anarchy (dubbed "Hamlet in a motorcycle gang"), which is by one of the writers of The Shield and shares many of its strengths and flaws, as well as a common universe (the fictional One Niners gang from the Shield is a key crossover). I don't know if its quite as compelling, but it also seems to have shed some of the weakest elements.

SubJeff on 5/10/2009 at 17:34

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PM me your address. I promise no bombs.

Rug Burn Junky on 16/11/2009 at 19:14

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*Bump*

(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Sgj78QG9Bg) The Wire - 100 Greatest Quotes

Thirith on 17/11/2009 at 08:58

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Was it here that someone was on the fence about whether they wanted to watch Generation Kill or not? If so: get off that goddamn fence and watch it already! As far as I'm concerned, it's up there with The Wire - as a whole, it's perhaps not quite on the same level as S4, but it's just as well written and acted, and IMO it beats the final season of The Wire.