TV Review: The Shield, season 6

TV #26 of 2023:

The Shield, season 6

This season of The Shield is a bit scattered compared to the ones before it. It’s initially exciting to see that Forest Whitaker is sticking around past his initial one-year-arc, given how thrilling the Kavanaugh investigation of Mackey has been, but then after a couple episodes, he’s abruptly out of the picture. Instead it seems like most of this run will be about the tightening noose of Vic getting closer to finding out what really happened to his friend in the previous finale — but then he learns that information halfway through and the story again has to reorient. These shifts keep the audience on our toes, and they wouldn’t necessarily be a problem if they were in service to some greater narrative purpose taking shape in their wake. But here, too much of it just feels like random noise.

It doesn’t help that a few of the characters are making choices that don’t register as particularly well-motivated, from Shane’s sudden partnership with the Armenians to Dutch’s weird escalating feud with Billings. Strike team newcomer Kevin Hiatt is especially egregious in this regard, his characterization seemingly mutating by the week to serve the writers’ current needs. And the background politics are murkier than usual too, with a lot of exposition about a nebulous Mexican / Salvadoran cartel war that seldom hits home for the cast in any meaningful ways. In prior dealings with the various gangland factions, we’ve gotten more specific personalities for antagonists, but now that element largely reads as an afterthought of context for Vic and Shane’s extralegal maneuvering.

With that being said, this series is generally competent enough that an off-year is still fun to watch. It’s great to finally get to see the new captain’s style of leadership, and plenty of scenes have that signature twisted Shield humor to them, along with the ever-present critiques both implicit and explicit that policing is an inherently flawed arrangement that breeds corruption and rarely serves the community’s true interests in the long run. The ticking-clock of Mackey’s impending forced retirement adds some good tension and desperate scrabbling, which is the mode his antihero protagonist tends to work best in. But overall I would call this outing a weaker effort.

[Content warning for gun violence, torture, sexual assault, racism, and gore.]

★★★☆☆

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