INTENSE? YOU WANT INTENSE? THEN WATCH 'THE SHIELD'

New Season Opener Is Violent, Brilliant

Last year at this time, I described the pilot for The Shield as more
intense than the late, great NBC drama Homicide: Life on the Street, saying
that's about as intense as you want your cop dramas to get.

The Shield returns for the start of its second season tonight, and the
news is that it has ratcheted the intensity even higher. In fact, the
two-episode story arc that starts tonight on cable channel FX is more
violent, visceral, brilliant, troubling and in-your-face than the
acclaimed episode of HBO's The Sopranos this year that featured Tony
Soprano (James Gandolfini) killing Ralph Cifaretto (Joe Pantoliano) in
a bloody ballet of a kitchen fight and then beheading of the corpse.

The producers understand that urban violence in all its ugliness is
crucial to their drama about a cop as hero whose moral ambiguity
shatters a black-and-white model of good and bad that has shaped
police shows on television since the debut of Dragnet some 50 years
ago. They go right to the violence at the start of tonight's episode:
gasoline-soaked automobile tires are placed over the bodies of two
young men, who are then burned alive.

The scene is incredibly graphic. The camera lingers on the executioner
as he holds his lighter in the first victim's face before striking the
flint. We see it all, starting with the flame spreading across the
tire and then onto the victim. The camera pulls back to show us a ball
of fire with legs moving crazily from side to side as the agonized
screams mount.

And the opening credits have not yet even finished
playing.

The man with the lighter, Armando "Armadillo" Quintero (Danny Pino),
is at the center of tonight's story as a drug dealer who moves up from
Tijuana with the idea of uniting two Latino gangs in Los Angeles'
gritty Farmington District and taking over the drug business there.
The only problem with the plan is that much of the drug business in
Farmington is controlled by Detective Vic Mackey (Michael Chiklis) and
the elite squad he leads. It's obvious two beats into the hour that
Mackey and Quintero are going to war, and they are two bad cowboys.

As complicated as The Shield can get in terms of ethics, the producers
work a pretty simple moral mathematics: Yes, Mac-key's a corrupt and
bad cop, but the people he is fighting are monsters capable of the
kind of evil about which most civilians don't even want to know. You
don't maintain societal order in the face of that by playing nice. The
writers, producers and directors are among the best in television,
good enough to make you feel positively righteous in rooting for
Mackey to hold the thin, blue line against the forces of darkness.

If the sadistic delight Quintero exhibits during tonight's opening
with the tire "necklaces" doesn't justify the methods Mackey uses to
try to take him down, what the sociopath does to two young female
victims probably will. After he rapes the two, Quintero and his gang
tattoo a dove on their faces to brand them as his.

Thankfully, neither assault is shown.

Nevertheless, hearing a teen-age victim recount how she was raped and
tattooed will rattle you. Later, when you see Quintero's handiwork on
the face of a 10-year-old girl, it will break your heart.

Next week's episode ends with Mackey and Quintero in hand-to-hand
combat in a kitchen just like Tony and Ralph on The Sopranos. There's
also a stove with a red hot burner, and Mackey in a murderous rage
trying to brand Quintero's face.

This is powerful and challenging stuff. It is also exceptional
television.

As a viewer, the question you have to ask yourself is whether it is
for you. If you are a parent, you also have to decide whether it is
for your children. I don't think it is for everyone, certainly not
small children.

But, as a critic who has wrestled with this issue for more than 20
years, I believe such violence has a place on television. And that
place is on cable, where you have to go out of your way and pay extra
money to bring it into your living room.

Television has become too large a part of the process through which we
as a society construct our notion of social reality for us to have
dramas that offer only a sanitized, fantasy notion of America.
Violence is at the core of the American experience from the revolution
in colonial times to the frontier wars of the 19th century and urban
riots of the 20th. Keeping it off of television altogether won't make
us a better people, just a more delusional one.