‘You just can’t do that s*** anymore’: The brilliance and brutality of The Shield, 20 years on

FX’s revolutionary cop show saw Michael Chiklis inhabit one of the most reprehensible police officers ever brought to the screen. For its 20th anniversary, Louis Chilton speaks to several of the cast and creators about the struggles and joys of making a series radically ahead of its time

‘Al Capone with a badge’: Michael Chiklis in his career-defining role as corrupt cop Vic Mackey in ‘The Shield’ (Fox-Tv/Kobal/Shutterstock)

There’s a line, some way through the pilot episode of The Shield, where detective Vic Mackey (Michael Chiklis) tells a suspect exactly who he is. “Good cop and bad cop have left for the day,” he sneers. “I’m a different kind of cop.”

It’s a widely repeated soundbite that served as a mission statement for the series, which ran from 2002 until 2008 and turns 20 years old today. Mackey was indeed a different kind of cop: a felonious, murderous, corrupt Machiavelli who spent seven seasons brutalising suspects and scandalising viewers. By the end of the first episode, Mackey – who headed up an experimental police task force known as the Strike Team – had struck a bargain with a drug dealer, beaten information out of a suspect with a phone book, and, in its closing moments, shot another police officer through the face. To call The Shield a different kind of cop show would be putting it mildly.

The Shield sprung up amid a tectonic shift in TV. The Sopranos was just three seasons into its run at the time, but had already redrawn the creative boundaries of what a drama series could be. Along with formative “prestige TV” such as Oz, Six Feet Under, and later Deadwood and The Wire, The Sopranos was on HBO: an established paid-for cable network where anything, it seemed, could go. The Shield was to be the flagship series for the newly launched basic cable network FX. FX would later become the home of acclaimed and popular series such as It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Fargo, Atlanta, Better Things, and The Americans, to name but a few. Before The Shield, however, FX was quite literally nothing.

The show was never an easy sell. Though bad language was pretty much curtailed at “s***” and nudity didn’t extend beyond the very occasional bare arse, this was, everyone agreed, the grittiest cop show television had ever seen. Fronting it was Chiklis, the skinhead actor then best known for playing affable good guys, notably on the lighthearted cop comedy The Commish. CCH Pounder was the other prominent actor brought on board, as murder investigator Claudette Wyms, the show’s intractable moral centre. Jay Karnes played her gauche but intelligent partner, Holland “Dutch” Wagenbach. Benito Martinez was cast as the ambition-poisoned precinct captain David Aceveda, who spends much of the first season butting heads with Mackey, while Walton Goggins played Shane Vendrell, Mackey’s cocksure, bigoted right-hand man. Kenny Johnson and David Rees Snell rounded out Mackey’s Strike Team, playing Curtis “Lem” Lemanski and Ronnie Gardocki.

Several of the cast had pre-existing connections to series creator Shawn Ryan. Karnes and Snell were his old friends. Chiklis had met him at a soft play class for their toddlers. The majority of the cast were practiced theatre actors, such as the Lamda-trained Martinez. “I got out of drama school and I had this English accent,” he tells me. “So I came back to the States and – at the time – as a young Latino man in Hollywood, the only roles I was being called in for were ‘Jose the migrant farmworker’ and ‘Chewy the gang member’. All these things that I wasn’t familiar with.” The part of Aceveda seemed almost too good to be true. “It felt like doing theatre all over again. We didn’t stage scenes for the cameras – the cameras had to find us.”

As the series entered its tragedy-laced later seasons, the word “Shakespearean” was often bandied around The Shield. Martinez likens his character to Iago and Richard III – such is the strength of the show’s writing that such a comparison doesn’t sound ridiculous. But make no mistake, this was television through and through. Ryan had cut his teeth on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, while producer and director Scott Brazil (who died in 2006) had worked for years on seminal Eighties cop drama Hill Street Blues. It had acquainted him with the dolly shots and handheld camerawork that would become staples of The Shield’s aesthetic.

The odds seemed to be stacked against the series’ success. Catherine Dent, who played uniform officer Danny Sofer, says her agents told her to turn it down. “They basically said don’t do it,” she recalls. “It was really bad money. It was an unproven network. Something better will come along.” Ultimately, the strength of the script, and a “gut feeling” convinced her otherwise.

Through ingenuity or sheer financial necessity, The Shield had to buck a number of conventional TV practices. Instead of the eight days per episode needed to film shows of its ilk, The Shield made do with seven (lasting around 14 hours each). Goggins recently described the series as “the cheapest show on TV”.

“NYPD Blue was the hardest thing on network [television],” says Martinez. “And you had The Sopranos on HBO. We were the road in between, and we had to be able to match the quality of these two shows, with one tenth of the budget and no viewership. The only thing we could rely on was our talents.”

Their talents were more than enough. The Shield had the highest-rated scripted premiere in the history of basic cable. Overnight, FX was thrust into TV’s big leagues. It wasn’t just audiences that fell for the charms of Mackey and co. Critics poured adoration on the series from the start. Chiklis won a Best Lead Actor Emmy for his work on the first season, an award that had previously gone to The Sopranos’ James Gandolfini for two years running. Emmy nominations for directing and writing accompanied it, as did a Golden Globe win for Best Drama. “Suddenly, it was a very different kind of thing,” recalls Jay Karnes. “We went from feeling like, ‘Is anyone ever going to see this?’, to ‘Wow, we really have gotten a lot of recognition’.”

The Strike Team: Lem (Kenny Johnson), Vic (Michael Chiklis), Shane (Walton Goggins) and Ronnie (David Rees Snell) (Fox-Tv/Kobal/Shutterstock)

With the first season out of the way, the show began to introduce increasingly ambitious story arcs – including, memorably, a season when the Strike Team orchestrated an armed robbery of the Armenian mafia’s multi-million-dollar money laundering operation. It’s this event, at the end of season two, on which the whole series essentially pivoted. It was Vic Mackey’s crowning criminal achievement. What followed for the next five seasons was his increasingly manic downfall.

“I always assumed it’d get easier,” says Scott Rosenbaum, a Shield writer who joined in the first season, eventually becoming an executive producer. “On any good show, season one is difficult. Maybe even season two. But it didn’t get easier. The reason was not because we weren’t talented, it was just that the stories and the characters themselves were so complex.”

The third season saw a decline in its ratings, so the series employed a time-honoured trick of the trade to goose viewership numbers: it started bringing in high-profile ringers. For season four, this took the form of Glenn Close – playing embattled new police chief Monica Rawling – and Anthony Anderson, as a terrifying local crime lord masquerading as a community activist. For both actors, this was a radical departure from their previous roles, yet both excelled. Season five brought Forest Whitaker on board, delivering a frankly possessed performance as internal affairs cop Jon Kavanaugh, a man whose determination to hold Mackey to account spirals into a fully fledged obsession. It’s maybe Whitaker’s best ever performance, one that bends the whole series to his peculiar, hypnotic rhythms.

Just as important to the show’s endurance were a number of lower-profile additions to the main cast. These included Paula Garcés as rookie cop Tina Hanlon, and David Marciano as Steve Billings, a detective who serves as a completely different foil for Dutch. Long gone were the days when agents were begging their clients to turn down roles in the show. Garcés was an avid fan who’d auditioned for a small, limited part. At the audition, she says, “I basically told the creators and the writers: ‘How are you doing a show about LAPD but you don’t have one Latina cop?’ Then I read the part and either I was incredibly lucky or they saw something in the read that didn’t affect me basically insulting them at first.”

Homicide detectives Claudette (CCH Pounder, centre) and Dutch (Jay Karnes, right) served as a moral counterpoint to the violent, scheming Mackey (Fox-Tv/Kobal/Shutterstock)

Marciano, meanwhile, was another of the show’s cast who arrived through a personal connection to Ryan; the pair had gotten to know each other while Marciano, a former lead on Due South, was working as the campus gardener at the school both their children attended. Initially a small and fairly inconspicuous role (he is described as a “a spineless, company yes-man jellyfish” in the show), Billings eventually blossomed into one of the series’ main sources of comic relief. As Mackey’s plotlines traversed increasingly dark and ominous territory, Billings’ inane bickering with Dutch – and his efforts to sue the police department while feigning a workplace injury – proved a welcome distraction. “I wasn’t sure what my purpose was going to be,” explains Marciano. “And the writers weren’t sure, either. It’s sort of a symbiotic relationship. They start to write for you, and then they see what you can do with it.”

There were sometimes disagreements among the show’s cast and writers when it came to some of the more controversial plotlines. Dent voiced strong objections to an early episode entitled “Cherrypoppers”, which saw a killer target underage sex workers and featured a scene in which Vic attends an underage sex show in order to make an arrest. A scene in which Dutch strangles a cat to death, after a particularly disquieting confrontation with a killer, also sparked concern. “I didn’t want to do that,” says Karnes. “I certainly didn’t understand it. But that was season three. In a different situation, in a different show with different people, I might have pushed against it and tried to get them to take the character in another direction. But by that time, I had grown to trust the writers.”

Periodically, we deal with some very, very dark stuff. And honestly, that would pierce the veil

Jay Karnes

Season three featured another, even more shocking storyline. While sitting in on a fairly routine police raid, Aceveda is raped at gunpoint. Martinez was shocked by the script, and says he showed it to his wife, his agent and his mother, expecting all of them to voice an objection. Instead, they all advised him to do it. “My mom said, ‘You know what, women get raped all the time. And they show it on TV all the time to deal with that. And it’s done to the point where it doesn’t even have an impact anymore. This could actually have an impact.’” After extensive consultations with a rape counselling organisation, Martinez agreed to the storyline – on the condition that it not be used as fodder for Mackey’s narrative. The end result is one of the most harrowing portrayals of sexual assault ever committed to screen.

“On the day that we filmed it, the entire crew just walked around very quiet [and] very angry at the writers and producers,” Martinez recalls. “They said, ‘How can you do this to him?’ They didn’t like it at all.”

“Most of the time,” says Karnes, the mood on set “was very light, and we had a good time shooting it. But periodically, we deal with some very, very dark stuff. And honestly, that would pierce the veil.”

Passionate disagreements about storylines and characters also took place in the writers’ room. “I remember people literally storming out of the room, furious,” says Rosenbaum. “There were constant disagreements. Unlike any show I’ve ever heard of, sometimes if we didn’t get our way there’d be a person leaving the room and slamming the door. If you look back on it, it seems so immature.”

Though the series featured a number of the most fleshed out and interesting female characters on TV at the time, The Shield’s core writing team were all male. “It’s funny, because as a woman on the show, it was a very male-heavy show, with a lot of testosterone,” says Cathy Cahlin Ryan, who played Vic’s wife Corrine and is married in reality to Shawn Ryan. “That’s how Shawn writes a lot of it and but he does do a good job with the female characters.”

Vic and the Strike Team threaten a suspect with immolation (Fox-Tv/Kobal/Shutterstock)

Dent says that she was paid “really bad money” for her work on the show. “As you know, the routine in Hollywood is that men make more money than women,” she adds. “And certainly 20 years ago, that was still the case. Unfortunately, even though I was on a TV series for seven years… in some cases, you might be set for life, [but] that was not my case.”

Dent says she has wrestled with the broader social legacy of the show, too. In the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder in 2020, America underwent a cultural reappraisal of the purpose and unintended consequences of police-based fictions (the portmanteau of the day being “copaganda”). Dent mentions that she donated “a bunch of money” at the time – one of many current and former cop show stars to do so – because she was “part of perpetuating” a misleading or somehow ultimately harmful view of US policing. “The world has changed,” she says. “My only perception of police officers was what I saw on television, in the movies. I think that there’s a bit of a god complex, if you will, and I didn’t see it. I was in a bubble. I don’t think you could have a show like The Shield today. Somebody like Vic Mackey beating up a perp with a telephone book in the pilot? I mean, my husband’s a civil rights lawyer. You just can’t do that s*** anymore.”

Of course, amid changing social perspectives and the growing appetite for police abolition, it is clear that The Shield is not what most people mean by “copaganda”. In many ways, the show was more scathing a look at police corruption, brutality and institutional rot than anything on TV today. But it was still a police procedural, one in which crimes are solved week in and week out, and invites you to admire the good, honest police work of characters like Claudette.

Benito Martinez as the oily, ambitious David Aceveda (FX)

“I don’t know if they could do this show today,” says Cathy Ryan. “In some ways it was ahead of its time, with everything that’s gone on – all the police brutality that we’re hearing and seeing in front of our eyes, and it’s like [how] it was depicted on The Shield. I mean, it’s not like nobody knew about it. It’s an underbelly that’s not going away. The biggest question [on the show] always was: ‘Wouldn’t you want Vic Mackey to find your person’s perpetrator?’ And most people would say, ‘Yeah. That’s who I want in the bunker with me.’ So that’s what made it so compelling.”

This is the paradox at the heart of The Shield’s legacy. Its message was radically ahead of its time, but its framing – within the conventions of a procedural show, with Mackey as a charismatic antihero – seems to have fallen out of step with the sensitivities and priorities of modern TV.

“It’s still a little ahead of its time,” argues Rosenbaum. “If you look at it, not a single show since then has tackled this. All you need to know about how brave the show was, was that we literally were told: ‘If you’re ever pulled over, make sure that you don’t have any Shield DVDs [on you], and don’t tell them you work for The Shield.’ The LAPD was p***** off that we were telling a story that dove into some of the realities of what’s happening. We were truly pulling back the curtain.”

The Rorschach test was failing. We realised that no matter what, we just could never get the audience to see Vic as a bad guy

Scott Rosenbaum

Complicating matters further, The Shield has also suffered the same fate as TV’s other big antihero dramas (Mad Men, The Sopranos, Breaking Bad) – fans that fail to get the point. “Shawn [Ryan] always said that he wanted the show to be like a Rorschach test when you look at Vic,” Rosenbaum says. “Some people would see Vic as a hero, because he’s breaking the rules a bit, but he’s doing the common good. But sometimes, an innocent person would get thrown in or used to get a bad guy. He could live with that. Could the audience?”

He continues: “What we discovered, which was fascinating to me, was almost the entire audience looked at Vic as a knight in shining armour. The Rorschach test was failing. We realised that no matter what, we just could never get the audience to see Vic as a bad guy. It was a fascinating social experiment. I don’t think the audience ever did turn on him, even at the end.”

The notion that people could still be rooting for Mackey by the end of the series is a funny one; the show’s final stretch sees him exposed to the world for the scheming, amoral villain that he is – and he gets away with it anyway. The finale is an absolute tour de force for Chiklis and Goggins in particular: Goggins, as a man who has finally run out of road and must face the full weight of his crimes; Chiklis as a downright poisonous man who refuses to do the same. As TV finales go, it’s an all-timer, threading the needle of being both crowd-pleasing and uncompromising.

The perfection of the finale has had something of a prophylactic effect on the possibility of a revival. There is a sense that The Shield is not to be touched. Marciano reveals that he attempted to pitch a spin-off series to the network entitled “Dutch and Billings”, with Karnes’ interest but without Ryan’s involvement. “[Fox Studios] didn’t want to,” he says. “The Shield is one of those shows they want to leave alone.” Then again, we live in the era of the never-ending franchise.

“I will tell you what will happen,” says Karnes. “We will wake up one morning, and someone will have decided to reboot The Shield from the beginning, either in movie form, or as a television show, using the name and maybe even the characters, but for a completely different generation of actors. As far as us continuing the story, I really wouldn’t want to do that. I think the ending was exactly what it was supposed to be. The idea that we’re all wondering what happened to Vic Mackey? I think that’s fantastic.”

It’s true. Perhaps, too, there is something about The Shield that belongs in the past, in a time when police brutality wasn’t quite so visible – in the news, on our phones, flashing before our faces on a depressingly regular basis. Maybe that’s why the show hasn’t been so widely “rediscovered” by younger viewers in the way that shows like The Sopranos or Seinfeld have. It has baggage, after all. Cop shows have receded from TV’s prestige forefront. The novelistic serialisation of shows like The Wire and The Sopranos has become the norm; The Shield’s procedural underpinnings were made to service a way of consuming TV that no longer really exists. Watch it, though, and its brilliance is unimpeached. A different kind of cop show indeed – there’s never been another like it.