The same year that the gritty police drama The Shield was one of them.
Breaking Bad wasn’t an instant success when season 1 aired. It was well-received by critics from the very beginning — especially after a first episode that had them hooked from start to finish — but it struggled in the ratings in its first couple of seasons. Since its story revolved around change, it was very different from what audiences were used to in traditional television shows. It might’ve been even harder for Breaking Bad to find an audience if one of its biggest competitors in the genre hadn’t gone off the air in the same year that it premiered.
The Shield Aired Its Finale Just A Few Months After Breaking Bad Premiered
The Shield Ended Just As Breaking Bad Was Getting Started
The pilot episode of Breaking Bad, detailing how a high school chemistry teacher with cancer is driven to produce crystal meth, originally aired on AMC on January 20, 2008. It received rave reviews from critics and earned Bryan Cranston his first of many Emmy Awards for playing Walter White. Just a few months later, The Shield’s seven-season run came to an end. The Shield aired its series finale — season 7, episodes 13 and 14, “Family Meeting” — on FX on November 25, 2008. The year was bookended by the beginning of one classic crime series and the end of another.
The Shield Was One Of The Best Crime Dramas Of The Early 2000s
The Shield's Vic Mackey Was One Of The Earliest TV Antiheroes
The 2000s were a great time for TV crime dramas, even before Vince Gilligan created Breaking Bad. The Wire captured the crime and corruption of Baltimore with an almost documentary-like sense of realism. Prison Break kept viewers guessing about how its characters would escape from their confinement. 24 made headlines with its unique real-time filmmaking, with each 24-episode season comprising a day in which Jack Bauer saved America from a terrorist threat. Dexter pitted one serial killer against all the other serial killers in Miami. The Shield was one of the best crime dramas of the decade.
All seven seasons of The Shield are available to stream on Hulu.
The Shield was loosely inspired by the true story of the L.A.P.D.’s Rampart Division. In its first episode, it sets itself up as a typical police procedural about cops going after crooks — that is, until its final scene, which changes everything. The series’ protagonist, Vic Mackey, reveals himself to be more of an antihero during a raid by his trusty Strike Team. Having learned that his colleague Terry Crowley is secretly working with the Justice Department to expose the Strike Team’s corruption, Vic kills him with a drug dealer’s gun and frames the dealer for it.
It set the stage for a brilliantly subversive detective series that blurred the line between right and wrong.
Before The Shield came along, it was the norm for police procedurals to present cops as the good guys and the criminals they arrest as the bad guys. But The Shield creator Shawn Ryan recognized that that’s not always the case in the real world, so he conceived a police procedural where the cops are corrupt, and commit just as many crimes as the perps they’re chasing. It set the stage for a brilliantly subversive detective series that blurred the line between right and wrong.
The Shield Deserves More Love As One Of The Greatest TV Crime Dramas
It Belongs In The Same Conversation As Breaking Bad & Sons Of Anarchy
The Shield belongs in the same conversation as Breaking Bad, Sons of Anarchy, The Sopranos, and all the other classic TV crime dramas. Vic is as complex and compelling an antihero as Walt or Tony Soprano or Don Draper. The Shield was very successful in its time, but it’s sadly underrated today.
The Shield
- Release Date
- 2002 - 2008-00-00
- Network
- FX
- Directors
- Kurt Sutter
Cast
Michael Jace
WHERE TO WATCH
- Writers
- Kurt Sutter
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