TV Review: The Shield, season 3

TV #47 of 2022:

The Shield, season 3

On some level, this season feels like it’s walking back many of the show’s recent plot developments, which is never a welcome sign. Aceveda has decided he’s not stepping down as precinct captain yet after all, Danny gets rehired and repartnered with Julien, Tavon is incapacitated and out of the rest of the strike team’s hair for much of the year, and so on. Even some complications that are now introduced, like the team having to report to Claudette and share their private office with an undercover decoy squad, are eventually undone again, leaving an overall feeling of regression to the status quo. As a fan attracted to TV dramas like this due to their inherent serialization, I’m mildly frustrated to see such thorough backsliding.

On the other hand, some fresh elements seem to be sticking around, like Shane’s new love interest Mara and the steadily weakening trust among our gang of outlaw officers. And I suppose that thematically, this Sisyphean inertia is somewhat apt. After all, the emerging ethos of the series is basically that no amount of traditional policing — or of the illegal variation embodied by Vic — can ever significantly curb the urban crime rate. We’ve also now got a whole season-long plot about how hard it is for the antihero and his crew to actually spend those millions of dollars that they robbed from the Armenian mafia in the previous finale. This should be their moment of triumph, but the suspicions of coworkers, the foresight of the US Treasury Department to inject marked bills into the money laundering operation, and the gangsters butchering their way across the city for answers cut against them at every turn. It’s enough to give Lem an ulcer, and it’s the sort of logistical headache that would make Breaking Bad such a hit a few years later on. You can’t just nab a fortune and ride off into the sunset, and there are great stories to be told in the frantic machinations of criminals trying to protect their ill-gotten gains.

Plus, even with the characters (and The Shield at large) chasing their tails a bit, this continues to be riveting television on an episode-by-episode basis. The humor is consistently dark and twisted, and the grimy storylines put everyone through the wringer. There are children raped and murdered, and there are elders raped and murdered, and in one horrifyingly memorable hour, there’s a main character who gets overpowered by a suspect and forced to fellate him at gunpoint. As an institution, the cops are as ineffectual as ever at stemming any of this; at best they can only clean up a situation after too many people have already been hurt, and their interventions generally make matters worse instead. Even the nominal good guys are murderers and enablers, and there are no effective safeguards in place to prevent abuses of the badge. I’ve said it before and I imagine I’ll say it again, but this is anti-copaganda through and through. It’s often uncomfortable as a viewing experience, but it’s in many ways a more honest look at law enforcement than nearly any other story out there.

So I remain hooked on seeing how the Farmington saga plays out, despite feeling that structurally, this is probably the weakest run of it yet.

[Content warning for domestic abuse, animal abuse, police brutality, gun violence, gore, racism including lynching, homophobia, ableism, drug abuse, suicide, and torture.]

★★★★☆

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