Goodbye, The Shield - Get Some Rest, Detective Mackey - Page 2

I’ll leave it to others to argue how realistic Ryan’s urban nightmare was, but there can be no doubt that The Shield has been by far the most thoroughly devastating portrayal of urban blight ever. Forget the profanity and the occasional nudity, The Shield week after week packed more intensely disgusting and gross scenes per minute than perhaps every single police show in the history of television combined. Farmington might as well have been a slaughterhouse for semi-human beings. Hacked off limbs, feet nailed to the floor, live bodies burned beyond repair, anal cavity searches, vaginal cavity searches, beatings, slayings, underage rapes, torture by every means imaginable, corruption everywhere - The Shield has spent seven years making old Holocaust footage look like a Sports Illustrated swimsuit layout.

Here, every conceivable racial profile had at least one gang of thieving, barbaric drug dealers to represent their interests. The show may not have been very life redeeming, but with its cavalcade of African-American, Mexicans, Armenians, Koreans, and Salvadorans, one could at least argue that it provided a grade-A geography and immigration lesson.

While the show has featured big names like Glenn Close and Forest Whitaker, the true stars of The Shield have been its amazingly rotten-to-the-core rogue’s gallery of side players. When The Shield featured a woman as a crack-ravaged prostitute, they didn’t produce Jennifer Aniston stretching her artistic instrument. Either through amazing make-up work or by perhaps just snatching someone off the mean streets, The Shield’s coke whores looked like they had spent decades of method work preparing for their roles. Is there anyone in Farmington not covered in tattoos?

Forget the venomous gang leaders that were constantly inventing new and grotesquely ingenious ways to kill off their competition, this show has provided enough tween-age murdering menaces to make me never want to venture to the West Coast ever again. Hannah Montana this is not!

I’m not sure that Shawn Ryan’s creation can really measure up to more nuanced and better-respected shows like The Wire or The Sopranos, but one thing is absolutely certain. Tony Soprano wouldn’t last a day in Farmington.

Good night, Vic. It’s been both gross and entertaining. So whether it’s death, a jail cell, or running off to Tahiti with a bag of cash and one of those hundreds of prostitutes you’ve tried to save, here’s hoping you finally get some of those well-deserved moments of everyday run-of-the-mill boredom that keep us pansies in the suburbs warm and sane.

Article Author: Brad Laidman

Brad Laidman writes on pop, politics, and other less than vital issues. He blogs at Brad Laidman.com and is desperate for comments so that he will feel truly loved.

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