It’s time to say goodbye to an old friend. The Shield ends its seven year run on FX tomorrow night, and with it goes the greatest television series in modern times. The television show about a corrupt core of Los Angeles police officers who challenge our ideals of morality and the blurred line between right and wrong is coming to an end, and from everything I’ve heard, it’s going to be one helluva ending. Clearly, and immediately, there will be comparisons and arguments drawn for The Sopranos, a groundbreaking series in its own right. But, The Shield did more with less. The Shield put not only FX on the map, but paved the way for modern television as we now both know and enjoy it. To draw metaphors of the two, The Sopranos had a canvas the size of a wall to paint on, with unlimited colors and tools with which to color. The Shield had a notebook-size piece of paper, with limited colors and tools, and yet they still managed to break boundaries and redefine a genre. Not just that, they redefined what a cable television series could be. Without The Shield there would be no Nip/Tuck, no Sons of Anarchy, no Mad Men, no Unit. At least, certainly not as we know them. More so than paving the way for the future of television, however, it did something that so few television shows do. It grabbed at a piece of our souls. It made us feel, and when it did, it was long-lived. Like a recurring emotion that hangs with you for weeks on end, haunting you when you least expect it. There are a slew of fantastic shows that can entertain or mystify, such as 24 or Lost, but The Shield was about eliciting emotions and challenging beliefs with the precursor of a tense drama. There were so many episodes that literally made you feel sick to your stomach for 60 minutes, only to be substituted by a sense of faux relief and unanswerable moral questions until next week. It still amazes me as we sit hours before the finale that a show can do that to you. That it can take you on a rollercoaster of emotions and deconstruct your own value system, all the while keeping you on the edge of your seat the entire hour.
What’s more is that The Shield never suffered from a bad season, a bad episode. They didn’t ponder with inconsistencies, they didn’t waste time with inadequate shows. Each show is an exercise in what television should be. It’s just that there aren’t any shows out there that are. Gillian Flynn, author and columnist for Entertainment Weekly said in her review of the finale, “Note to David Chase (Exec. Producer of The Sopranos): This is how you end a series.” I can presume that she’s right, but deep down, I know that she is. The consistent delivery thus far has paved the path for The Shield to be one of the greatest television shows of all time. Tuesday night will only solidify that.
It’s not too late, by the way. Go rent a season at your local video store. Go buy the show on DVD. Go get a season pass from iTunes. Give it a chance, because things this good are not meant to be kept secret. Now, certainly, there will be shows in the future that may match The Shield, and eventually, there will be some that probably surpass it. But we can all look back and understand that in this moment, it was The Shield that made a lot of these future shows possible. And one can only hope that maybe, just maybe, we see something like it again.
And hopefully Shane was right when he said in the next to last episode, “See you on the other side.”
We should all be so lucky.
A Pleasant Conversation 