Interrogating The Shield

By Nicholas Ray

When The Shield first appeared on US television in March 2002, it broke ratings records with the highest audience-rated original series premiere in cable history. In the course of its subsequent seven-season run, the show went on to win international acclaim for its abrasive depiction of an urban American dystopia and the systemic political and juridical corruption feeding it. The first book dedicated to the analysis of this immensely successful series, Interrogating "The Shield" brings together ten critical essays, written from a variety of methodological and theoretical perspectives. Topics range from an exploration of the series’ derivation, genre, and production, to expositions of the ethics, aesthetics, and politics of the show.

As may be expected from a multiauthored collection, this volume does not seek to present a homogenized account of The Shield. The show is variously applauded and critiqued. In their critical variety, however, the essays in this book are a testament to the cultural significance and creative complexity of the series. As such, they are a reminder of the renewed power of quality television drama today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Syracuse University Press
• Release date: Sep 27, 2012
• ISBN: 9780815651895

Book preview

Introduction

Trees Falling

NICHOLAS RAY

I

In episode 4.1 of The Shield (FX, 2002–2008), The Cure, Officer Danny Sofer indulges in a bit of cod philosophy. After senior colleagues fail to materialize at the scene of a drive-by shooting, she addresses a rhetorical question to her partner, Julien Lowe: If a guy gets shot in the ghetto, but the detectives don’t show up, did the crime really happen? Flippant as it may be, Sofer’s reworking of the old philosophical question about a tree falling in an uninhabited forest gets to the heart of an essential concern of the entire series. The conundrum of the falling tree, popularly misattributed to the idealist philosopher George Berkeley, opens onto questions that are nonetheless congruent with Berkeley’s thought: Does reality exist independently of perception? Is the existence of an object distinct from its being known? Sofer’s remark, however, shifts the focus of the conundrum from the actuality of a natural event unperceived by human beings to the actuality of an event—a crime—that is itself humanly instigated and humanly known. In doing so, it makes a significant departure from the hackneyed philosophical question it parodies. Her concern is not, obviously enough, with the matter of whether reality exists outside of perception. It is with the ways in which different modalities of perception may constitute and fail to constitute what passes for reality.

The centrality of this concern to the very conception of The Shield is made manifest within the first few minutes of the first episode of season 1 (Pilot). Here, the cold open cuts between a press conference at the Barn—the station house for the police precinct in the Farmington District of Los Angeles—hosted by Captain David Aceveda and the Strike Team’s pursuit of Booty, an African American drug dealer, through a poor shopping area in Farmington. At the press conference, Aceveda lauds the virtues of Farmington policing under his leadership. He makes claims about a fall in violent crime, an increased feeling of safety experienced by local citizens, and the newly sympathetic mode of policing evinced by his neighborhood outreach programs. Meanwhile, the Strike Team’s pursuit of Booty gives a very different sense of the police presence in South Central LA. Once Vic Mackey and his men corner the dealer at the back of a Best Buy supermarket, they beat, strip, and aggressively disburden him of his third ‘nad—a drug pouch attached to his scrotum.

What is most significant about the juxtaposition of Aceveda’s soothing claims for a new era in policing and the brutality of the Strike Team’s metaphorical emasculation of Booty is that both scenes—however much they otherwise contrast—feature internal audiences. Aceveda, naturally enough, is speaking before an invited group of press reporters, whom the captain’s personal assistant thanks for their attendance. However, although the pursuit of Booty has taken him and the Strike Team from the main drag to the rear of the supermarket, the brutality inflicted on the suspect is undertaken in the open. No sooner have we heard Aceveda’s claim to the press about the increased safety enjoyed by local families than we cut to a Hispanic family looking down on Booty’s humiliation from their balcony. The Strike Team members are unperturbed by the family’s presence—so much so that in a gesture that rhymes ironically with the assistant’s expression of gratitude to the reporters, Mackey’s final act in the sequence is to address to his informal audience a sarcastic Buenos días! The contrast established in The Shield’s first cold open is not, then, as one might initially expect, between the public face and the private face of Farmington policing—between the division’s overt and regulated presentation to the community and its covert tactics behind closed doors. Rather than the predictable opposition between public and private, the fundamental contrast established here is between public and public. The Strike Team’s treatment of Booty—antithetical to the model of policing peddled to the media by Aceveda—does not take place beyond the community’s gaze. It is perceived, it is known, it is witnessed. But what the cold open stresses is the differential authority that inheres respectively in Aceveda’s audience and Mackey’s. The brute reality of the Strike Team’s tactics goes unacknowledged in Aceveda’s polished narrative, but that narrative—received, authorized, and put into mass circulation by the press—bears an infinitely greater constitutive power. Mackey is able to brutalize Booty publicly not because his tactics are officially sanctioned, but because the official line that the Farmington police have left behind such tactics is so much more emphatically instantiated through the vast network of the media. Witnessed by a localized group of poor, disenfranchised spectators, the maltreatment of the drug dealer might just as well have never happened.

I begin with this inaugural sequence because it exemplifies why The Shield is more than just another American cop drama. As part of a well-established television genre that John Sumser (1996) has astutely characterized as modern America’s reelaboration of the frontier narrative, The Shield is, to be sure, deeply invested in the dramatic spectacle of the affirmation of state authority—beatings, interrogations, wire taps, and stings. But the series is also notable for its willingness to question the legitimacy of those who patrol the urban frontier and to throw into crisis any clear delimitation between the licit use of force deployed by the state and the illicit transgressions of those whom the state would police. With a notable self-consciousness, The Shield both exposes the means by which the putative boundary between the licit and the illicit is programmed and publicly instantiated and labors to articulate the realities that this boundary seeks to foreclose. It places emphasis on the gross dichotomies of social existence out of which crime emerges and the attendant dichotomies of cultural authority that enable abuses of state power to persist. Self-reflexive, critically engaged, visually and narratologically challenging, The Shield is television drama that thinks and that demands that its audience should think. This volume is an attempt to respond to that demand.

II

The Shield is only one of the most recent fictional representations of policing in Los Angeles to have tackled the popular association of the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) with brutality, racism, and corruption. The earliest substantial representation of the LAPD in popular dramatic fiction emerged in the 1950s radio and television series Dragnet (NBC, 1951–59), a sympathetic portrayal of the everyday heroism of the department’s officers that the department itself greatly approved of. But a number of controversial events subsequently tarnished the LAPD’s reputation nationally and internationally and led to a marked cleavage between the image the department sought to project and its much more interrogative fictional portrayals. Among the most prominent of these events were the fatal shooting in 1962 of Ronald Stokes, an unarmed member of the Nation of Islam; the Watts uprisings of 1965; the framing of the Black Panther Geronimo Pratt for the murder of Caroline Olsen in 1968; and the Rodney King beatings of 1991. In the latter decades of the twentieth century, a much more cynical series of fictional portrayals of the LAPD emerged, reflecting critically on the department’s recent history. James Ellroy’s 1990 novel LA Confidential gave a much more disturbing account of LA policing in the 1950s than Dragnet had ever dared to offer. Several subsequent films—such as Internal Affairs (Mike Figgis, 1990), Curtis Hanson’s adaptation of Ellroy’s novel (1997), Training Day (Antoine Fuqua, 2001), and Changeling (Clint Eastwood, 2008)—continued in a similar tradition. On the small screen, the LAPD hit back via the reality show LAPD: Life on the Beat (QRZ, 1995–99), ostensibly conveying the real business of police work. However, by the time The Shield emerged with its own fictionalized small-screen portrayal, the popular association of the LAPD with unethical policing had—in screen drama, at least—become almost proverbial.¹

The inception of The Shield can be precisely dated in relationship to the LAPD’s evolving fortunes. Although the show makes overt allusions to the uprisings of 1965, the King beatings, and subsequent riots, it takes its principal inspiration from the Rampart scandal that rocked Los Angeles in the late 1990s.² The scandal emerged out of a series of initially localized investigations into corruption in the Rampart division of the LAPD’s antigang unit Community Resources Against Street Hoodlums (CRASH). These investigations quickly became focused on Officer Rafael Pérez. In August 1998, Pérez was arrested for stealing six pounds of cocaine from police evidence lockers. Further investigation revealed more evidence of drug thefts. In September 1999, facing retrial, Pérez cut a deal. In exchange for pleading guilty to stealing cocaine, serving a maximum of five years in jail, and receiving immunity from all other charges short of murder, Pérez agreed to give evidence of further corruption within the Rampart CRASH division. The information he surrendered, however, was far more extensive than anyone claimed to have expected. In the course of fifty meetings held over nine months, Pérez delivered a lengthy testimony. The transcripts ran to more than four thousand pages. The testimony implicated nearly seventy other officers and involved details of widespread misconduct, including the planting of evidence and framing of suspects, thefts, beatings, narcotic distribution, and the awarding of token prizes to officers who shot gang members. The extent of corruption in Rampart’s CRASH division led to the establishment of an ad hoc internal board of inquiry. The board’s report was released in March 2000, and CRASH was disbanded the same month. In April, the police officers’ union, the Los Angeles Police Protective League, demanded an independent investigation as well. It was the first time the league had done so in its seventy-five-year history.

When the Rampart scandal unfolded in the US media, Shawn Ryan was working as a producer on the Buffy the Vampire Slayer (WB, 1997–2003) spin-off Angel (WB, 1999–2004), having cut his teeth as a writer for the bland police drama Nash Bridges (CBS, 1996–2001). In an interview for the UK newspaper The Guardian in 2009, Ryan recalled his astonished reaction to the Rampart headlines:

I came from this small town outside of Chicago. I had this absolute belief in the U.S. Constitution, and a naïve—but nonetheless clear—notion of right and wrong. So when I moved to L.A. I was very trusting. Then the Rampart scandal erupted. I lived only a few miles from that district, but I lived in an L.A. where cops did not pull you over for no reason, where the cops did not beat up on people. And yet nearby it was anarchy. So my idea of the world was damaged—clearly not everyone believed in the rule of law, the [C]onstitution and civil rights. (quoted in Marshall 2009)

Ryan’s comment provides an honest and powerful real-life exemplification of the problematic perceptual structure dramatized in the cold open of The Shield’s pilot episode. To the white, middle-class professional living in a good neighborhood, the civil rights violations taking place on an everyday basis in dispossessed areas just a few miles away remained essentially unreal, foreclosed from his very idea of the world. Until they became news, their actuality remained something akin to that of the proverbial falling tree.

While still working on Angel, Ryan wrote the pilot for The Shield as a direct response to the Rampart scandal.³ Indeed, early on in production the new series was titled Rampart, although this choice predictably proved unsatisfactory to the LAPD. The Shield is notable for its unvarnished depiction of precisely those areas of Los Angeles that had been precluded from Ryan’s symbolic world until the scandal emerged, and it concentrates much of its focus on LA’s heterogeneous social and ethnic communities and subcultures as well as their manifold cultural expressions: languages, music, body art, and graffiti. The show is not set in the Rampart area, but in the analogous fictional Farmington District. The CRASH division is transfigured and scaled down to the small group of elite male and—for the most part—white detectives known as the Strike Team, detailed to investigate local drug and gang activity. The character of Vic Mackey takes its cue from a number of the high-profile officers in Rampart’s CRASH unit, not least of all Rafael Pérez. The team’s professional tactics and side activities are entirely consonant with those revealed during the scandal, and its irrevocable termination is sealed in a long, detailed testimony by Mackey in the final season, which he, like Pérez—although with an implausibly cushier deal—offers in exchange for immunity.

III

And yet whatever its immediate historical inspiration, The Shield is not—or, at least, is not just—concerned with perpetuating the long-standing popular-culture association of the LAPD with corruption and brutality. As the essays in this volume insist, policing in The Shield is about much more than just the Strike Team. The show uses a superb ensemble cast, whose members are carefully deployed to represent different aspects of police work and drastically different approaches to the ethics of its undertaking. A much more cerebral form of policing is exemplified by partner detectives Holland Dutch Wagenbach and Claudette Wyms. Their joint work on serial killings and sex crimes is more patient and more reflective than any Strike Team action. It is frequently driven by a shared ethical integrity and by a recognition—sometimes lacking in more traditional television cop drama—that criminality may be understood and not merely punished. Julien Lowe, Danny Sofer (until she falls pregnant), and Tina Hanlon are well-intentioned patrol officers whom we witness endeavoring to gain authority on Farmington’s streets without resorting to the excesses of Mackey and his men. They are junior officers who learn from each other and from the individuals they police. Their presence, like that of Wagenbach and Wyms, provides an essential counterpoint to the Strike Team’s dramatic centrality—not only in terms of professional responsibility and integrity, but also in their demographic composition. These alternative clusters of officers are not, as the Strike Team for the most part is, populated exclusively by white males but also feature strong, complex, male and female characters of African American or Hispanic descent.

The Shield is also careful to insist that policing—from the most to the least socially and ethically responsible—does not take place in an institutional vacuum. The series tracks the struggles of female and nonwhite officers against the structural discrimination of the professional world they inhabit and the fates of individuals who seek to overturn the cynical culture that prevails at the Barn. Moreover, much of its focus is devoted to the ways in which the personal and political interests of the brass, as the higher-ranking officers are habitually referred to, determine the street officers’ modus operandi and periodically effect recalibrations of what can pass for right or wrong. Captain (later Councilman) David Aceveda is the most obvious example here, but the influence of dramatically more marginal figures such as Assistant Chiefs Ben Gilroy and Roy Phillips and Chief Tom Bankston remains decisive. These ambitious men are more concerned with the exigencies of the media and city governance than with the realities of the street, and it is their command decisions that organize and curtail the scope and trajectory of the Barn’s policing.

The Shield, to put it succinctly, is an emphatically plural text. It is notable for its presentation of multiple centers of dramatic gravity and juridical authority. As such, morality is not necessarily a given in the series; and although there are many voices of dissent that speak against Mackey’s compelling Pérez-like excesses, none of the Barn’s employees—even the most ethically driven—has a monopoly on integrity and honesty. This series is as much concerned with the internal frontiers that traverse, divide, and compromise the institutions and practices of urban policing as it is with questioning the putative frontiers at which television policing has generically operated. An intelligent, polyvocal, and often interrogative text, The Shield warrants interrogation in its turn.

IV

The first three essays in this volume focus on the derivation and stylistic idioms of The Shield. Concepción Cascajosa Virino gives a detailed account of the generic, institutional, and creative influences that shaped the series. Tracking the evolution of The Shield’s small-screen precursors, the creative trajectory of creator Shawn Ryan, and the imperatives of television management that led to the show’s appearance on FX, she makes a case for The Shield as an exemplary work of industrial art. Gary Needham situates the show’s messy visual style within the diachronic context of earlier cop dramas and the synchronic context of the present-day fashion for television verité, making a case for the show’s astute exploitation of the stylistic possibilities inherent in the medium of television. Nicholas Chare’s chapter shifts the focus to the acoustic signatures that define The Shield. Drawing on a range of theoretical perspectives as well as contemporary accounts of the sonic landscape of actual police work, Chare analyzes both the aesthetic and the ethical dimensions of the show’s manifold sound practices.

The next three chapters observe The Shield’s apparent similarities to or creative dependence on other shows but also explore those aspects of the series that make it distinctive. Lorna Jowett examines the relationship between Detective Wagenbach of The Shield and Agent Fox Mulder of The X-Files (Fox, 1993–2002). She gives a detailed reading of Wagenbach’s character, arguing that his positioning within an ensemble cast at once allows for more nuanced characterization and lends to the figure of the intellectual investigator a much greater potential to interrogate masculine heroism than can be countenanced within the framework of the earlier series. Glyn White reads The Shield as an emphatically "post-Sopranos" cop drama, but one that drives the ethical challenges broached by the emergence of Tony Soprano to a new dimension by positioning its central antihero as a cop within a long-established television genre. Douglas L. Howard’s chapter explores the place of the interrogation room in The Shield. Tracing its function over many different plotlines, he argues that although interrogations in the series may appear wholly generic, they are made distinctive by a more reciprocal confessional dynamic than is common in US cop drama.

The final four essays in the volume articulate distinctive critical approaches to The Shield’s ideologies and politics. Mike Chopra-Gant interrogates the show’s representation of race and masculinity. Although acknowledging that the visibility of nonwhite characters in The Shield marks its distinctiveness from many successful US television shows that came before it, he demonstrates that the series remains deeply committed to reinstantiating and relegitimating an essentially white male patriarchy. The focus of Jason P. Vest’s contribution is those key female figures in the series whose characterization bears the potential to challenge the patriarchal hierarchies that predominate within the Farmington District. Through a detailed reading of the sexual politics driving the narrative trajectories of Claudette Wyms, Danny Sofer, and Monica Rawling, Vest gives a balanced discussion of the limits that govern The Shield’s representation of women police officers. My own chapter examines the place of The Shield in the context of the political exceptionalism that defined the George W. Bush era. I invoke the work of Giorgio Agamben in order to investigate the problematic ideological investments that structure the show’s positioning and representation of its central character, Vic Mackey, as exceptional. Finally, Stephen Shapiro argues that however much the racial and criminological politics of The Shield may synchronize with the imperialist revanchism of America after September 11, 2001, the show is more fundamentally the articulation of a crisis within the American middle class, which was itself the organizing force behind the response to the events of September 11. Taking The Shield’s final sequence as a starting point, Shapiro offers a meditation on the place of popular culture more generally in the apprehension and precognition of social crisis.

As is to be expected from a multiauthored collection, there is no attempt here to present a united front. Different authors’ arguments do not necessarily harmonize with one another; in places, they manifestly disagree. The Shield is thus variously applauded and criticized. Nevertheless, it is to be hoped that in their critical variety these essays as a whole are a testament to the series’ cultural significance and creative complexity. As such, they are a reminder of the extraordinary potentiality of quality television drama today—a field of cultural production that still too often passes unperceived in what is called serious academic scholarship.

1. In episode 3.2 of the satirical cartoon Family Guy (Fox, 1999–) Brian Does Hollywood, the central character, Peter Griffin, takes his family to LA on vacation. When he receives a beating from LAPD’s traffic cops, his wife enthusiastically films the event on her camera to take home as though the beating were just another tourist activity for visitors to the city.

2. The PBS Web site maintains a detailed archive of information about the Rampart scandal, including transcripts and recordings of testimonies as well as interviews with some of the key figures involved (officers, investigators, and gang members). Factual information presented here regarding the Rampart scandal is derived from this archive.

3. There have been other big-screen responses to CRASH. Prior to the scandal, Dennis Hopper’s Colors (1988) offered a sympathetic portrayal of the lives of two CRASH officers in LA. Nick Broomfield’s documentary Biggie and Tupac (2002) touches on the alleged involvement of Rafael Pérez and his Rampart colleague Nuno Durden in the murder of the rapper Biggie Smalls. Although Antoine Fuqua’s movie Training Day (2001) was conceived before the Rampart scandal erupted, the direction and characterization of Alonzo Harris is rumored to have been influenced by Pérez. Finally, David R. Ellis’s Cellular (2004) gives a fictionalized account of the scandal’s origins.

1

The Derivation of a Television Crime Drama

CONCEPCIÓN CASCAJOSA VIRINO

There are a number of ways to describe The Shield (FX, 2002–2008): the cable drama that put the little-watched basic channel FX on the map; a police procedural with more action and brutality than is expected in the CSI era; the television program that dared to portray cops as criminals in the wake of September 11, 2001; the series that succeeded in getting that affable bald thespian from The Commish (ABC, 1991–96) an Emmy. The critics heralded The Shield as one of the finest works in the new golden age of television, and it is one of the very few police dramas to be so praised.¹ In a decade of fertile creativity, some US television series are considered works of art thanks to their thematic, narrative, and aesthetic sophistication, and The Shield has undoubtedly secured a place among them.

However, no television show is an island. The Shield, like any other good show, is more than the sum of its parts. The reasons for its success are varied, complex, and, in some cases, interrelated: a young channel (FX) was looking for groundbreaking material to make a splash in the jam-packed basic-cable market; an ambitious but almost unknown writer (Shawn Ryan) was in the right place at the right time with a superb pilot script; a group of talented actors (led by Michael Chiklis, C. C. H. Pounder, and Benito Martinez) got the roles of their lives; and, last but not least, the audience, always an unpredictable entity, found the exploits of a gang of corrupt cops more fascinating than appalling.

This chapter reflects on these determinants, among others, in order to offer an account of the The Shield’s derivation: its emergence as a flagship work of cable television, its textual influences and heritage, its place in the evolving oeuvre of its creator, Shawn Ryan, and its significance as a critically successful expression of television authorship. I start off with a brief account of the context in which FX took up The Shield. I then examine the show’s genealogical lineage, focusing first on the influence of its generic antecedents and contemporaries and then on some of the key writing, directing, and production personnel they share with The Shield. Finally, I turn to Shawn Ryan’s previous output as a staff writer on Nash Bridges (CBS, 1996–2001) and as producer on Angel (WB, 1999–2004) in order to adumbrate the ways in which The Shield can be seen to be shaped by Ryan’s earlier work. My aim, broadly speaking, is to give an account of The Shield as an exemplary industrial work of art that is peculiar to its medium—a text that successfully and brilliantly negotiates institutional and management practices and generic conventions while remaining an emphatic expression of individual creativity.

The Shield and FX

Let us begin by considering how The Shield was used to build an entire brand of television drama. Michael Chiklis’s acceptance speech at the 2002 Emmys after winning the trophy for Best Drama Actor probably marked the first time that millions of Americans had ever heard of the FX channel, one of the multiple properties of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. A previous incarnation of the channel, Fx, had failed to attract viewers with its interactive programming, but under the leadership of the former marketing executive Peter Liguori the channel was reborn as FX