TV Review: The Shield, season 2

TV #32 of 2022:

The Shield, season 2

The same bitterly funny anti-cop police drama, back for a follow-up round of continued corruption, complicity, and arrogant ignorance. I’d rate this season as a slight step down from the debut, but mainly only because as great as all that remains, the series has already staked out that particular thematic territory and proven itself there, and this second year doesn’t ever really escalate matters appreciably. In fact, with Chief Aceveda now explicitly agreeing to turn a blind eye to the strike team’s methods in exchange for their success boosting his political campaign, there’s less internal pressure on Vic and his crew, and so our antihero protagonist spends a lot of this run going up against a crime boss who seems written so heinously as to make it easier for us to root for his downfall at the hands of the crooked detective.

Luckily Claudette has started catching on to his extracurriculars as well, part of her steadily emerging as the effective conscience of this department. Don’t get me wrong: she’s still as compromised as the rest of them, hindered by her moralizing and her snap judgments and certainly willing to bend the rules or look the other way herself upon occasion. But with Dutch too often puffed-up on his own ego or fretting about his failures, the patrol officers like Danny and Julien unable to set their own biases and poor impulses aside, and the remainder of the ensemble basically criminals with a badge, she’s the closest thing we’ve got to a straightforward force for good. Having such a flawed would-be savior is very in line with the overall ethos of this program, and it makes her apparent career trajectory opposite Vic’s particularly exciting.

Nevertheless, a lot of that feels more like setup for future fireworks than a full story here and now, as do the Mackey marriage troubles, new arrival Tavon, and the robbery of the Armenian money train that closes out this stretch of the plot. These are minor structural critiques of a show I’m very much enjoying watching despite the preponderance of disturbing material, and hopefully a sign of pieces being moved into play for another strong presentation of anti-copaganda ahead.

[Content warning for gun violence, torture, gore, burning alive, drug abuse, pedophilia, rape, racism including slurs and lynching, homophobia including slurs and lynching, transphobia, domestic abuse, Islamophobia, fatphobia, and sexism.]

★★★★☆

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