The Shield Is Still the Ultimate 'Previously On' TV drama

Almost every episode of The Shield begins the same way, with a quick look at what previously happened on The Shield. This was neither new nor uncommon for TV in the early 2000s, when Shawn Ryan’s gritty Los Angeles cop drama premiered on FX. If you watched ’90s network hits like ER or The X-Files, you were well-acquainted with recap sequences, those tightly edited opening montages designed to jog the audience’s memory of past plot points. 

But on The Shield, such reminders were less a courtesy than a necessity. Skip the opening 60 seconds of this show and you risked feeling lost over the 40 minutes that followed, because there was a good chance they would involve something you had forgotten about, something even the characters had filed away as yesterday’s news. 

The Shield, which ran for seven consistently tense, morally complex seasons, was constantly calling back to past episodes. Like, way back. Often, the show wasn’t merely reminding viewers what happened last week. It was reminding them what happened last year or several years prior. The sheer chronological scope of those introductory recaps, which continued to include shots or lines of dialogue from the start of the series, betrayed the progressive nature of the plotting. The Shield was playing a very long game, slowly escalating conflicts it planted much earlier, always setting things up and paying them off.

Like The Sopranos, another addictive portrait of a magnetic, murderous anti-hero, The Shield exemplified a booming revolution in small-screen drama — that turn-of-the-century turn away from chiefly episodic storytelling and towards the serialization that would come to define so much “prestige TV.” Of course, just as plenty of ’90s cop shows had elements of long-form storytelling, The Shield wasn’t totally disinterested in the short-form variety: The officers of The Barn, an experimental wing of the LAPD operating without enough oversight, solved their fair share of cases of the week. But as the show progressed, Ryan and his writers increasingly embraced television’s capacity to tell one large story over an extended period. They took the traditional multi-episode arc to a new extreme, daring to create an arc that extended across every episode.

By now, it’s widely understood that the series teed up that arc in its opening hour, which shockingly concludes with dirty detective Vic Mackey (Michael Chiklis) shooting and killing a member of his own strike team, Terry Crowley (Reed Diamond), who he knows is working with internal affairs to expose him. This pilot episode is still regarded as one of the all-time great series premieres, and for good reason: More than just establishing the high stakes of everything to come, it confounds a viewer’s expectations of rooting interest. The courageous, scrupulous whistleblower — the Serpico figure we expect to continue following — is dead. His killer, as it turns out, is the protagonist of the series.

That mic-drop of a murder keeps showing up in the recaps years down the line, as if anyone watching from home could possibly forget it. By the end of the show, we’ve probably seen Crowley take the bullet to the face a dozen or more times. “Previously on” becomes like a tell-tale heart, a murmur of guilt pumping away beneath the action. Any time we might be tempted to fall under Vic’s sway — to see some logic in his ruthless realpolitik perspective on serving and protecting, to be seduced by Chiklis’ undeniably charismatic performance — a clip from the pilot’s closing scene puts his actions into context once more. Over and over again, The Shield reminds us who Vic Mackey is, and dares us to keep watching him wiggle free of justice.

Few shows before or since have been more obsessed with cause and effect, action and reaction. One thing always leads to another on The Shield. The second half of the second season revolves around Mackey and his boys plotting to rip off a so-called money train run by the Armenian mob, the strike team’s most ambitious transgression yet. It’s a decision that will come to haunt all involved, starting with a third season that’s all about the crooked cops trying to cover their asses (and which leads to the temporary dissolution of the strike team). A whole four seasons later, the chickens are still coming home to roost, as the Armenians discover what viewers have known for years. Here, especially, those opening recaps had to come in handy.

The sense that we’re watching a line of dominos fall in slow motion extends to individual arcs, too. Barn captain David Aceveda (Benito Martinez) is initially presented as a foil for Mackey, the honest supervisor trying to bring down this force of corruption within his own unit. But as the show progressed, Aceveda’s own hands got dirtier — partially as a result of his desperate, tragic attempts to bury evidence of his sexual assault at the hands of an armed suspect in Season 3. This brutal act of violence haunts the recaps too, lending them a psychological bent through repetition: “Previously on” becomes a shorthand for the destructive effects of unprocessed trauma.

The Shield gave most of its characters long-gestating conflicts: the dire medical diagnosis future captain Claudette Wyms (CCH Pounder) hides from her coworkers; the homophobia and self-loathing that hardens closeted rookie Julien Lowe (Michael Jace); the way goony expert detective Dutch (Jay Karnes) gradually disappears into his obsession with understanding the mind of a killer, even as he outgrows his tendency to let his libido complicate his workplace relationships. All of these subplots benefitted from what you could call the institutional memory of the writers’ room; there was a particular thrill to seeing the show pay off developments several seasons in the making.

But it was the killing of Terry Crowley that set the show in motion, and reverberated all the way through to the finale. Almost every major thing that happens on The Shield is an aftershock of his murder. What we’re watching, it becomes clear, is a seven-year coverup: the story of a compromised cop, and those in his orbit, grappling with the fallout of a single dark decision. A full season — the fifth, widely regarded as the show’s finest — is devoted to the sweaty, zealous attempts by an IAD lieutenant, brilliantly played by Forest Whitaker, to corner Vic and his men into a confession. That it took five years for the show to confront them with a real threat of exposure illustrates how patiently The Shield tightens the screws and moves towards its endgame.

On some level, the series is a grand extrapolation of that old saw about crime not paying. Its final three seasons are an extended free fall, as the whole strike team experiences respective consequences of Vic’s leadership. No one is safe from this delay-trigger reckoning: not pretty boy team naif Lem (Kenny Johnson), not loyal soldier Ronnie (David Rees Snell), and certainly not imploding good ol’ boy Shane (Walton Goggins), the unlikely tragic figure of The Shield’s final stretch. “I wish I never met Vic Mackey,” he says in the finale — an implicit acknowledgement of the show’s fatalistic structure, the way its sequence of unfortunate events could be traced forever backwards, like a thread unraveling a garment.

Naturally, there’s also a larger critique baked into the this-follows-that framework of the show. Watching it, one can’t help but think of that idiom about bad apples, misquoted and distorted by real police forces into a reason not to blame the many for the actions of the supposed few. Vic Mackey is the rebuttal to that notion, the rotten apple who spoils the whole barrel. The Shield may not go so far as to condemn the entire LAPD — there are good cops left standing by the closing scenes of “Family Meeting” — but in a more symbolic sense, it captures how Mackey’s greed and fascism destroy so much of what he touches, eating away at an institution that fails to root him out for so long. In that sense, the daisy-chain plotting of The Shield takes on a moral dimension, the methodical antithesis of copaganda.

It was also just an ingenious narrative coup, one that exploited TV’s then-latent potential to incrementally unfurl a story over multiple years, lighting a fuse and then following it to its inevitable explosion. Plenty of major shows since have capitalized on that potential; there’s a snowball quality to the cliffhanger mechanics of Breaking Bad, the failson tragicomedy of Succession, and the ensemble chess-piece moving of Game of Thrones, another seminal series that killed off its ostensible moral center early on. But arguably none of them have matched the cumulative power of The Shield, which created a chain reaction that reached from the very first episode all the way to the last. This tale of moral ruin never let the audience forget where it started — the “previously on” it forever built upon.

A.A. Dowd is a writer and editor who lives in Chicago.