L.A.P.D. Blues

By James Poniewozik

Vic Mackey is a gang leader. And he is a gang leader's worst nightmare. He murders to keep his secrets. And he saves little girls and babies. He is a criminal. And he is a cop. What kind? "Good Cop and Bad Cop left for the day," he tells a suspect he's about to interrogate (i.e., torture). "I'm a different kind of cop."

The Shield (FX, Tuesdays, 10 p.m. E.T.) was inspired by Los Angeles' Rampart police scandal. But it asks a question that is all too relevant in the days of liberty vs. security: How far do we want our protectors to go in our name? There's no simple answer. Mackey (played by Michael Chiklis, of the lame sitcom Daddio, with surprising cocksure charisma), runs the elite strike-team unit in one of L.A.'s. toughest precincts. But the unit is really a gang itself--corrupt, racist and bullying (even to other cops) and running its own testosterone-charged HQ.

It's a guilty thrill to watch Mackey trample sleazebags and their liberties like a skinhead rhino--you feel complicit when he crosses the line, but he does get results. Mackey's rival, an ambitious precinct captain (Benito Martinez), is principled but ineffectual. Between them is Detective Claudette Wyms (C.C.H. Pounder), a middle-aged black woman in a white boys' clubhouse who keeps her own counsel.

Like Mackey, The Shield is a self-consciously different animal. Its envelope-pushing nudity and obscenity--it makes NYPD Blue look like Barney Miller--can be too showy, its sicko criminals too baroquely quirky. But it's already the most riveting player in the tapped-out field of cop dramas, a moral no-man's-land where crime fighting is tough, but justice is the hard part.

--By James Poniewozik