Just finished this. It's a fucking masterpiece. For 7 seasons straight I was constantly hooked...

Just finished this. It's a fucking masterpiece. For 7 seasons straight I was constantly hooked, it just kept getting better. Shame Breaking Bad steals all the limelight, this deserves it more.

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Steals the limelight in what regard? There aren't only two shows featuring antiheroes.

In terms of popular anti-heroes, both Walter White & Vic Mackey have similar motives as well as the shows revolving around tragedy. Breaking Bad just came out at a time where the internet was big enough to cause its virality, just wish The Shield got the same recognition and popularity it deserves.

It's complete schlock, but entertaining. A solid B-tier show. People who compare it to things like The Sopranos and The Wire are fucking retarded though.

First season was fine but for some reason the charactees drastically shifted , I watched till the end but muh family drama was boooring, kind of lile breaking bad actually.

Ah, yeah totally agree with you. I wonder what memes would've come from it

isn't this the guy who played The Thing in Fantastic Four

Totally agree with you on Breaking Bad, which swagger-jacked The Shield pretty blatantly in terms of style and themes, and making a "thriller" into a TV series. The Shield was just simply a better show, with more interesting and nuanced characters. Compare Dutch and Claudette to Hank and Gomez. Dutch and Claudette had actual chemistry.

Yeah

Eh at least two of the seasons dragged. The Glenn Close season.

The Shield was like if they turned The Wire into a roller coaster.

And I mean that as a compliment.

I'd have preferred that Ronnie wasn't shafted by Vic in the end.
Am I part of the minority of fans that feel that way?

>The Glenn Close season.
That's the season with pic related so you're wrong about that. I am not a fan of season 3 though, with the Decoy squad and Natalie Zea and Mara's introduction which could have been a little better.

Ronnie fanboys are the absolute worst. The guy had 0 personality until season 6 at least. Team Shane/Mara all the way.

this is one of the greatest TV series ever made, much better than got and breaking bad.

Breaking Bad owes a lot to The Shield. Also, Chiklis was supposed to play to Hank.

y'all should watch Damages. it's like a cleaner, more buttoned down The Shield but just as vulgar and intense.

This guy was incredible. Forest Whitaker as well.

Nah Ronnie was great, whilst yeah I agree that his character was lacking in development for a while, his eventual rise in screen time was made better from that as it was revealed just how loyal he truly was and he was underestimated.

Mackey > Dutch > Claudette > Shane > Hispani guy> Lem

True but he was loyal, always had vics back. Least he could've done for years of service and scars is give him some money for a coyote

>Team Shane/Mara all the way.
Never met one of you before.
Why?

>GoT even in this discussion
>Breaking Bad not a show that went off rails to appease the reddit audience

If you want shows that The Shield is better than, Mad Men.

He's good but he's the 4th man in the team for a reason: Easily the most limited actor. And as a character, not as compelling.

>show with a female lead
kys

Is the lead female? I don't want to watch something based on reality, I want fiction.

>Never met one of you before.
Because Shane is shameless in his pursuit of self-preservation, but his guilt also destroys him. However, he finds destiny with Mara, a woman who will kill for him and her children like a mama bear. That was one thing Vic never took away from him while Shane and Corinne took practically everything from Vic.

there's male characters too (pic related is incredible). It's made by the guys who went on to do Bloodline and it's much better. the women aren't strong or skullcrushers, they are lawyers and they are conniving, particularly Glenn Close who is kind of androgynous honestly.

Yeah I would have liked to have seen Ronnie saved, his demise had to occur to keep in line with greek tragedy themes. If Ronnie had've gotten free, it would have removed the added guilt to Vic's character as well as removing the point that when you trust Vic the way they did, you end up getting burned.

Never thought of them that way. That's actually a pretty cool way to look at it, and definitely merits another viewing with this in mind. Cheers user

>dude this am masterpiece !
>only comparison is breaking bad

...

at some point (money train) the show became entirely about vic mackey and nothing else, thus locking the show into a single trajectory that's entirely predictable from that point.

the wire makes it look like a parody

I love Zeljko Ivanek. I also really liked Bloodline which I know is by the same people who made Damages.

I'll have to check it out then, thanks for the recommendation

Why was Anthony Anderson so fucking phenomenal on this show but so fucking garbage throughout the rest of his career?

Claudette's a bitch for majority of the show, it's only when Vic truly becomes a true villain in the finale that you sympathise with her. And Lem is fucking great, adds that touch of humanity to the strike team.

The Wire is better than both.

>the show became entirely about vic mackey and nothing else
wrong, I can name at least 5 plotlines that superceded Vic's downfall post-Money Train (cuddler rapist, Antwon Mitchell, Kleavon Gardner, the house full of Mexican corpses)

I unironically feel bad for you

Duckling syndrome must suck, I hope I never get it

the show was literally about ''the Shield'' (vic, shane, lem, ronnie), nigger.
Don't forget Dutchboy, Claudette, Forest whitaker guy, other ars etc.

The Wire gets great acclaim, the point isn't that The Shield is fantastic, therefore there is no better. The point is that Breaking Bad definitely took a lot of inspiration from The Shield & ended up being more widely regarded. The Shield deserves as much credit as BB & The Wire.

And The Sopranos is better than all of them.

This is true.

desu Sopranos is better than anything

Dutch is just like me.

Because he played a bad guy in this one instead of a goofy comedic sidekick

S4 was clearly the worst because it didn't even have the Strike Team to kick some ass, even Antoine "faggot nigger son" Mitchell couldn't save it

You download cp with computers from work and murder cats? Damn

Brofist OP, one of my favorite series ever.

>Vic is amazing, you know how much dangerous and dirty he is but you still take his parts
>Everyone, and i mean EVERYONE in this series has the right amount of screentime, no one is a filler, everyone has a good character development and everyone is bound to the main plot in a way or another
>The end is the end, no vague shit to keep a door open for some cheap spinoff, no loose ends, no unsolved plot, everything is clear and final

Is that what happened to the character? What a bummer. I remember watching Shield when it was originally airing, and really liked Dutch, but stopped watching after the start of season two, because some real life thing made me repeatedly miss several episodes.

Were all the characters rotten in the end?

>it didn't even have the Strike Team to kick some ass
It had them all kicking ass separately and the reunion is epic.

it's still Dutch though

You both raise good points

After the cancellation of Gang Related, where do you get your fix?

Dutch was a good even up until the end. The show was just being edgy with that cat thing.

>Previously, on the Shield
>HE MADE YOU SUCK?

FINALLY I can post this! youtube.com/watch?v=r2aINQduzqM

Nah, Dutch just borrowed a laptop from the evidence room to surf the web trying to catch some predator in his free time and when he had to explain it, it was just akward for him.

And the cat was just a way to drop the stress after pushing himself really bad into a serial killer mind to empatize with him and make it confess. Jesus christ i loved how much they fight to catch that nigger bastard. Also he redeemed himself adopting a litter of kittens.

This show had so much potential but good God was it boring.

The only time Vic was a "true villian" was in the first episode when he murdered that cop. Everything else could be explained away somehow.

Dutch in a nutshell

youtube.com/watch?v=Bm2-kQeGMMg

rewatch Third Watch

It's not the most well written show (constant use of the word "money train" being an example)

But damn is it not the perfect thrill ride from start to finish. One of the perfect finales imo.

I would if there were DVDs or rips past Season 1

You're wrong. Dutch was the murderer, not the sixteen year old.

Glenn Close's season actually SAVED the show.

S3 was such a god-forsaken train wreck that FX was ready to end the Shield with season four but Ryan and the writers convinced Glenn Close to join the cast and along with the career reinventing performance of Anthony Anderson, basically saved the show from premature cancellation

christ i forgot how much of a cunt his wife was over it

Damages is really good but it's different from Shield though, in a major major way: Damages basically LOVES to play around with timeline/narrative (basically each season starts with two different plot narratives (the main plot set in the past and a flash forward plot, with the former running for the first 10-11 episodes until you see the climatic event that basically leads to the event of the flash forward plot, which then takes over for the last two-three episodes).

There is a cynical part of me that thinks Mara only existed/paired up with Shane because someone noticed the gay subtext between Shane and Vic and they had to give Shane a girlfriend to try and distract from it.

Ironically, Mara would have worked better with Ronnie since his disfigurement in season two would have made it more sense that he would start detaching himself from Vic and end up with a woman who had no love for Vic given what happened to Ronnie and how he ignores him in favor of screw-up Shane.

At the very least, it would have made Mara less of a hateable figure since unlike Shane, her antics would at least come from a place where Vic legitimately got Ronnie hurt with his antics and seeing Shane as a legit threat to everyone that he should be insulating himself from

Anderson is an actor that got typecast as a comedy type actor.

The Shield basically was the show that made his career and led to him getting cast on Law and Order (where he got rave reviews for his performance/revitalized the show which had been flaying about for the bulk of the 90s)

Unfortunately, after L&O got canceled, Anderson went back to doing comedy stuff

Fun fact: the original planned version of season 7 had Ronnie dying in the finale episode, during the final bust when Vic arrested the top guy from the Mexican Mafia.

Originally Ronnie was supposed to a heroic death in the line of duty, never knowing Vic betrayed him. We were also supposed to find out his backstory (he basically behaves like a complete and utter asshole towards Julian, culminating in him revealing that he despises Julian because Julian is a devote Christian who supports gay conversion therapy and Ronnie was forced to undergo gay conversion therapy by his parents as a teen, resulting in him being an angry atheist bisexual as an adult.

Also, Shane and Vic were supposed to legit reconcile, until Vic betrays the surviving Strike Team members to secure himself immunity (after his daughter, not Corrine, sells him out via getting her hands on the MAD document and gives it to Danny so she can use it to basically blackmail Vic into severing his parental rights to their kid).

They ended up ditching the reveal of Ronnie's backstory and his death when various factors forced them to redo season seven from scratch. As a consolation, they gave the actor Shane's final fate/speech scene when they reworked the finale as far as Ronnie living but being arrested and being the guy who gets the last word denouncing Vic before Vic is forever banished from the precinct.

wut?

The show always made a point, in a way that all of the characters had dark sides and being bullied/picked upon all of his life made Dutch a better person, since if he was left to his own devices, he'd be a bully boy shit just like Vic.

Ironically, when they split Dutch and Claudette up from each other in season three, it was CLAUDETTE who went fully of the rails rather than Dutch, as previously implied with regards to their dynamic. Claudette basically needs Dutch around to give a shit about her, because without someone giving a shit about her, Claudette self-destructs personally and professionally.

That said, Dutch and his various storylines take on a bit of a disturbing element to them when you factor in the fact that Shawn Ryan and Jay Karnes are BBF in real life and a good amount of the stuff that happens to Dutch actually happened to Karnes in real life, as mentioned multiple times on the various DVD commentaries the two appear on.

That was just Kurt Sutter's headwank. Ryan basically vetoed that reveal ASAP when Sutter tried to sneak that into the first draft of the final script

When work on the script for the finale was being done, Shawn Ryan handed it over to Kurt Sutter to for rewrites and Sutter stuck into the script's finale moments (right before the scene with Vic at ICE, being neutered) that Dutch killed the mother of the young would be serial killer he was pursuing the entire season and was accused of killing in the finale. And a bunch of other people, who's corpse he kept in a room in his house.

Ryan basically removed the scene Sutter added to the script as soon as he saw it, but later acknowledged it when discussing all of the stuff that went on when the writers were coming up with ways to end the show, because Sutter has a reputation of being responsible for most of the really sick and over the top violence moments on the show.

The Shield was awesome. It has a true and bitter end, totally deserved. But visually, it got old very fast.

Please. Damages, even though it has Glenn Close, is pure shit writing. Alternating between flash forwards and flash backwards is a stupid idea to repeat every season. It could have worked for maybe 2-3 episodes at the beginning, but after a while, you realise it's a trick to hide the script flaws.

Well i think it is better if they have removed that plot since, i mean, Vic confession is a bomb big enough for the precint, adding "dutch is a serial killer" would have just shifted the focus of the endng

What do you mean? You didn't like cinema veritae?

>A solid B-tier show
compare the shield to a fucking sons of anarchy the shield is a-tier show. Sons of Anarchy is the real schlock.

no, they were trying to do the "dutch is a serial killer" storyline but for some reason they dropped it.

JU-JU-JU-JU-JUST ANOTHER DAYYYYYY! (oi papi)
DAAAYYYYYYYYY!!!

Yeah because they were trying to be edgy. Luckily they dropped it, probably because it was retarded.

I thought the video look was horrible...after a while you get used to it, but it's really hard to rewatch the first seasons.

>wrong I can name some filler

...

nah I think it's what makes the show comfy af

I thought it was interesting that they adressed the hesitation he has at some moment...no one would have really believed Dutch to be a killer though...the idea that he could have been was more interesting.

in reality they dropped it because they didn't want to flesh out any character other than michael chicklis.

I don't know, i think it could have been done differently

I generally hate cop dramas, but this is one of the best TV shows out there

literally every wife on the shield was a cunt

For what it's worth, The Shield came about at the dawn of the modern golden age of TV and Shawn Ryan himself, prior to The Shield, was coming off work on Nash Bridges, which was super-duper episodic.

As such, The Shield is in a funny place ala Buffy the Vampire Slayer, in that it's not a proper "serialized" show where there is zero filler and basically if you miss an episode, you basically run the risk of losing track of the plot.

The Shield was largely structured the same way as most cop shows were at the time (think the above Nash Bridges, but also NYPD Blues, a show that Shield both borrowed heavily from even as it ruthlessly deconstructed it). Basically each episode had stand-alone cases along the the lines of the Strike Team, Dutch/Claudette, and Danny/Julian to give it an episodic feel.

Usually the format was that you'd have the core case (usually C/D or Strike Team, but sometimes they would have Vic get involve with J/D) that basically was the A-Story and the other two cases would be done in a manner that would further the running storylines of the season. In general, you usually had the format where at least 1/3rd of the 13 episode season would be main arc heavy, but the rest of the episodes would be generally episodic yet sprinkled with plot advancement for the main arc, as a B-Plot or C-Plot.

But the guys are cunts too, to be honest

what was nice about the stand alone cases, is that it could be just a few minutes in an episode, and then we'd move to an other one, and then we'd move to a way deeper story arc that would spread for a few episodes or more

I honestly laugh everytime I see on the news ACTOR FROM THE SHIELD GETS 40 YEARS IN PRISON and the show is only known today because of this. And he was like the last guy I expect to murder his wife

who? everytime??

Best thing that has happened on tv

Not really. Did they say that? They spent a lot of time on different characters.

...

Holy shit... Is this real?

just google Michael Jace m8, it's was all over the news. He shot his wife and just called the police saying "I shot my wife lol"

fucking hell...guess he couldn't hold all that hate within...

No they dropped it because the whole cat killing plotline was something that they did to be edgy (the episode had David Mamet, who Ryan later worked with on The Unit, as special guest director) and it backfired pretty much from day one.

Mamet did not like the scene, but kept it in because he didn't want to come off like a prima donna demanding rewrites and stuff, especially after network S&P forced Ryan to change a scene from the episode after Mamet signed on to direct the episode*. FX studio executives hated the cat strangling scenes too, which was one of the reasons why they threatened to cancel the show when season three wrapped. And fans pretty much shitted all over it too when the episode aired.

So the whole thing got dropped because Shawn Ryan realized that he kind of crossed the line with the cat strangling and decided to let the whole thing drop rather fight a fight he knew he would lose.

*The episode was supposed to have a huge monologue where Corrine breaks down at having to raise no one but TWO autistic kids and basically drops the f-bomb, the first time the f-bomb would be dropped on FX. But then the whole "Janet Jackson shows her tittie on live TV" thing happened and even though FX had approved it, they got cold feet and ordered the speech rewritten to remove the f-word bomb dropping climax.

Damn, that would have been a perfect back story