You’re safe now that Mackey’s back in town
“THE Shield” is a hazy sort of television. Stories don’t unfold at a reasoned pace so much as careen from explosion to explosion, literal and otherwise. Backed by the constant chatter, in multiple languages, of the Los Angeles streets -- and dealing with an invigorating variety of crimes, and criminals -- it’s improbably loud and disorienting. Which is to say, it’s an apt fit for its protagonists, who often appear to be operating under their own inertia, moving in no discernible direction besides forward.
As true to Los Angeles as “The Wire” is to Baltimore (and certainly more attuned to this city than “24” pretends to be), “The Shield” is encoded with fear, anger and absence. It’s as if uncertainty itself were written into the show’s very fabric.
Staying the course through choppy waters is Det. Vic Mackey (Michael Chiklis), leader of an elite strike team in the city’s troubled, and imaginary, Farmington district. Small and tightly wound, Mackey is a stoic who speaks in wry one-liners and quick fist jabs. (Chiklis has won both an Emmy and a Golden Globe for the role.) As a crime-fighter, he’s efficient and ruthless -- everyone understands he crosses ethical lines, but he’s been difficult to roust from his position. When time allows, he’s also a concerned father of three children, two of whom are autistic. And he’s an improbable lothario who seems to attract women by sheer force of will. Mostly, though, he’s a machine, tasked with eliminating everything in his path.
In a traditional cop show, that would make him an antihero, but “The Shield” has always been something different. It’s a show about fury and action, not process and the law. And though it’s been emotionally engaging, with memorable, fleshed-out characters, it’s visually gripping above all: grainy and jumpy and exciting. It’s the rare show in which actors of great talent are content to be part of a tapestry that sometimes sees them as being in the way. Over the course of five seasons, though, the show has become more of a vortex, and it’s begun to take a toll.
The outset of Season 6 (10 p.m. Tuesday on FX), for once, finds Vic with true clarity of purpose. Curtis Lemansky (Kenny Johnson), who approximated the role of moral backbone on Mackey’s team, was murdered at the end of last season. Vic thinks Salvadoran weapons traffickers did the do; what he doesn’t know is that it’s his own teammate Shane (Walton Goggins) who served Lem a grenade, fearful an Internal Affairs investigation was leading Lem to snitch on his partners.
Watching Vic stomp through the first few episodes of this season should be invigorating -- finally, all the rage and passion and whatever else he’s motivated by (more on that later) is channeled into a just cause: vengeance.
But not only is Vic not justified -- and knowing the truth causes Shane to melt into ever-greater pools of sweat -- but he’s also, over the years, systematically deadened the thrill of violence. By specializing in ethical ambiguity, Vic has all but eliminated the possibility that his manhunt could ever feel redemptive. After all, the lines between moral violence and immoral violence have long ago been blurred on “The Shield,” where it takes dirty cops with questionable methods to tackle gruesome crimes and their perpetrators. Cheering for that behavior means questioning Vic as he employs the usual tactics to punish someone who’s actually innocent of the crime in question (though who’s certainly guilty of others -- something of a cop-out). If this isn’t a meditation on the nature of guilt, it’s unclear what ever could be.
Typically Vic’s criminal foes don’t leave much of an impact (apart from gang leader Antwon Mitchell, played slickly and evocatively by Anthony Anderson, who threatened to steal Mackey’s, and Chiklis’, thunder over the last two seasons). Last season, though, Vic found a tough adversary in the form of Lt. John Kavanagh (Forest Whitaker), an Internal Affairs officer tasked with investigating Vic and his team.
Anyone who had doubts about whether Whitaker deserved an Oscar this year should have sat with those episodes. In the beginning, he was genial, self-effacing and letting only a touch of his inner roilings simmer through (no one on television, or perhaps anywhere, has ever ingested a stick of Juicy Fruit more sadistically). Over the course of the season, though, as Mackey was slipping away, Kavanagh quite literally morphed on screen. He lost a significant amount of weight over the course of the season: by the end, he was gaunt, receding into the background.
Glenn Close wasn’t quite as riveting during the previous season in her role as the station’s captain, Monica Rawling, but her mere presence on the show, her first regular TV role, indicates the high regard in which “The Shield’s” acting is held.
Which is why it’s a shame that, as Mackey’s struggling with his own unraveling, the show’s secondary characters feel more ancillary than ever. Claudette Wyms (CCH Pounder) has been promoted to captain and has yet to fully assert her seriousness. Her former partner Det. Dutch Wagenbach (Jay Karnes) has been enlisted to help investigate Lem’s murder too, but his dogged nerdiness finally serves as an asset for Vic, one of the few times their interests align.
All of which leaves Vic ever more at the center, even as he’s losing his authority. On “The Shield,” Chiklis suffers for the same reason Kiefer Sutherland suffers on “24”: their roles, ultimately, are to annihilate. Nuance takes a back seat, meaning that even when a broader range of emotion is called for -- as in this season’s opening episodes, when Vic is mourning Lem -- it must take a back seat to the prime directive. Even when true sentiment sneaks into the show, it’s unfailingly macabre. After Lem is denied a proper police burial, Vic, Shane and Ronnie visit his grave and offer their own 21-gun salute, solemnly firing rounds into the ground. (This, following the opening montage scored to Johnny Cash’s “I Hung My Head.”)
And over the years, Vic’s been tougher to root for, if rooting for him was ever meant to be the right response. If it was clear what Vic was aiming for with his brutality and his nihilism, or maybe what he was running from, his journey might not feel so cyclical. But there’s a cloud of exhaustion hanging over this season of “The Shield,” one that’s been creeping up for the last couple of years. As Mackey systematic dismantles everything around him, there’s almost nothing left to cling on to. If he’s not driven by principle, or even greed, then what’s holding the show together?
And so there’s another bad guy, another busted-down door, another threatening interrogation. When Vic finally catches the baddie he thinks offed Lem, he treats him particularly sadistically, with slight echoes of Abu Ghraib. Yet it inspires only indifference. Justice feels foreign as a goal. And maybe, in this troubled universe, that’s just the point.