Overall the Shield was a great series, but a lot of series even that are great have annoying things about them (Battlestar Galactica is another)... where I don't really want to re-watch them. Parts of the Shield got to be very drawn out, and some contrived as well, it doesn't have as good an aftertaste. Glenn Close did great.
The title character did great too, where it's hard to believe it's the same actor as 'The Commish', a light-hearted network character.
(And I thought the theme song was great for the show - it really fit the chaos. Hard to think of a better song.)
Might be a similar change as when Patrick McGoohan had enough of the simplistic 'Secret Agent Man' and made 'The Prisoner'.
I've long had an opinion that tv cop shows are a measure of society's evolution on somewhat more sophisticated entertainment.
Earlier we had squeaky clean cop shows; when Dragnet and its spin-off Adam-12 aired, they were considered sort of 'gritty' for including 'real problems' from hippies to an alcoholic police officer and more; after that, Barney Miller added some 'current topics', and then 'Hill Street Blues' was famous for being 'gritty'., sort of revolutionary at the time.
After that, NYPD Blue was more 'gritty'. Then there were were a series of sort of 'realistic' tv show plots on series from Law & Order-theme series and CSI's.
Then came 'The Shield', breaking some new ground with an anti-hero, and 'The Wire' on HBO, breaking its own new ground (forget about 'The Sopranos', not a cop show).
Then we've moved to more 'gritty shows', trying to recall the name of one example... it got cancelled and later renewed.
Even 'The Mentalist' which is sort of light-hearted has dealt with some 'gritty' topics, a squeaky detecticve who had what I thought was a realistic fling with a junkie informant moving her into his house secretly, to the dark side of the star dealing with a serial killer, killing the wrong person in revenge and lying in court about it, so a main cast character having to kill her own fiancee FBI agent.
Each one of these evolutions in 'gritty' cop shows seems to pass up the previous generation, where it'd be hard to see the show being made in more 'naive' times.
Britain sort of paralleled this, with a show like 'Cracker' having an alcoholic, womanizing, chain-smoking bad father for an anti-hero and some dark plots.
Though to be fair, there were some 'gritty' movie back in the 30's to 50's as well, the 'Film Noire' for example, and some dealing with things like a young woman whored out by her alcoholic father for poker credits from other players at a regular game at his house. Heck, see 'M' from the 1920's for perhaps the most memorable child serial killer movie I've seen.
Westerns are somewhat similar - decades of simple stories (literally with white and black hats), to some anti-hero elements introduced as soon as the 50's with "Have Gun, Will Travel" but pretty naive stuff mostly with tv shows like 'Bonanza' and 'The Big Valley', later somewhat darker with 'spaghetti westerns', but later westerns evolved into 'grittier', finally making 'The Unforgiven', and 'Deadwood'. Because highly gritty westerns are a bit of a harsh combination, westerns have fallen from favor.
Cop shows might have the same risk, there's not a lot of room left after cops' drug addictions, torture, assassination, rogue units, corruption have become cliche.
It's a little like how 24 jumped the shark on conspiracies.
So shows seem to turn to darker heroes than in westerns or cop shows. Recall Tony Soprano killing a guy while with his daughter to visit a school or killing the boy she loved who he'd promised to protect to the boy's father. Or Dexter, or Breaking Bad. Who knows the next evolution? Many of the shows I mentioned that now seem innocent and dated seemed 'gritty' when aired.
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