Spoiler alert: This essay discusses major plot points of the The Shield, including the series finale, and also touches on plot points of The Wire and The Sopranos.
There were three great television crime dramas of the past decade: The Sopranos, The Wire, and The Shield. There are similarities between them, but each marked out its own distinctive dark territory. Only The Sopranos was actually a commercial success: ratings for both The Wire and The Shield were mediocre at best. And although both The Wire and The Shieldwere frequently the subject of critical adulation, both were largely snubbed by the Emmys, which have otherwise lavished awards on sophisticated cable shows. But by my unofficial tally The Wire became must-viewing for the cultural cognoscenti in a way The Shield never did: while it seemed that virtually everyone I know watched The Wire, almost nobody I know watched The Shield, despite my repeatedly telling them that they should. The Shield was, if not quite underrated, certainly neglected.
Perhaps this was because at a glance The Shield was by far the most conventional of the three. The show was fast-paced, with plenty of violence and drawn guns, and in that sense packed a consistent conventional visceral punch that The Sopranos and The Wiremostly did not. It was also a cop procedural, or at least pretended to be, with most episodes primarily revolving around a "crime of the week" or two that played out over the course of a single episode. But it also had a series of complex plot arcs that spanned a season or even longer. In fact, the major plot twist of the pilot -- Vic Mackey's killing of a fellow cop who had been planted on his team to expose its corruption --- echoed out through the entire show, all the way to the finale. It is the original sin from which Vic could never escape, dooming him and his team.
The Shield was a show that did everything well -- its visual style was masterful, its dialogue first rate, and it boasted a number of understanding performances -- but I'm going to focus on just one aspect of what made it great: its plotting. The Shield was as well-plotted as any show I've ever seen on television. Plot was not really central to The Sopranos; and while each season of The Wire had a complex overarching theme, the show was less focused on plot as such (for example, the plot of the last season -- a phantom serial killer and a fabricating reporter -- was hardly as interesting as the revealing of character and theme that emerged around that plot).
There are two things that made the plotting of The Shield so great. One was that the fundamental conflicts -- both on an episodic level and on a season-long level -- were never simply binary battles between a good guy and a bad guy, but almost always involved three or more sides. While most crime stories play out in a straightforward good guy vs. bad guy paradigm, on The Shield that paradigm generally featured good guys on the one hand, bad guys on the other, and then our protagonist, the flawed and corrupt Vic Mackey, somewhere in between. Largely this was because Vic was a master triangulator who was expert at playing both ends against the middle. Both ends in Vic's case meant the bad guys on the one hand and his fellow cops on the other -- in many episodes, the strike team was racing not just to solve the crime, but to do so before other detectives could figure out how Vic was implicated in the criminal activity.
The show utilized this basic triangular conflict structuree through many permutations. It was at the root of Vic's uneasy true with David Aceveda (himself a frequent triangulator), his simmering warfare (especially in the early seasons) with Dutch, followed by his simmering warfare (in the later seasons) with Claudette; his season-long battles with Antwon Mitchell on the gang side and with Lt. Kavanaugh on the police side.
The other thing that made the plotting of The Shield so extraordinary was the extent to which it flowed from character. In a conventional detective procedural, the character of the protagonist is practically irrelevant. Nothing about the plotting of Law & Order, for example, ever changes when the cast does-- any given episode would be essentially identical no matter what actors were then playing the detectives and ADAs. But character was always destiny for the cops on The Shield, and never more so than in the final season.
The importance of character to the plot of The Shieldsprang from Vic Mackey. Vic's corruption was the show's center; it was the star around which all of the show's characters revolved. Vic was always a master strategist, but his chess master skills came at a price: he was a user of people, even the people he cared for, and that was why they ultimately turned on him. And Vic's character flaw also played a central role in forming the destructive character of his protege-turned-nemesis, Shane Vendrell.
In the show's final season, character not only became destiny, but the complex interweave of the show's major characters was also the basis for virtually all of the plot. This was true of the secondary plots -- such as Dutch's identifying a teenager as a budding serial killer, or Claudette's proud and fierce but ultimately doomed battle with Lupus. But the primary plot of the last season was the fight to the death between Vic and Shane. Shane had learned much from Vic, but he lacked his mentor's intelligence and ability to see all the angles. As a result everything Shane ever did was a sort of Vic-lite, and he was never able to pull off the kind of schemes that enabled Vic's long-term survival.
But Vic also fell victim to his own failings. There are obvious similarities between Vic Mackey and Tony Soprano -- two deeply flawed and narcissistic anti-heroes who we were initially invited to identify with, only to gradually realize we'd been conned into rooting for men who really were just no good. By the end of The Sopranos it felt as though the writers were deliberately rubbing the audience's face into Tony's awfulness: a show that had began with its protagonist's angels and demons fighting it out for his soul ended with the demons in full control.
With Vic Mackey, what changed was less his essential nature and more the steady diminution of his ambitions. Vic's goals are initially fueled by greed, but were ultimately reduced to simple survival. At first, his schemes werecentered on getting a cut of the vast sums of money possessed by the street gangs and ethnic mafias he occasionally stymied but could never stop. Those schemes reach their peak early in the show's span, with the theft of money from the Armenian mob, which, along with Detective Crowley's murder, are the two ambitious acts of evil that Vic and his team can never fully escape from.
It was that theft that ultimately breaks Vic's team apart, as Lem finds himself vulnerable to indictment and Shane, acting as a second-rate Vic, decides to kill him. It is also the focus of Forrest Whitaker's wonderfully unhinged performance as internal affairs Lieutenant Jon Kavanaugh. From then on, Vic is fundamentally playing defense: all of his schemes become merely about survival.
In the show's final season almost all of the considerable suspense was generated by character and not situation, which lent it a wonderful depth and complexity. For example, Corrine, Vic's ex-wife, agreed to help Dutch and Claudette put him away, but it was virtually impossible to determine where her loyalties would ultimately fall. By then we'd learned to appreciate that she feared and relied on Vic in equal measure, and it was impossible to guess whether her dislike of him and fear of having him in her life would actually trump her need for him and fear of what he would do if he found out she'd betrayed him. Shane's ultimate doom is caused by the sum total of his bad decisions, mistakes he can't help making because he's never been smart enough to survive on his own. Vic's final betrayal of Ronnie is also inevitable in the sense that cold calculation is all that's left of his soul.
That's what makes the extent to which character determines plot in the final arc of The Shield so extraordinary: by the end it had become an actual tragedy, a distinction that virtually no television show has ever reached. That was in large measure due to the depth and complexity of its plotting, both as a matter of strategy and as a measure in which all of the show's essential conflicts spring from the conflicted natures of its characters themselves.
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