The Shield

interesting to read (in back of last week's guardian) that csi is spinning off a new series, "csi miami" or something. and will star david caruso from nypd blue. which is good. (but phear the photo of him on imdb). he was also in the odd episode of HSB as the leader of the irish gang, the Shamrocks.

andy

i think the show thinks it's better than it is. it's facile like they watched oz and missed the point. i'm getting bored of the grant mitchell bloke, and the toothy guy in his squad (the one who had the beef with the basketball playa... if his name isn't really Jerry i'm dumbstruck) is the most punchable guy i've ever seen

where do i know that tough black woman detective from? homicide?

actually, that's a lie, she hasn't been in er since 1997.

http://us.imdb.com/Name?Pounder,+CCH

andy

surely all tv cop shows are based on "shades of grey" these days? my prob with THE BADGE (aw you changed it) is that it does it really obviously and exploitatively and without any sort of tenderness or awareness of previous convention. "hey kool, bad cops!!" not much commingling of goodness with that badness either. so far.

oh SHE'S cch pounder!! i love her even more now. and i remember cHIPS now thanks

As for Five: (1) BULLETS. MADE. OF. MEAT. (2) VOMIT. CAM.

The Shield = best programme EVAH. Last night's was aces. They're repeating the first series on CNX at 9pm Mondays - they're about two thirds of the way through the first series

andy

Boomtown is also great. I was disappointed that they more or less ditched the alternate perspectives with the later episodes.

Sad to see Glenn Close go, but perhaps she was best as a one-season deal. Season 4 may have been the best yet - it has a really nice arc from start to finish, with the old players gradually rejoining just as they're set up as adversaries. Also, many great moments, including (spoilers!) Dutch finally standing up for himself and even giving Vic a little punch, Shane and Vic's standoff, Dutch and Claudette laughing along with/at the coffee-throwing guy (and his arrest), and Monica v. Antwon in the interrogation room.

In a tight black shirt.

actually this is basically what I did with Spencer last time I was in town.

Yes.

guh, this show was the best, wasn't it?

I've just started season 2. It's not as polished as the other US dramas I've been watching, and some of the acting is a bit shitty, but damn there's some fine breathless plot-juggling going on here.

My current wishes are for

a) Whiney Julian to man up and be gay
b) Less rubbish sub-Soundgarden crap on the soundtrack

Stick with it. Been a while, but I want to say season 2 is only OK, and then it's all golden from there. But I could be thinking of some other show.

Concur. Stick with it. I want to watch it all agai.

Again.

Oh I'm definitely enjoying it.

Probably in my top 3 shows ever.

Definitely stick with it. Season 3 is where the show starts getting really good, and it stays consistently good at least till season 6.

I just started season six, and it's still pretty great. Kind of over the top, way too much earnest Nickleback type shit, and definitely a bit more basic-cable level acting and such than the big epic HBO series but it's still totally worth it.

Fucking Vic Mackey, seriously.

The final episode is my favorite final episode of any series.

the series had sort of bottomed out for me - but the last season was like a phoenix rising from the ashes the of earlier, crappier seasons; culminating and what, as eazy pointed out, is a seriously all-time amazing ending.

whole series on hulu plus now

Hmmm may watch again.

this sure is a lot of kid rock in the pilot

The music in The Shield is uniformly terrible.

Weird that one episode that closes with Magnetic Fields.

Got about a far as the fifth episode of this? Does it improve?

I found the first season to be quite patchy, at times amateurish. Everything from S2 is great though, stick with it.

It's always a lot more hyper and rough round the edges than The Wire or Breaking Bad say, but that's part of the charm.

It's got a real unique gnarly energy.

And it's got the tremendous Walton Goggins who I rate as a great actor.

S1 is pretty weak IMO, possibly the weakest first season of any great show I can think of. Doesn't quite find itself til season 2 yeah and I think the money train shit is where it really picks up steam.

i got kind of tired of it towards the latter middle. totally picked up for the last season tho.

I've only watched up to S4. I will pick it up again further on down the line, but I definitely thought 'right, that's enough for the time being' at the end of the fourth.

claudette calls everyone 'son'

Claudette is my favorite thing about the Shield.

Having skipped a few early seasons: is it only late in the show that we see Claudette outside of work?

I just finished series 3 tonight, it rocked bells. Loads of pluses like how they handled Vic's autistic kids sub-plot quite realistically and without too much schmaltzy melodrama. Walter Goggins/Shane - he has the coolest accent I have ever heard and he could easily turn me gay. The strange Claudette/Dutch dynamic and Dutch's cat strangling scene was extremely dark for a cop show. It was a hell of a lot better than I expected it to be. It was probably the opening music that put me off it previously, it sounds more suited to some more run of the mill type shit.

I need to watch this all the way through again. So awesome.

Except the Dutch/cat part. Poor form Holland!!!!

Mamet wrote/directed that episode btw.

almost done with the first season of this. was coming here to post "does it get better?" but skimming this thread real quick i see that it does! there are some qualities i already like for sure--chiklis is already great as mackey, and a few characters like dutch have room to become great later on--but all in all it's only okay so far?

Get's better for sure.

http://www.mandatory.com/2013/09/10/good-cop-bad-cop-an-oral-history-of-the-shield/

holy shit

http://www.cnn.com/2014/05/20/showbiz/shield-actor-michael-jace-homicide-charge/index.html?c=homepage-t

Whoa!

Oh no!

Having skipped a few early seasons: is it only late in the show that we see Claudette outside of work?

it's only a quick shot but you do see her come home to her dog in the pilot, during the end-of-watch montage.

been starting to rewatch again, and since reed diamond is the strike team rat (i always forget he was in this until i realize they kill him off in the pilot) i was sort of struck by how much this show's multi-story plotting and sorta ensemble cast and handi-cam directing make it like 'homicide', with really distinct and developed characters, even though it clearly has mackie as a focal character. i was thinking maybe it had to do with the direction - the camera seems way more to treat each character focal, when on them (even the family of a guy they arrest in s01e02), than even homicide does. the first pedophile dutch interviews in the pilot somehow seems like he is just as much a character as dutch for the duration of the interview, where in 'homicide' the emphasis is so much on the detectives that there's always a kind of distance from the suspects and others (cf. the stupefying 'i was drinkin' guy in the pilot, or the suspect they get a confession from who refuses to say why he did it, or the araber, who stays lead-suspect-but-maybe-not (pembleton and bayliss kind of trade doubts/convictions after they're done with him in the box), and maybe even stays kind of unknown/unconfessed to himself (his near-breakdown over being so pathetic as to love a little girl) in the adena watson case). which maybe has a lot to do with the stupidity-of-murderers theme in 'homicide' (which they do a riff on in the one where they see the videographer's film about them?), since they generally act as if they're smarter than the perps ('thinking cops', bayliss says in the pilot).

anyway, i was struck that they could manage that much turn-on-a-dime focus on each character's segments / role in the plot and its transient plots, yet still have the strong focal character in mackie. and i was wondering if maybe that's partly an artifact of being familiar with the show, so the secondary characters seem more prominent. but i think not. different idea: we feel closer to vic as viewers because we're privy to the things he conceals from the other characters (even though they suspect). then i realize that many characters have similar secrets. julian's closeting, aceveda's rape, claudette's… cancer?, dutch and the cat. none of those are such structurally foundational secrets for the show, but it does make sense that the other characters would eventually (in time) get secrets to develop their thickness/independence from vic's focal existence, sort of to counterbalance his dominating presence in the story. (and that, say, is why shane is a more important character than lem or the other guy; he's in on terry's death from the pilot onward.)

i would not be surprised if that secret-sharing structure has something to do with the use they make of vic in the pilot to beat the location of the 8-year old victim out of the second pedophile. unlike the usual cop show but-the-law/but-the-costs lip service, which usually at least keeps some tension in the prospect of getting to the victim safely or getting a solid conviction in the process, up to the point where the matter is settled, on this one even claudette, the moral voice, is like, welp. and they do find the girl, and it's sickening and horrifying - not like a trembling-unseen-unsaid-it's-all-ok-now scene from another show. to the point where as the viewer, barring any critique of the position the show has put you in, you're not at all going to be all, that was a violation of proper procedure and the suspect's civil rights. because they find the girl alive.

Has begun season 6, season five was an immensely powerful cat-and-mouse game. Actually, I'm calling it: The Shield > Breaking Bad.

No doubt. Shield > almost every other show made.

lol does lem really have a tramp stamp

holy shit - http://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/Verdict-Reached-in-Murder-Trial-for-Shield-Actor-381401761.html?_osource=SocialFlowTwt_LABrand

really sad story

Hell of a good Gita Jackson piece here, and not just about the show:

https://aftermath.site/the-shield-mini-room-television

I was with her all the way up till "Ryan Murphy's 9-1-1 is a delight".

I admit I tripped over that as well but I have to assume this is coming from looking at it as a true camp classic of absurdity, because it is.

not gonna read this thread b/c we are only on S4, but it was extremely satisfying to see Shane Vendrell get his ass handed to him by Antwon Mitchell in the "Tar Baby" episode