The Shield

TV SHOW TITLE: The Shield
CREATOR: Shawn Ryan
YEARS ACTIVE: 2002-2008
GENRE: Crime Drama
RATING: TV-MA for violence, language, and sexual situations
GRADE: Pass


The city of Los Angeles is plagued with crime whether it’s gang-related, corporate, or the work of a sadistic serial killer. With Detective Vic Mackey and his Strike Team on the case, the justice may be worse than the crime itself. Vic is not afraid to break the rules when it comes to catching criminals. He’s not above torturing suspects or even killing and intimidating other cops if it means closing a case or saving his own ass. Even under the hawk-like eyes of Captain David Aceveda and the scrutiny of his peers such as Detective Dutch Wagenbach and Officer Danielle Sofer, Vic Mackey manages to stay one step ahead of everyone else and leaves a trail of blood and broken bones in his wake.

Unlike crime dramas such as Castle, NCIS, Bones, and Rizzoli and Isles, The Shield takes the viewers to a much darker place where the humor is raunchy and the violence is graphic. As I’ve mentioned in the opening paragraph, Vic often tortures his suspects to get a confession or information to a bigger arrest. Over the course of the show, he has whipped a suspect with a chain, burned a suspect’s face on a stovetop, stabbed a cop killer with his badge, and in the first episode shot another cop named Terry Crowley because Terry was a rat within the Strike Team. Vic Mackey and his team are like police brutality on steroids. The more people complained against him and his tactics, the more bruises and scars those people got. It’s an endless stream of graphic beatings and torture until the city is safe again, at least from the original gangsters, but not Mackey.

As vicious as Vic can be, the things he did on the show will never compare to what happened to David Aceveda in the third season of the show. David is investigating the home of a Mexican gangster named Juan Lazano. Juan jumps David from behind, binds his hands with a TV cord, and orally rapes him while Juan’s buddy is filming the whole thing with a smart phone. The sodomy was disturbing enough, but it was the ongoing trauma, family dissention, and blackmail David experienced afterwards that made The Shield hard to watch. When it comes to TV-MA-rated shows, I’m not a wimp by any stretch of the imagination, but even David Aceveda’s oral rape storyline was enough to shake me to my core.

If you strip away all of the torture, forced sex, limb chopping, burnings, and blood, you still have a well-written detective show. Yes, all of that hardcore and disgusting content is good for the Nightmare Fetishists out there, but The Shield isn’t just about violence and brutality; it has substance. It asks the bold question of whether or not the ends justify the means and how far we’re willing to trust the government to protect us when they commit questionable acts. Police brutality is an ongoing problem even in today’s world; just ask the families of Michael Brown and Eric Garner. The Shield does what all forms of media should do: it holds a mirror up to society and shows everyone its ugliest features. The show doesn’t glorify police brutality; it questions it. And by the end of the series, everybody on that show gets what they deserve whether it’s for better or worse.

But sometimes all you want from a detective show is a solid series of cases where the police work is intelligent and the laws and techniques are well-researched. You’ll get all of those things with The Shield. Shawn Ryan wasn’t just putting together a montage of beatings; he was putting together solid cases that real police officers and detectives would have to solve using their sharp investigative skills. Even Vic Mackey and his Strike Team are capable of using smart investigative tactics; otherwise, they wouldn’t be detectives.

All in all, The Shield is the complete package that a detective show is supposed to have. The only things that separate it from other shows is its dark nature, it’s bold statements, and its TV-MA rating. The show was revolutionary in more ways than TV being allowed to use the word “shit”, which is why it deserves a passing grade.

　

***TELEVISION DIALOGUE OF THE DAY***

VIC MACKEY: Do you want to catch this criminal or not?

DAVID ACEVEDA: Going undercover as dirty cops. You guys think you can pull that off?

VIC MACKEY: We can try.

-The Shield-

Karlos Ludwig

Okay, so maybe I already have a character named Karlos Ludwig. He’s the guitarist in the title band Death Blade. He’s got dreadlocks, a fluffy beard, and badass shredding abilities. Even so, his role was very small, because there were other characters who easily outshined him and his name was only mentioned a few times within that short story. Before the guitarist version of this character was created, Karlos Ludwig was an entirely different person in a Good Reads fantasy RPG called Medieval Magic. In that storyline, he was an introverted knight who didn’t like taking crap from authority figures. Being introverted works for a lot of people in real life, but unfortunately, aggressively seeking privacy from the other players doesn’t work so well in an RPG setting. Nobody can say he didn’t try, though. He ordered a big ass pizza at a bar known for brawls. He took a swim in a fairy lake. He trained in an open field known for being hunting grounds. How could this guy not be obvious to everyone after all these things? It’s probably because everyone was so scared of Karlos that they were afraid to approach him. Due to a lack of human interaction, I had to permanently disable him from game play and when I tried to make a more extroverted character, that didn’t work either. Eventually, I parted ways with Medieval Magic and went on to bigger and better things. Despite having already used Karlos as a character in Death Blade, I feel like he didn’t get enough of the spotlight and that he needs more. I’m more than willing to recycle his name into a more prominent character. What kind of character will that be? Karlos Ludwig is a very intimidating name no matter what occupation he undertakes. Hey, he could be an undertaker! Nothing strikes fear in the hearts of others quite like burying dead bodies. But what if he was actively seeking “clients”? What if he was cruising the neighborhood looking for young girls to put in these graves? Alive, no less! Karlos Ludwig is already sounding like a creepy psychopath. But he doesn’t necessarily have to be. In Medieval Magic, he was a dark knight similar to Cecil Harvey’s first incarnation in the videogame Final Fantasy IV. What if Karlos was Cecil Harvey on steroids? Maybe instead of dark blue armor, it could be all black with poisonous spikes. Instead of a long sword, Karlos could carry a glowing green battleaxe to signify even more poison running through his veins. Whether he’s an antihero or an ant villain, the one requirement I would have for Karlos Ludwig is that he’s the scariest motherfucker in the entire prose. He’d have to have a face only a mother could love, provided that mother also gave birth to either Jeffrey Dahmer or Charles Manson. I think we can make this work, people. I’m not ruling it out just yet!

　

***TELEVISION DIALOGUE OF THE DAY***

VIC MACKEY: You want us to catch this killer or not?

DAVID ACEVEDA: Going undercover as dirty cops. You think you can pull that off?

VIC MACKEY: We can try.

-The Shield-

The D- From Hell

I haven’t told this story in a long time and I didn’t see a reason for it until now. My Smash Words e-book “Confessions of a Schizophrenic Savage” opens with heavy metal lyrics for a song called “62”. The opening line of the song goes like this: “True blue! I don’t need a 62! Your wife’s sweet juices will just have to do!” Although altered somewhat, these lyrics are part of an insult poem I wrote in 2005 that got me suspended from college. Is it story time already? It sure is. In winter quarter of 2005, I took a geology class on the advice of my guidance counselor. She told me that the guy who taught it, Steve, was funny and charismatic and therefore would be a fun teacher to have. By the time winter quarter actually begins, all I saw was a goofball who cared about rocks a little too much. He even had a sign on his door that said “Have a Gneiss Day”. Get it? He-he-ho-ho. His annoyingly quirky behavior was the least of his problems. I wrote that insult poem about him for three main reasons. First, he told us to study for one thing and tested us on something completely different. This ultimate swerve resulted in me barely surviving that test with a 62 (the title of the updated heavy metal song), or a D- for those who deal in letters. Secondly, he identified me in class as “the guy with bad handwriting”. And lastly, to put the cap on the humiliation, he made a big deal about me not covering my mouth when I yawned. Three acts of poor taste led to the creation of a battle rap against him. In this poem, I said three things to him that were equally in bad taste. I told him I was going to fuck his wife, fuck his mother, and scrape my keys across the side of his car. That would certainly be enough to put him in his place. Maybe it was overkill, maybe it was a lack of maturity, but something prompted Steve to complain to the Vice President of the college and tell them he was…brace yourselves…”terrified”. Steve actually thought I was going to do those nasty things to his family and his car. In order to keep from receiving a full ten day suspension or even an expulsion, I had to convince the Vice President and his Head of Security I was just blowing a whole bunch of smoke and the poem was more like a fantasy than a plan of action. I dodged a huge bullet. The worst that happened to me was that I was no longer allowed to sign up for Steve’s classes. I wouldn’t want to anyway. It’s many years later and I have yet to hear anybody say that success is the best revenge. Could that be because I’m not successful? I have yet to make any money off of my writing and I still live at home with my parents. Meanwhile, Steve, who never received any kind of punishment for his part in the incident, gets to teach class for as long as he wants and live like a rock star at the expense of his students. This is what the poem “62” means to me: just because you have to get along with people who don’t have to get along with you (the teachers), doesn’t mean that power should be abused. The sooner we recognize the abuses of authority that go on every day, the better off we’ll be as a country. Or as a world, depending on how far you want to take this.

　

***TELEVISION DIALOGUE OF THE DAY***

VIC MACKEY: You’ll get my report in a couple of days, maybe in a week. If you don’t like the timetable, you can take it up with Gilroy.

DAVID ACEVEDA: I don’t have to. In this building, I’m in charge.

VIC MACKEY: Well, maybe in your own mind, amigo. But in the real world, I don’t answer to you. Not today, not tomorrow, not even on Cinqo De Mayo.

-The Shield-