![]() In those respects, The Shield’s pilot was par for the course. ![]() One reason that the events of pilots so rarely reverberate throughout a series’ run is that those first episodes are typically trial balloons floated by creators who haven’t mapped out where they want their shows to go and networks that may not be sold on their storytelling both are fumbling forward in the absence of feedback from a mass audience. “It opened up a lot of doors, and then shows came through and kicked them open even further,” Ryan says.įrom a plot standpoint, the pilot’s apparent prescience was partly engineered after the fact, as Ryan followed the threads that led from the episode’s stunning turnabout. Crowley’s unpredictable demise, and the ramifications that came from it, made America’s introduction to The Shield one of the most startling, momentous, and prescient pilots ever. It also altered TV history by blazing a trail on basic cable for the mature content and “ difficult men” who would dominate the decade’s indelible TV dramas. Leslie Knope crushes on Mark Brendanawicz and Andy Dwyer dates Ann Perkins on Parks and Recreation Coach costars instead of Winston on New Girl Xander’s close friend Jesse on Buffy is bitten by a vampire and, after Xander accidentally stakes him in the second episode, is never mentioned again.īut when Mackey murdered Crowley, a strike team member and would-be informant who’d agreed to blow the whistle on Mackey’s misdeeds, it set the long-term tone and course for a series that ran for 87 more episodes. To watch most pilots is to venture into a world where the series you remember hasn’t quite come together: where the writing is too cute or too caustic, the leads are still stuck in the wrong relationships, and actions lack consequences. It’s easier to summon examples of pilots that flopped so spectacularly that they never aired and led to recast roles, or that featured prominent characters who never returned, than it is to pick out pilots whose events resonated right through the series finale. Their job is to establish a premise and setting, introduce core characters, and convince spectators to come back next week (or, on a streaming service like The Shield’s current home, Hulu, to select “Next Episode”). ![]() “I don’t know that there was a pilot I can think of that had a specific incident that carried through to the finale the way that we were able to do with ours,” says series creator Shawn Ryan, who wrote the first and last episodes. Vic’s final fallouts with (and backstabs of) strike team members Shane (Walton Goggins) and Ronnie (David Rees Snell) Shane’s shocking murder-suicide Vic’s confrontation with a disgusted, accusing Claudette (CCH Pounder) an office-bound, bereft Vic’s silent, series-ending scene-all of those wrenching, Shakespearean moments and more traced their roots to the twist in the closing seconds of the series opener, which makes The Shield unusual, if not unique, among long-running series. Almost every meaningful moment in the last two episodes (including a finale that, like the legendarily well-concluded Breaking Bad’s, boasts the highest average IMDb user rating of any episode in the series) was set up by the Emmy-nominated pilot, which had aired six and a half years earlier-20 years ago this Saturday. What made the scene so special, aside from Michael Chiklis’s portrayal of a serial deceiver who’s forced to fess up to his (surviving) victims and to himself, is that the audience had been anticipating the moment when Mackey would come clean ever since the series started. After taking a twitchy minute to gather himself, he begins with the worst one: “I shot and killed detective Terry Crowley.” The duped, appalled ICE agent, who looks like she was expecting to send Mackey away with a finger wag and an instruction to say a few Our Fathers, asks, “You killed a police officer?” Mackey, both beaten and victorious, confirms, “I planned it. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in exchange for his help in apprehending a cartel enforcer, corrupt-cop protagonist Vic Mackey confesses his crimes into a tape recorder, unloading a long list of unpunished-and, as soon as he speaks, unpunishable-transgressions in a onetime, no-strings-attached absolution. Having wheedled an immunity deal out of U.S. In a sense, the series climaxes in a scene from the penultimate episode-not with a shootout, a car chase, or a dramatic interrogation, but with a man and a microphone in a nondescript room. TV drama doesn’t get more fraught, or more fulfilling, than the last two episodes of The Shield, the seven-season series about cops and criminals (and criminal cops) that aired on FX from 2002 to 2008.
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