One of the great trends in US TV over the last decade has been the evolution of the high quality complex adult drama series.
You can almost trace the evolutionary routes that brought us to The Shield.
Hill Street Blues brought us NYPD Blue, then we had Oz, Sopranos and Six Feet Under.
The Shield is like the badly behaved illegitimate off-spring of The Sopranos and NYPD Blue on steroids.
Lead character and morally ambiguous front man Vic Mackey (bullet-headed Michael Chiklis) is an incredibly compelling character, leading an L.A. strike team in a rough city precinct.
The character is brilliantly complex.
He's a money-grabbing corrupt cop, but he still puts runs on the board by putting away the bad guys.
He's a broken machine, but still the most effective means of cleaning up the streets.
Beyond Vic, the other characters are equally complex, unpredictable and illustrative of different human qualities.
Police captain turned Councillor Acevada is the political animal of the series, again showing good and very very bad qualities in equal measure.
Glenn Close does an excellent job of her portrayal of the police captain, too.
Which leads me to point out that The Shield, like Oz and The Sopranos, are shows that have more quality, more compulsion and more addictive quality for the viewer than many, many movies these days.
This is easily the best show to have been on TV for a long time and will throw curve-balls at the viewer to keep them on the edge of their seat.
Lean, mean, tough, gritty and ugly, but oh-so wonderful, too.
