Why "The Shield" is one of the best TV shows of all time

The Shield (2002-08) is one of the most interesting TV shows ever made. Its hero is Vic Mackey, a rule-bending cop who only answers to his own moral code. There are flashes of Nietzsche in him - Vic lives to fight. Over 7 seasons, he wages war with our modern world 👇

Vic's take on evil: This is an amoral world with some truly terrible people in it. But nature abhors a vacuum - even a vacuum of evil. You can't eliminate the bad guy without someone else taking his place. Best you can do is manage evil, slow it down, contain it.

Rules are for people who can't think on the spot, who can't separate the the-best-possible-good from the most-avoidable-evil when faced with the critical moment of choice, who freeze up when the stakes get high. But Vic Mackey is not that guy.

For Vic, the supreme virtue is loyalty. He leads not a team but a warband, soldiers and not mere men. They are tight - they stick together & can crack cases that the thinkers, bureaucrats, politicians can't. But the preconditions for such a warband are gone, they're an anomaly.

And the world is never kind to the anomalies of the age. The nerds hate Vic because he's too smooth, the rule-lovers hate him because he flaunts the laws that govern their life, the politicians because he only cares for truth, results, and his personal code.

Vic Mackey gets results, more results than anyone else; but the zeitgeist isn't his, he sticks out like a sore thumb. In life, our actual jobs are secondary. The primary job foisted on all is to not disturb the morality of our society and to help extend it. Vic isn't interested.

The Shield is a tragedy not because our heroes get hurt, get shot at, and receive nothing but condescension from a system that wouldn't work without them. The Shield is a tragedy because our heroes betray their brothers. The world manages to crush the warband.

Vic is betrayed, can't protect the ones he's supposed to, and the final knife-twist is when he's forced to choose between his loyalty to his ex-wife and one of his brothers. He chooses wrong - he chooses loyalty to the one who already sold him out, he betrays the one who didn't.

What happens to Vic? Watch the show. The world tries to impose a fate worse than death on him - to separate him not just from his men and family but from his way of life. But I like to imagine that he would one day slip through the chains, face the ones who wronged him, and go:

To submit, comply, go with the system? Or to bet everything on your soul guiding you right? For men like Vic Mackey, the question itself never comes up. Let man's deep instinct clash with the weight of the world, and see who's the last man standing.