how a playground bully picks on vulnerable targets. Despite his best efforts to ignore Vic’s juvenile behaviour, Dutch is eventually forced to confront his issues with Vic and the team. The Shield is, therefore, as much about the modern man’s crisis of masculinity as it is about crime and punishment. In their line of work, maintaining an image of control and dominance is essential to survival on the streets and within the police department. Both environments are ruthless battlefields where power means everything. Throughout, the strike team are forced to operate under the command of multiple disapproving captains, all of which seek to expose and destroy them. The audience are forced to confront their own perceptions of justice as the strike team often break chain of command, the law, and even at times betray their own ethical code. In this regard, The Shield is similar to Breaking Bad (20082013), which focuses on the moral conflicts and ethical considerations of its central protagonist; meth cook Walter White (Bryan Cranston) is inherently reminiscent of Vic Mackey. The two characters attempt to justify their criminal actions and manipulations of the law by protecting those close to them and, as the characters and respective shows develop
and evolve, it becomes increasingly difficult to defend their actions. The Shield presents the audience with a highoctane, unflinchingly ruthless account of the war on drugs on the streets of LA. A source tells Vic early in the first season, “Man, somebody needs to end this war”, to which Vic replies, rather triumphantly, “I intend to”. The strike team transforms from a group of close-knit friends busting down the doors of petty corner boys to a well-trained machine. The Shield is no ordinary police drama. It has the audacity and bravery to tackle highly controversial issues and subject matter and earns its reputation as one of the all-time great television series, echoed by James Poniewozik in his review for Time magazine: “The Shield did what network cop shows have lately abandoned: it created a richly imagined world with continuing story lines, driven by LA’s roiling racial politics”. To some a hero, others a monster, detective Vic Mackey embodies the moral and ethical struggle faced by police officers and detectives in any crime drama. The thin line between good and bad is not simply blurred but rather demolished by Vic and the strike team, leaving it to the audience to draw their own distinction between right and wrong •
Diegesis: CUT TO [conflict]
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