In a feat of uncharacteristic daring for serial TV dramas, most of which presume an endless run capped by a big syndication payoff, the conclusion of Shawn Ryan’s FX cop epic The Shield was built into its very beginning. That is, in the series’ first episode, the extravagantly crooked, politically ingenious “strike team” hotshot Vic Mackey (Michael Chiklis) shot and killed—spoiler alert for those who have yet to see the show (it’s available on DVD)—a fellow officer he’d discovered was spying on him for a higher-up.
Virtually everything in the series’ subsequent seasons has spun off from that original sin, and part of the immense satisfaction of watching it comes from anticipating how—or if—Mackey will be made to pay for the murder. The Shield’s sixth season ended earlier this month, nicely setting up a few final conflagrations for its seventh, closing chapter, which will air early next year.
So will this bullet-domed bad apple finally get what’s coming to him? Hard to say: Many have tried to bring Mackey down over the course of the show, from guest-fuzz Glenn Close and Forest Whitaker to, most consistently, regular characters Detective (now Captain) Claudette Wyms (CCH Pounder) and Detective “Dutch” Wagenbach (Jay Karnes). Typically, the most they get for their pains is an ugly, bewildering slog down to Mackey’s level and, as one character put it this season, “a mountain of ill will that’s just too high to climb.”
What makes Mackey such an intriguing TV character, though, and such a confounding pain in the ass to his colleagues, isn’t just that he’s a self-serving/self-destructive goon with a lust for power and money—it’s that he’s also a decent, loving man. Vic is relentlessly loyal to his fellow strike team members—to a fault in the case of hillbilly Mackey-manque Shane Vendrell (Walton Goggins), an even looser cannon than his boss—and a good protector of and provider for his estranged wife and kids. On the job, his tenderness and raw humanity translate into the keen insight and utter lack of ambivalence about using brute force that make him such an outrageously effective policeman. “I’m a different kind of cop,” Vic tells a kiddie-rapist suspect in the show’s pilot, before beating a confession out of him with a telephone book. Clearly. For one thing, his less-than-legal methods get results that straight-arrows Wyms and Wagenbach only dream of.
With so morally muddled a character as its focus, The Shield makes a brilliant rejoinder to a half-century of TV supercop shows—and, notwithstanding Adam-12 and HBO’s The Wire, there are precious few ordinary-powered cops to be found on television. By portraying police work in mythic terms and its best practitioners as nobly resistant to the job’s fascistic allure, however, this longstanding genre has never had anywhere to take its heroes but down.
A cinematic template can be found in Orson Welles’ 1958 art-trash masterpiece Touch of Evil, which is, among other things, a disquisition on waning American power presented as the story of a good cop gone to seed. By the time we encounter Welles’ blubberous Captain Hank Quinlan, he’s an evidence-planting, race-baiting dry-drunk sadist who relies on a “game leg” to alert him to criminal wrongdoing; like Mackey, he lets his megalomania lead him to kill in the pursuit of a hideously subjective brand of justice. Quinlan’s increasingly sloppy methods inevitably catch up with him, though, and as a fortune-telling old flame (Marlene Dietrich) tells him midfilm, “Your future is all used up.”
Maybe so, but impossibly virtuous cops were flourishing on the box when Touch of Evil was released (indeed, it can be read as a skewering of the populist boosterism of Jack Webb’s 1950s-spanning Dragnet), and continued to do so for decades. Television may finally have caught up with Welles’ vision in The Shield, but the road there is littered with steely-jawed but tender-hearted shamuses upholding the white male hegemony—er, working for the common good—whatever their personality flaws.
In the early and mid-’60s, the supercop impulse was channeled into Cold War scenarios in shows like The Man From U.N.C.L.E.. and I Spy, the latter of which traded Kennedy-era cool a third of the way through its three-season run for a surprisingly bitter world-weariness. The status-quo gap this created was quickly filled in the late ’60s by CBS mainstay Hawaii Five-0, the hero of which, Steve McGarrett (Jack Lord), is positively Nixonian in his rigid support of law and order and Hank Quinlan-esque philosophizing; McGarrett touts his “cop’s intuition” repeatedly in the series’ highly watchable first season (also available on DVD), and flirts with planting evidence at least once. He’s the supercop’s supercop in almost every way, which apparently excuses his fastidiously natty attire, insouciant coif and general pansexual vibe. (Clint Eastwood’s Harry Callahan, the grotesquely dandified poster boy for homegrown fascism in Don Siegel’s 1971 Dirty Harry, surely owes a debt to Lord’s stylized conception.)
The sensitive-man ’70s softened the supercop figure internally in such series as Barney Miller, while in the following decade Hill Street Blues added a layer of emotional complication to their touchy-feely hypercompetence. It wasn’t until the ’90s, and Tom Fontana’s Homicide: Life on the Street, that genuine moral ambiguity began to surface in the genre. That show’s detectives were as petty and backbiting as they were capable, and the arrogant savant Detective Frank Pembleton (Andre Braugher) was literally and metaphorically brought down by a stroke in the series’ fourth season. (For its part, David Milch’s NYPD Blue simply synthesized Hawaii Five-0 and Barney Miller, and broke new ground only in its copious ass shots.)
Homicide’s moral complexity finally reached fruition with The Shield, but Deadwood’s Seth Bullock (Timothy Olyphant) may well represent the prototype for the internally divided TV cop, at least in terms of a historical timeline. Fist-happy, perpetually seething and so naively bound up in his own steadfastness that the series’ brutally efficient eminence grise, Al Swearengen (Ian McShane), can manipulate him at will, Bullock embodies the same contradictory qualities—tenderness and cruelty, charm and repugnance, a sense of injustice and an attraction to power—as Vic Mackey, which are so pointedly absent in Joe Friday, Steve McGarrett, Frank Furillo and the like. The difference is that Bullock has a sporadic awareness of his shortcomings, and can recognize (typically after the fact) when he’s inappropriately indulging his tortured impulses in the capacity of peace officer.
Vic Mackey, who’s an expert in everyone’s failings except his own, not so much. And whether he gets busted by his colleagues, snuffed by one of his scores of underworld adversaries or just alienated from everything he loves, his lapse in self-reflection dooms him to a present swallowed up by the past. As the evolutionary dead end of the TV supercop, Vic’s future is all used up.