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The cop show that changed them all
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The Shield.
If you haven’t watched the groundbreaking drama
The Shield since it first aired in 2002, or if it’s your first viewing, strap in – this police drama about corruption in the fictional LA suburb of Farmington is the very definition of gritty. Even the theme music is mildly assaulting.
It opens in fairly standard police procedural style – plain-clothes cops chasing a “perp”, a drug bust, some wisecracks as they make their arrest – but by the end of the first episode, there’s been a homicide, a drug addict selling his child to a paedophile, and, most scandalously, a police officer murdered by a fellow cop. This is not
In the 2002 pilot episode of the hit FX series
The Shield, the show’s merciless and corrupt protagonist, Los Angeles Police Department detective Vic Mackey, played by Michael Chiklis, brutally beats a suspect and murders a fellow officer in cold blood and it only gets worse from there. For the rest of the show’s seven seasons, Mackey displays increasingly disturbing and illegal behavior: torturing and killing suspects, stealing evidence, embezzling money. Not only did the events of that first episode make it onto
Rolling Stone’s “The Shocking 16: TV’s Most Heart-stopping Moments,” but
Entertainment Weekly also named Mackey one of its “16 Ultimate TV Antiheroes.”