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The Shield
2002 · TV series · 45 min episodes · 7 seasons
Created by Shawn Ryan
The story of an inner-city Los Angeles police precinct where some of the cops aren't above breaking the rules or working against their associates to both keep the streets safe and their self-interests intact.
10 positive4 negative1 mixed11 neutralfrom 26 commenters
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27 comments on Hacker News
I would say just the opposite.
Think about all the serial killer and urban crime movies in the ‘80s and ‘90s, or the film noir of the postwar period.
TV is more complicated, but cop shows like the early seasons of Law and Order and all of SVU, NYPD, and then later The Wire and The Shield were pretty gritty.
Video games have always been a mix of squeaky clean Mario and Zelda and gory content: Think Doom, Mortal Kombat, Grand Theft Auto, Postal, etc.
Most people will never interact with a cop on duty outside of a speeding ticket or some other mundane encounter. A major chuck of what many people think about police comes from TV and movies.
It's impossible to overstate the influence of Dragnet (the OG police procedural from the early 50s) alone on the widely held idea that police are mostly heroic and good. Police procedurals are still extremely popular, they overwhelmingly portray law enforcement in an extremely idealized way.
There are exceptions (The Wire, The Shield), but they are noteworty in that police are not heroes.
Competitive markets provide natural death of weak content, without premature euthanasia of strong content. With on-demand streaming, viewers can stop watching if/when a show deteriorates in quality. Some shows have maintained relatively high quality over multiple seasons.
The Americans (6 seasons, 75 episodes) Battlestar Galactica (4 seasons, 88 episodes) Borgen (3 seasons, 30 episodes) Burn Notice (7 seasons, 111 episodes) The Shield (7 seasons, 88 episodes) Slow Horses (5 seasons, 30 episodes) WestWorld (4 seasons, 36 episodes) The Wire (5 seasons, 60 episodes)
24 was Fox, if I'm not mistaken, and its format is very much the same as all broadcast shows.
Breaking Bad isn't the same format. No obvious commercial breaks, no saccharine Hays-Code-like bullshit.
Others mentioned The Shield, which is FX, and I tend to think of FX shows as not being of the broadcast mold. Monk was USA, I think, which as a network was borderline, but seems like a few of their original programming shows were not-horrible. Then someone said Deadliest Catch, but that's just cheap reality tv sludge and I feel dirty having typed out its title. Even the worst 1980s NBC sitcom was better than reality tv shows.
It's come to my attention that you're all, every last one of you, watching tv wrong.
FWIW I absolutely love The Shield, one of my favorite shows. The Americans is better. But it was also hard to get into, and I stopped a few episodes in the first time. It gets much better the more the story goes on.
As a fellow The Shield-lover, I highly recommend you try to finish The Americans.
'the shield' is a TV show about this from the 2000s era. it probably doesn't hold up very well today but at the time it was pretty groundbreaking.
Some one in a commentary track for some movie (I know really specific here, but the brain is fuzzy on the details) used a phrase that has always stuck with me when talking about their use of off speed frame rates. They used the term "imperceptible slow motion". It's not slo-mo for slo-mo sake, but just enough to give it that slight not normal feel.
The director of the Shield would switch from normal 24fps to 30fps in camera to playback at 30fps. So it wasn't slow motion, but the switch in frame rate gave it just enough of a difference to get the viewer to feel it. So there's a lot of things that can be done that are perceptible subconsciously without making it a slap in the face type of effect.
I've made a career of taking pull down sequences out of videos to prep for DVD->Blu-ray->streaming. Where others have failed, I have properly restored. "Others" for example are FAANG's streaming services. Everyone wants it to be a single button IVTC, "set it and forget it" like you said. Shot on 24fps film, edited at 29.97 with pull down where every edit is a break in cadence, 30i graphics/bumpers, and some shows (I'm looking at you The Shield) where they shot 30fps film for a special look/feel during certain scenes, and a set-it-forget IVTC will not do well at all.
I absolutely adore Line of Duty. I like how everyone in the team of protagonists is not entirely clean, though not estirely bad either.
Of course the prime example and my favorite cop TV show ever is The Shield. You are rooting for the bad guys, though you gradually realize just how bad they are as the series progresses, and eventually you become horrified and want their punishment to finally arrive... but still, every time they evade it you (I) find myself cheering. Horrifying.
Agree. Think about The Shield, Sons of Anarchy, Peaky Blinders which had brilliant early seasons, but then had a formulaic season arc. Here are the new bad guys -- worse than the old bad guys, even though we told you last season's bad guys were the worst, we got re-upped for a season and now we have Armenians, neo-Nazi's or American Mafiosi. Whatever it takes to squeeze out a few more episodes.
I find the British model of 6-8 episode series, with a low possibility of renewal, leads to much better TV in my opinion. If you have to produce 20+ episodes of a series then your core story ends up being dragged out in 5 minute doses across all those episodes, and you inevitably end up with slow episodes where nothing much happens.
Compare for example Line of Duty with The Shield. Both on the surface dramas about corrupt police officers, but Line of Duty is relentless in its plot development - there’s barely a sentence that doesn’t lead somewhere, whereas The Shield has whole episodes with nothing much of consequence.
Being good is evidently boring...
I added a few examples in another comment. Even Rambo sacrificed his own safety and freedom to help rescue POWs.
Modern day heroes are all a bunch of whining self-centered children. Just go watch any super hero movie today for a good example of that.
It's almost a badge of honor to be morally ambiguous. Compare a list of protaganists, how many are anti-heros? Do we even have any real good guys in movies and tv these days? Even Superman has been turned into a murderer for this generation.
A few examples from popular TV:
Walking Dead: everyone is a murderer. Murder is justified consistently.
Billions: It's hard to know who to root for, they are all rotten. The righteous people are the "bad guys"
Scrubs: All the characters are morally bankrupt (compared to 30 years before it's time)
Ironman: A selfish rich asshole.
Batman: (ok, he was always an anti-hero from day 1)
Deadpool: Do I need to explain this one?
Wicked: A play about how the evil witch is misunderstood.
The Shield, The Wire, modern Star Trek vs old Star Trek, the list is too long...
There has always been corruptions, lack of morals. That's not my issue, it's that today, there simply isn't even close to a minority of actual real main protagonists that are selfless.
I think people find good people trying to do what is right just boring these days.
/rant
The situation sounds much more like The Shield. The Wire was focused on institutional problems. It was more interested in the tragedy that incentives in the police force and city government were such that barely an iota of thought was ever given as to how to actually fix the problems of the city. Instead most work was expended in public relations efforts, cooking the books and ass covering. There was one storyline in season 1 where Herc and Carver thought about pocketing some drug money instead of turning it in as evidence, but they ended up giving it back didn't they?
The Shield on the other hand..
There's a substantial amount of depictions of police corruption in America that does make it into media, but often times the depiction is so extreme or so jarring that people write it off as being substantially fictional rather than substantially real. Take, for example, the TV show "The Shield", which had roots in the LAPD rampart/CRASH scandal. There's plenty in the show that isn't real, but the reality is about as extreme.
We are more and more nostalgic about everything. But I don't see how people can think TV shows were better in the 70s, 80s or even 90s. Since 2000 we live in the golden age of TV shows. We got The Wire, the Sopranos, Mad Men, the Shield, (Game of thrones?, Westworld?) and a ton of original concepts. I tend to think that nowadays there is more originality and risk taking in TV shows than in the movie industry.
This summer, I watch Twin Peaks The Return, some episodes are the weirdest things I have seen on a mainstream TV channel. I am amazed it was allowed to air at prime time.
The problem is police departments across the country use civil forfeiture to fund day to day activities and it's a policy that gets a candidate the support and endorsement of law enforcement at the municipal and state level. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/10/us/police-use-department-wish-list-when-deciding-which-assets-to-seize.html?_r=0 The situation was depicted in the fictional TV show The Shield fifteen years ago but it turns out, the truth is not worse than the crazy stuff they told in those fictional stories.
The Shield and The Wire may be two of the finest television shows ever, and both portrayed corrupt cops without glorifying them. Well, mostly.
It's sort of all of the above. Netflix et al increases the availability of backlog TV shows. Networks abandoned quality tv because lowest common denominator won the highest ratings.
Then cable saw the benefits of high quality niche programming. HBO started it. But FX and AMC showed you could make real money on regular cable with prestige shows like mad men, breaking bad and the shield.
This hasn't been the case for a long time, although for some reason it remains a common misperception. I think it's mainly a marketing problem because people are always reading comments like this online, or hearing about such-and-such series that "is on Netflix" but disappointingly isn't currently available in the UK, while simultaneously being unaware of all the content that is available in the UK but not in the US.
For example, Netflix UK has the first 2 Hobbit movies, Pixar's Up, the original Danish versions of The Killing and The Bridge, all of Stargate SG-1/Atlantis, 24 and The Shield - none of which are currently available in the US. There's a load more I can't remember off the top of my head. The UK also got Breaking Bad a few hours after it was aired in the US, whereas US customers had to wait several months, presumably due to an exclusivity deal with AMC.
Obviously the UK also gets all the Netflix original content. Occasionally a new season will launch a few months ahead in the US, but that's not really a big deal. I can only assume this is done for same marketing reasons that blockbuster movie launches are typically staggered worldwide.
There are a small number of US shows like 30 Rock and Better Off Ted that I wish were on the UK service, and Star Trek DS9 is conspicuously absent, but that list is much smaller than it was 2 years ago.
Oh my, I could spend hours with this!
'Sopranos' has the same 'Season 4' problem as 'Shield':
http://graphtv.kevinformatics.com/tt0141842
The massive drop in Twin Peaks after the murderer is revealed:
http://graphtv.kevinformatics.com/tt0098936
The awful last season of 'Dexter':
http://graphtv.kevinformatics.com/tt0773262
And that's how you do a last season (Six feet under):
http://graphtv.kevinformatics.com/tt0248654
This is great!
Here's a few interesting ones I've come across:
* The Wire (http://graphtv.kevinformatics.com/tt0306414)
Known for being a slow starting show, this is visible with the season trend lines.
* The Shield (http://graphtv.kevinformatics.com/tt0286486)
Season 4 is such a massive outlier.
* Seinfeld (http://graphtv.kevinformatics.com/tt0098904)
Held very steady until the last season.
I felt The Shield dealt with it very well though, especially the developments in the final episodes. We're supposed to hate all the people in the story that torture, and the 'wrong' of empathizing with them is spelled out in the end (in a much better way, I feel, than The Sopranos did).
In fact, I remember being somewhat shocked by Ryan's follow-up, "The Unit", which seemed much more pro-violence and torture (perhaps through some influence of David Mamet).
I viewed Lethal Weapon as one of the early movies to glorify torture to get what you want out of bad guys. On TV the Shield took it to a much higher level.
not to be mistaken with… The Shield! http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0286486/
Well, when I hear the term "cherry popper" it's a similarly titled episode of The Shield that springs to mind. And that episode was all about pre-teen sex while pervy middle aged guys in a seedy club watched. So, even after knowing what the product is, I'd maintain that it's not a well thought out name.
European who loves watching USA TV shows: it can literally take YEARS before very successful US shows make it to (non-pay) TV over here and quite often they are not being shown at all.
I was honestly surprised "Dexter" was on regular German TV here rather soon - I was on season three when they started season one here. I cannot say "Breaking Bad" is being aired yet nor "The Shield", "The Wire" or any other of my favorite shows. Not even "Battlestar Galactica" or "South Park" made it to non-pay TV.
Well, at least "Two and a Half Men" is on if you are so inclined.
You mean except for The Sopranos, The Wire, The Shield, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, The West Wing, Six Feet Under, Dexter, BSG (gak), Friday Night Lights, Lost, Sons of Anarchy, Deadwood, Extras, Damages, Weeds (gak), House...
What's tricky about this comparison is that there's so much North American TV. A lot of it is ABC sitcoms, yes.