Predators

Predators is a movie about a group of savage but highly evolved alien warriors who hunt people for sport by boring their targets with constant inactivity until they eventually stand unafraid before the monsters and their energy cannons just to spice things up a bit. Its most unexpected moment involves the sudden blaring of Little Richard's "Long Tall Sally" over the credits, the first thrilling bit since the opening. That this nevertheless stands as a marked improvement over the last two films to feature the fierce hunters is a source of deep depression.

The original Predator, the events of which are referenced at one point by, for some incredible strange reason, an IDF soldier, does not deserve the reputation it enjoys today, but it was still an airtight sci-fi thriller that maintained a steady suspense until it finally broke down into pure '80s carnage. Predators, previously one of Robert Rodriguez's endless list of upcoming projects that he ultimately turned over Nimród "Too Easy" Antal, attempts to follow this format, gathering a group of professional killers to fend off the attacks of genetically and technologically superior creatures. But it never achieves the same stupidity of the first film, and thus it never approaches that movie's simple brilliance.

The first 20 minutes or so of Predators, however, make up the most skillfully arranged section of any action film yet released this summer. Its opening few minutes alone masterfully drop us in the middle of a tense situation, showing Adrien Brody plummeting through the sky in its first shot as he stirs from unconsciousness and notices that he's 30,000 feet above a jungle with a chute that doesn't open. After fumbling with the chute for what seems like hours, he finally managed to open it, only to crash into the ground as the frame smash-cuts to the title card. So invigorating and pulse-pounding is this opening that you push out of mind the question of why Predators would go to the trouble of teleporting people onto their game preserve planet to hunt them, and then not bother to give them a decent parachute (and why does the parachute need to be activated electronically when a ripcord is far more efficient and trustworthy a system?).

Brody's character, a mercenary left unnamed until the end, discovers that others are falling from the sky with the same faulty chutes: there's an IDF sniper, Isabelle (Alice Braga); Nikolai (Oleg Taktarov), a Spetsnaz commando sporting a minigun; a Mexican cartel enforcer (Danny Trejo); an RUF officer (Mahershalalhashbaz Ali); a death row inmate (the always great Walton Goggins); a member of the Yakuza (Louis Ozawa Changchien); and Topher Grace. They are representative of the deadliest humanity has to offer, and Topher Grace is there too.

The initial distrust between these trained killers (and Topher Grace) creates a rich bedrock for the coming hunt, sowing seeds of individualism that will get people killed in short order. Even when the characters reach a hill and notice giant moons looming in the sky, finally figuring out the situation, these people do not band together closely to ensure their survival. The greatest enemy of any monster movie is always the infighting among survivors, and I hoped that Predators would build on this idea.

Sadly, Antal wastes this atmosphere, and Predators quickly devolves into a plodding hike across an alien jungle, broken up by the sporadic attack of the titular aliens, who bring creatures to this planet to make themselves better hunters, yet man cannot truly be called the most dangerous game if a being superior in every fashion is the one hunting. How difficult is it to kill a man when you have acute senses, active camouflage and energy weapons? But even the invisibility does not lend itself to an air of sustained tension.

Instead, characters sit around waiting for attacks to come, which could be suspenseful if they did not spend so much time anticipating raids that lack any hint of surprise and are themselves unexciting. The killers (and Topher Grace) spend so much time walking around yet the film does not even do us the courtesy of setting up numerous setpieces in which big action scenes can occur. Everything looks the same, save for a sequence inside an abandoned drilling station, and by the end of the first hour I decided I'd rather see the forced construction of action stunts than this endless meandering.

To their credit, Antal and Rodriguez, who stayed on the project as a producer, want to return the alien characters to their roots, scrubbing away memories of the cartoonish versions seen in the Alien vs. Predator films. But they've also sapped the menace out the Predators. Now they're just meant to be feared because of their size. They become better hunters with each season, refining techniques that work and adapting ones that fail, yet these hunters succumb easily to the slightest tricks. When the Yakuza uncovers evidence that the Predators' habit of bringing humans to the planet stretches back centuries, the revelation begs the question: how inept were these things hundreds of years ago? No wonder these dangerous people (and Topher Grace) react with minimal fear when confronted with a Predator; it's a small miracle one of the creatures doesn't shoot itself in the foot.

Thankfully, a few performances enliven the material. Brody's "Batman" voice amuses greatly, but he still has a mysterious gravitas to him that he's always had and I've never been able to explain or fully comprehend. But the most entertaining of the group is certainly Goggins, who plays the inmate with just the right mixture of arrogance, filth and underlying cowardice. Goggins' high forehead and his wild eyes make for great dark comedy in themselves, and the insights he gives to the true pig beneath the wisecracking comic relief actually makes the character even funnier, making Topher Grace's presence even more pointless. Best of all is Laurence Fishburne, who channels Colonel Kurtz as an Air Cavalry soldier who's managed to survive on the planet for 10 hunting seasons, but at the expense of sanity and humanity. He is every bit the one madman who brings destruction upon the survivors, and the filmmakers' failure to channel Fishburne's unsettling tics, whispers, and conversations with imaginary partners marks the greatest misstep in the movie.

Everything else has the feel of mediocrity. Antal appears to be less concerned with putting forward an auterial aesthetic and instead delivering a serviceable blockbuster, but this admirable intent leads to awkward execution, with so little standing out in the endless trek through the trees. So many moments intended to carry weight fall completely flat: Brody's character finally saying his name, a perfunctory speech about how men are the true monsters, the revelation of why Grace's character is in the movie at all (which will go down as one of the most stupefyingly useless and jejune twists in recent years), these bits thud into the ground like malfunctioning bombs, smacking into the mud with a great whomp.

To be perfectly honest, of the two warring space creatures who occasionally stoop to killing humans, I'd much rather see the reputation of the xenomorphs from the Alien saga repaired. Far more interesting creatures (and the subject of two certifiably great films), the xenomorphs still have potential, visible even in the final two installments of the series proper, both marred by studio tampering and conflicting visions. But I went into the theater hoping, in opposition to my frothing rage over 2010's '80s obsession, that the creative team could revive an entertaining piece of action cinema. Instead, I got one of those episodes of Lost where all anyone did was walk to a place that would be eventually important, and just like the show, Predators ends at the moment where it just might become intriguing. By that point, I'd already scrapped writing notes in favor of simply forming a checklist, ticking off the inevitable as, one-by-one, the Predators got to the killers. And Topher Grace.

The Shield — Season 3

Whatever issues weakly scuffed the veneer of the otherwise sterling quality of The Shield are swiftly and thunderously obliterated in its third season. Every show with narrative-based storytelling changes and expands in some way each season: Lost introduced and followed a new group of characters for each of the first few seasons, The Wire focused on a different part of the crumbling system to spotlight. But The Shield thus far has mostly kept the same cast and only added a few new characters. What it does instead, and does brilliantly, is increase not so much the scope but the pressure, using the bigger events of each progressive season to squish its characters just a bit more to see how far they can go before snapping.

With four seasons to go, I don't know how much more these people can take. The previous season ended with Julien's harassment reaching its boiling point and the Strike Team successfully pulling off their Money Train heist, albeit not without leaving some loose ends. Somehow, Aceveda won his election, only for his win to cause more problems as he must work even harder to maintain his image to ensure a rise through the political ranks before he even takes his position as councilman. Meanwhile, Danni Sofer's luck hit its nadir when Aceveda had to list her name among the cutbacks enforced by the chief in one last gambit to cripple Aceveda's campaign.

Each of these developments, even the more positive ones, tighten the screws, which makes it all the more difficult for these cops to maintain their sanity when everything -- almost simultaneously -- goes to shit.

The Strike Team's secrecy alienates its newest member, Tavon, eventually leading to a confrontation between him and the racist Shane that only compounds the strain placed upon the four standing members of the team as those with any connection to the Money Train heist start showing up without their feet. The Strike Team, once an airtight entity whose members covered for each other no matter how hairy the situation, begins to pull apart at the seams as the temptation to touch the cash weighs on the minds of underpaid officers who face mounting financial need and any possible discrepancy leads to paranoid looks and the occasional statement of suspicion.

Each of the members reacts in his own way. Ronnie, having suffered at the hands of Armadillo before the heist, has steeled into a silent and calculating professional, the only one of the team who can reasonably exist outside of suspicion and often follows up on the others. Vic, who must contend not only with Matthew's autism but now Megan's, is in deep enough trouble already before forcing out the excellent developmental therapist helping Matthew when he discovers that Owen is dating Corinne. Vic manages to bounce the guy, only for his satisfaction to be undercut by the realization that the agency has a finite number of therapists and Owen's departure places a red flag on Matthew's profile just as he begins to regress and needs treatment more than ever.

And if Vic is in trouble, then Shane must be about to dive into an even larger bed of manure, which he does when he meets Mara (Michele Hicks). Mara, initially presented as a thorn in Vic's side and a nagging wedge driven between the questionably sexual dynamics of the friendship, a facet of the show that is prodded more this season but stopped just short of moving into clichéd territory. However, Ryan and co. quickly mold Mara into a strong foil for Shane, someone just as rash but also capable of more maturity and civility. Even Shane cannot understand why exactly she stays with him; "She's the first one that's been better than me," he quietly tells Vic when Mackey tests to see whether his buddy will leave this lady. Mara eventually involves herself in the Money Train issue without realizing it, causing a rapid advancement in her character even as it further complicates the existing characters.

The interplay between Mara and Shane, and the effect of Mara's snooping on the Strike Team dynamic, brings to the fore the key theme of the season: trust and lies. Vic tries to woo a K-9 officer named Lauren Riley, only for her boyfriend to find out and attempt to control her life. Danni manages to get back in at the precinct, but only on the condition that she report any and all suspicious behavior to Aceveda. Surprisingly, the officer Danni must report the most is Julien, who finally earns the respect of his other officers only to start exhibiting aggressive behavior as he fights his own sexuality. With Danni back to being a more emotionally constant figure, we can see just how far Julien has slipped because of his inability to be honest with himself.

Some of the twists and turns are downright horrific. Dutch takes the lead on a serial rapist case that forces yet another turn of character when the perpetrator is caught and interrogated. Aceveda, stuck with all the pressures of continuing to run the precinct while preparing for office, gets cornered without backup in a raid and falls victim to a sexual predator, and the experience haunts the captain for the rest of the season. His refusal to tell anyone, out of shame and fear of his public image, alienates him even further from the officers he's about to leave and opens a rift between him and his wife. Aceveda grooms Claudette to replace him as captain, but her attempts to crack down on the Strike Team with her new authority blind her to other decisions. Claudette botches the handling of an undercover case by the Decoy Squad, a group of heavy-undercover officers borrowed from another precinct, and the mistake threatens her advancement and forces her to regain the trust of the squad. Yet she remains a competent and moral force within The Barn, and when she uncovers clues that could lead to the retrials of hundreds of convicts, she risks her career by losing the confidence of every officer in the precinct as well as the politicians.

Racial identity also plays a bigger role in this season. The lynching of a black teenager who painted graffiti so beautiful even the cops left it alone sets off a conflict between black and Latino gangs, and the Korean community, even its legitimate and prominent members, close in and keep out the police when one young man shoots and kills a child. Of course, the specter of the Armenians casts a pall over the Strike Team, and every mutilated immigrant corpse makes them wonder what will happen if the trail ever leads back to them. Even Claudette's flirtation with power owes more to her skin tone than her professionalism; as we can plainly see late in the season, it's not her honesty and ethical code that Aceveda admires.

The third season of The Shield introduces a number of nauseating events that at times made me question whether I needed to see some of it. It is not inherently incisive to show the ugly side of society when one merely does it to rub the audience's face in exaggerated horror; after all, one would hardly point to something like the Saw franchise as truly subversive just because it pushes the bounds of taste. Yet Shawn Ryan has such a strong hold over the material, using these events to direct the characters to a state of confusion and despair that, despite the distinction of the disparate incidents (and the manner with which nearly everyone hides the problem affecting him or her from others), feels shared and more powerful because of it. Where these characters had been sympathetic without downplaying their flaws, now they flirt with a monstrosity beyond their most heinous acts previously shown even as these characters convey so much more loneliness and panic that, for the first time, you start to root for more than one or two of them. As inhuman as so many of them are, you'd have to be the devil himself not to take pity when the universe launches a war on these people and gives no quarter. The fate of the Money Train cash cannot even be called ironic, not only because it comes too far out of left field but because irony implies that fate cares enough to take stock of a situation before it ruins someone; the world in which these characters live just crushes like the spiked walls of an old adventure movie, and you can't be entirely certain when the season ends whether the walls were stopped or if they merely meshed together, splaying all those caught between them.

The Shield — Season 2

The Shield established itself as one of the most unique cop dramas to hit television even faster than The Wire, with its initially confusing structure and multilayering, hit its stride. Despite softening antihero Vic Mackey with the pressure of an autistic son, a desire to help a prostitute informant clean up and raise her own child and a commitment to clean up the streets of a crime-ravaged district, creator Shawn Ryan and his team of writers never forgave Mackey for his brutality. They never presented his corruption, up to an including killing fellow cops who might rat him out, as a justifiable course of action regardless of the horror of the Farmington District's crimes, and while no officer working at "The Barn" has completely clean hands, those who recognized Vic's dangerous anomie were never marginalized as annoying bureaucratic pissants. From the start, The Shield examined all those tough-guy, loose-cannon cop tropes with more clarity, wit and maturity than any film that comes to mind.

The first season finale managed to keep the show grounded even as it dealt with a full-scale riot in the Farmington District, and it set up new developments in Vic's personal life that gave the unstoppable brute pause. Season two opens with the detective still searching for his wife and children after Corinne caves from the stress of living with her husband and drives a wedge in their marriage that lasts through the season and forces Vic to contemplate the price of living his personal life as he does his professional one.

Not that work also doesn't prove difficult, as the effectiveness of the Strike Team cannot save them from investigation by Internal Affairs and a civilian auditor who initially seeks to expose the glaring flaws of Aceveda's precinct before being so consumed by The Barn's rampant corruption that she cannot afford to expose it without destroying the district's entire infrastructure (such as it is).

The auditor's appearance marks the elevation of the political side of law enforcement, as Capt. Aceveda considers a run for a council seat and the chief of police worms through the precinct's issues, attempting to dump responsibility for all of the corruption charges leveled against The Barn upon Aceveda's shoulders while taking credit for the precinct's impressive statistics regarding crime rates. No one can argue with the Strike Team's effectiveness, and it's amusing to watch Aceveda, Vic's nemesis, argue those figures to the chief; their back-and-forth throughout the season proves to be a captivating battle of wits as Bankston tries to force Aceveda into spending more time campaigning on a doomed platform than he does cleaning up Farmington, thus sending Aceveda into oblivion while the captain routinely matches and even outmaneuvers the chief at times.

But all roads lead to Vic. Neither the captain nor the chief has any affection for the detective or his methods, yet both need Vic's results to pin to their own resumés. Somehow, however, Vic manages to delve even deeper into illicit methods and questionable allies, not blurring the thin blue line but stomping all over it and crossing freely between territories when it suits him. His usual practice of looking the other way for dealers and hookers who cooperate takes a turn when his main snitch starts putting out tainted heroin and Vic gets a great deal of blood (and foamed spittle) on his hands.

This situation is made worse when a ruthless new drug tyrant, Armadillo, enters Farmington and begins to horrifically assert authority by placing competitors and incompetent members of his own organization in gasoline-soaked tires and lighting them ablaze. Armadillo becomes a more considerable enemy for Vic and his Strike Team to face, a sadist who forces the audience to truly question if they accept Vic's methods against such a terrifying criminal. Armadillo is a rapist, a torturer and a murderer, and even a liberal viewer wouldn't mind seeing him come to some sort of grisly demise.

Yet Ryan still doesn't let Mackey off the hook. Not only are the methods the Strike Team take even more outrageous and unforgivable than when they were roughing up gangbangers practically for fun, Ryan introduces the second major plotline of season: the Strike Team's plan to rip off the Armenian mob. With the civilian auditor knocking around The Barn and Armadillo openly declaring hits on Mackey's team, Vic makes the insane decision to knock off a money exchange that would give the Strike Team enough cash to retire in luxury, provided they could outwit investigation by the authorities and by vengeful Armenian mob bosses.

The strain takes its toll on Vic, who also attempts to put his private life back together after testing Corinne's patience one too many times. With lingering fears of his old friend Gilroy returning and new concerns over danger from Armadillo's Mexican gang and the Armenians, Vic makes matters worse by placing Corinne under constant surveillance without ever telling her that she may be in jeopardy. The truth can only stay covered up for so long, though, and Vic's secrecy only further damages the relationship. Impressively, Ryan and co. believably weave together this private plotline with the arching cases of the season, painting a more complex portrait of the cop and giving his more belligerent actions an emotional anchor.

To watch The Shield is to be reminded of the limitless potential of television when a program is blessed with strong writing. I apologize for this pullquote-esque blanket praise, but I've had a rough TV season this spring. I always end up missing episodes of my favorite shows after the winter hiatus, and TV has become so (to its immense benefit) plot-driven now that even comedies like Community and The Office require dedicated viewing. So, I kept missing episodes until I decided to wait for DVDs, leaving me only to watch the final season of Lost as it airs, which has been such a trying exercise that I'm going to have to take a month off after it ends to review it just so I don't end up smashing my new laptop in inchoate rage. That show has spiraled so far out of control in its endgame that one could spend hours with puns about being lost or adrift or out to sea as characters break whatever loose logic had been established for them and plots move without direction as writers scramble to make sense out of the series' countless loose ends.

Returning to the Farmington District, I see television drama as it should be: dramatic and compelling not because of left-field plot twists thrown at the audience to distract from weak storytelling but a concrete emphasis on character and a steady hand. Ryan has a clear head for cop jargon and office politics, giving the surreality of many of the cases to land on desks in The Barn a bedrock of realism to provide a solid footing. As such, its exaggerated elements do not compromise the show's relation to the real crime problem sweeping our cities, and Vic becomes an increasingly three-dimensional character. Corinne's crackdown on her husband's behavior prevents him from seeing his children, yet we know her actions are justified and so do the writers. Vic does as well, and for the first time he evaluates his methods and tries to change his personal life by altering his professional conduct, only to find himself unable to fully break from his methods. That layering of internal and external forces, far from exclusive to Vic, gives The Shield a layering no less complex and revealing than The Wire's.

Consider how Ryan and co. flesh out the other characters through the cases and the oddball bit players who filter in and out of The Barn. Dutch, seen before and after as a smarmy know-it-all, not only gets knocked down a peg or two but demonstrates a heretofore-unseen depth when he must try and force a confession out of a man suspected of maiming and killing women. The episode's plot may be predictable, complete with a final twist you'll surely spot, but it gives us a splendid battle of wits between Dutch and someone who also knows his way around psychological warfare. The intensity of their war of words and Dutch's ability to absorb the many blows this guy lands changes not only the audience's opinion of the detective but the rest of the Barn's, and it's a development that is not forgotten once the credits roll and the next episode starts. Julien, attempting to "rehabilitate" himself from homosexuality, enters into a relationship with a woman but begins to suffer severe harassment when his secret gets out, while Danni endures a string of bad luck that begins when she shoots and kills an Arab man brandishing a gun and incurs his wife's wrath. These are all plot details, but each brings out a different side to the characters and explores existing traits more deeply, from Danni's slow breakdown to Claudette's increasingly assertive call for accountability as Aceveda slips into a more political frame of mind that reveals her leadership capacity.

As with the last season, the only discernible flaws are minor ones. The occasionally iffy aesthetic can be chalked up to TV budgeting and the need for more street-friendly cameras over fancy and bulky film stock. In terms of the storytelling, Aceveda's actual campaign receives little attention, focusing more on how he begins to neglect his police work without following him on the trail. This approach is clever, but it does not sufficiently add tension to the captain's run and never explains how or why he makes gains and losses in the polls. Also, a flashback episode placed late in the season seeks to take stock of the lost and altered characters by showing The Barn as it was started, but the flashbacks don't reveal much other than how a few partnerships started and the mixture of projected innocence and almost overt corruption that continue to swirl around the precinct.

However, the second season so skillfully expands upon the scope of its plot, the depth of its characters, the and the sharpness of its wit and humor (including one hilarious interlude in which Aceveda spends a day out on the streets in cop blues and ends up mistakenly stealing a kid's bike) that a single unnecessary episode cannot mar its considerable successes. The cast handles the new advancements in their characters without missing a beat, from Chiklis' sympathetic reflection rubbing against his repulsive exterior to Jay Karnes turning Dutch from a socially inept jackass into part of the show's moral center, the lighter side of Claudette's firmness. (I continue to be amazed by Walton Goggins, who plays Shane as someone, if possible, even more repugnant than Vic even as he also has his moments of humanity.) I grew up on cop dramas that quickly grew stale, but programs like The Wire and The Shield reveal just how gripping police drama can be when in the hands of artists, and The Shield's second season cements it as one of the finest programs of the modern era, and already I am lamenting that I only have five more seasons to watch.

The Shield — Season 1

"Good cop and bad cop left for the day. I'm a different kind of cop." - Detective Vic Mackey

Taken out of context, this quote, said at the end of the pilot episode of Shawn Ryan's cop drama The Shield, might strike one as the sort of eye-rolling "rough justice" cop show that's been a part of the pop culture lexicon since Clint Eastwood roamed the streets of San Francisco asking punks how lucky they felt. Instead, it's the perfect summation of the series' originality and brilliance: right after he says these words, Vic Mackey removes all doubt that he's just another "loose cannon cop who doesn't play by the rules" and instead establishes himself as a monster whose willingness to fabricate, intimidate, steal, beat and murder not in the name of rough justice but his own interests edges him away from the likes of Dirty Harry and closer to Tony Soprano.


Mackey (Michael Chiklis) heads a group of hand-picked police officers he calls the Strike Team. They work in L.A.'s ultraviolent Farmington District, where politicians and top police brass -- there never seems to be a clear distinction between the two, does there? -- are so desperate to see the crime rates go down that the precinct turns its back on Mackey and the considerable results he's having on crime levels, preferring to simply run away to avoid even the slightest chance of looking the gift horse in its mouth. Only two officers have the tenacity -- and the courage, judging from the adoration Vic receives from the rest of the precinct -- to question Mackey's tactic: rival detective Holland "Dutch" Wagenbach (Jay Karnes), a goody two-shoes skilled in his psychological reading and manipulation of suspects in the interrogation room, and David Aceveda (Benito Martinez), captain of the precinct and a clear political hopeful. He's in charge of the station, but Vic answers to those even higher up on the food chain, and they both know it.

Whatever clichés the pilot evokes in its display of macho bravado crumble quickly in the face of brutal storytelling: one of the members of the Strike Team approaches Aceveda throughout the episode concerning Mackey's behavior and gives the captain a much-needed informant, but Mackey catches wind of the betrayal and kills his fellow cop during a particularly vicious raid. Placing this action at the end of the pilot not only guarantees a certain amount of interest in continuing the series -- hey, hook 'em however you can -- but draws a line in the sand demarcating the series from other loose-cannon cop shows. The murder reveals how far Vic will go in the name of self-preservation, yet it never once manages to overshadow his actions throughout the rest of the season.

For youngsters like me, Mackey more or less is Michael Chiklis, but his performance must have shocked audiences back when the show premiered in 2002: Chiklis hit the scene back in '89 as the lead in the John Belushi biopic Wired, a film so reviled that Chiklis later apologized to Belushi's brother Jim (I have not seen it, but anything that requires an apology delivered to Jim Belushi cannot possibly enrich me spiritually) and found fame in another cop program, The Commish. Andy Griffith by way of NYPD Blue, The Commish featured Chiklis as the pudgy, affable police commissioner, who solved crimes as much with homespun aphorisms and Life Lessons as serious police work. Tony Spall is the sort of person Vic Mackey would insult for being a fat desk jockey, with a gay slur or two thrown in for good measure. Mackey is a vision of fascist machismo: bald, tanned and buff, with eyes that bulge from his head when he's angry (so, always) and burn with a cold blue flame. Chiklis went from looking like a fat Keith Sutherland to Bruce Willis on crank.

Naturally, such a forceful character requires a supporting cast of equally distinctive oddballs and psychopaths, and the cops who populate "The Barn" (a reconverted church used as the headquarters of the experimental division) offer a bounty of unique and immediately differentiating traits that allow us to acclimate quickly to these characters without suffering the extended tedium of "better know a character" introductions (it also makes for an easier time matching names to faces than the more realistic Wire, which can easily throw new viewers until they manage to fully hop on-board sometime halfway through the first season). Flanking Mackey on the Strike Team are Detectives Shane Vendrell (the always great Walton Goggins), a good ol' boy who mixes Vic's sadism with "yee-haw!" enthusiasm, and Curtis "Lem" Lemansky (Kenny Johnson), about as fratboyish as Shane but the only member of the trio with a readily identifiable conscience. Their brand of corrupt crime-solving rubs up against the traditional detection of the preppy, smarmy Wagenbach and the deadpan Claudette Wyms (CCH Pounder), arguably the only cop in the whole damn place who's both competent and ethical. Rounding out the main cast are two bobbies on the beat, Officers Danielle "Danny" Sofer (Catherine Dent, who's given the most emotional range of the characters) and Julien Lowe (Michael Jace), a closeted homosexual who occasionally lashes out violently at criminals due to the pressure and self-loathing his ultra-religious upbringing and the rampant homophobia of the police force place upon him.

Compared to The Wire -- which is frankly the only crime drama that provides a worthy counterpoint to this series -- The Shield operates in a hyperrealistic, insane world. It's every bit as gritty as David Simon's masterpiece, but all the little details of Ryan's show drift just left of reality. Gallows humor abounds, but some scenarios dip into outright absurdity, such as the Strike Team installing an illegal wiretap to monitor a group of Armenians, only to realize in retrospect that the Armenians would speak their own language in private. Some of the crimes play like CSI episodes after a few seasons when the well's run dry, albeit presented as the comic situations they are (one episode revolves around a man who keeps a collection of his sperm on ice in the hopes of spreading his seed and ensuring his "survival"). Some jokes run across more than one episode, such as an extended spat between a cuckold, a lover and the woman who continues to lead both on, much to the chagrin of Lowe and Sofer, who have to put up with this fatuous back-and-forth on three separate occasions.

Balancing the skewed humor of these scenarios is the unremitting darkness of its macabre exaggeration of urban decomposition and putrefaction. Vic and co. eke information out of junkies by providing hits to those who still have needles sticking out of their veins. For all the moral outrage cops like Aceveda and Wagenbach conjure up for Mackey's tactics, everyone displays a willingness to bend rules to get what they want: Aceveda pushes officers to rat on Vic, even after he gives intimidating speeches on how informants are treated by other cops, while Wagenbach uses his psychoanalytical knowledge to extract information from suspects that lacks the physical damage of Vic's "methods" but often takes a toll mentally. The Farmington District constantly simmers under the heat of numerous Internal Affairs investigations, grandstanding against the corruption from the politicians who benefit copiously from the lowered crime numbers and outraged citizens who object to the obscene brutality of the police force as well as a restructuring of the patrol system that places almost every officer in more dangerous areas, leaving calmer sectors almost completely undefended when something does go wrong there.

It's a madcap grotesquerie, the perfect backdrop for Mackey, who effortlessly dominates this world like a Herzog protagonist. At no time can any reasonable human being view him as a hero, but Ryan and the other writers ask us to consider what might drive a police officer to such an extreme method of pacification. Furthermore, they add layers to Mackey to mold him into something more than a terrible thug, including the discovery of his young son's autism and an odd (and oddly touching) relationship with a crack whore named Connie (who strikes me at this early venture as The Shield's equivalent of Bubbles) into whom he channels whatever remains of his humanity to clean her up to raise her son. These tangential bits of minutiae help draw you into this world and place actions into context without forgiving characters of their sins.

As with The Wire, The Shield quickly establishes itself as a piece of innovative programming, albeit with a few flaws you can see it rapidly outpacing even in the first season. The use of sudden bursts of heavy metal for action shots grows wearisome, the ill-fitting, generic de-tuned guitars and screamed vocals trying to inject life into scenes that already pack a visceral punch and contain an element of horror that the music undercuts in favor of adrenaline-pumping rawk. Also, some of the earlier episodes are too damn out-there for their own good, especially the third and fourth episodes -- why, why, oh why would a secretive strike team created to crack down hard on serious crime place themselves in the middle of a rapper feud or hold up a basketball player without cause; the latter reveals the pettier side of Vic's corruption, as he locks up the player to ensure he wins a bet on the upcoming game and, on an even simpler level, just wants the Lakers to win, but it's too bizarre a distraction so early in the series. But these are minor quibbles when stacked against the sick allure of the rest of the season: the writers sew tiny threads through the first season, never crafting an overarching arc but laying the foundations for recurring subplots (the biggest concerning Vic's protected dealer and informant who constantly tests Mackey's limited patience) and even introducing a large-scale villain at the end whose schemes recall those of Noah Cross in Chinatown, though with a different course of action. Even if it contains a few problems that require ironing out, The Shield makes an unbelievably strong case for greatness in only 13 episodes. Suddenly, blind-buying the whole damn show doesn't seem like such a stupid investment.