The original post: /r/television by /u/Striking-Speaker8686 on 2026-05-07 05:56:27+00:00.
When you take a gander at lists of the best shows ever made, there’s some variation in order but for the most part the consensus is that the very top tier consists of the Wire, the Sopranos, and Breaking Bad. Some will throw Better Call Saul, Oz, and Mad Men in there, too. But on occasion, you will see some say the Shield is the best of them all. Now, the Shield is an old, gross looking show that is extremely long, which means nobody’s seen it and more importantly nobody is going to go out of their way to actually watch and verify this. And when you do bother to check the critical consensus, well, they line up with that narrative. Extremely high ratings across the board, critics raved about it from early on.
When you actually watch the show, though, it’s a different story. If you’re accustomed to and have watched much of the canon of incredible shows besides this one, you’re going to have to lower your standards for the Shield. It’s got a great pilot episode, true, particularly in its final scenes, but mostly this show is a cop procedural. It’s grimier and more fucked up than the typical one of those, regularly dealing with crimes of a more visceral variety, and with some plot threads that carry into future episodes and seasons (unlike many of the more episodic shows of its era), but the kind of writing and production value you expect from top shows, just isn’t there. The main character is praised often for being the archetype upon whom future TV antiheroes were based, but my problem with this framing is that it’s not like the Shield pioneered the concept, not even in the medium of TV it was just something not *as* common in popular network shows of the time as it’d come to be. Maybe thanks to him, in significant measure. But does that signify greatness in a vacuum? People praise the show for “holding up”, but it didn’t come out 50 years ago, it was on air until like 2007.
If you take the show in a vacuum, the first 4 seasons are like a 7/10 maybe, it takes until season 5 to hit its stride and become truly great (even then, a bit overrated), but to reach that point you are sitting through a TON of what is effectively filler content, with characters who aren’t all that interesting or entertaining to spend time with, the filmmaking isn’t anything that noteworthy either. If you want to be a stickler there are tons of smaller criticisms you can make about the way events transpire - cops turn off cameras all the time and generally do tons of things there’s no way you can suspend disbelief they’d get away with to the degree that they do, plot points that you’d think lead somewhere disappear altogether and leave you scratching your head, twists are contrived, there’re Deus Ex Machinas, but the overarching point is that there’s nothing about the writing that keeps you above water even through the stupiditiy of some of the things that happen. Lost for instance was really stupid and terrible in a ton of ways, but it had some of the most unforgettable moments in TV, peppered throughout its entire 6 season run. The Shield, apart from the pilot, has very few noteworthy moments in its first 3 or 4 seasons. That’s just not the mark of an all time great show. If you’ve seen cop shows thie inspired, or even some that came before or were contemporaneous with it (Homicide Life on the Street, which came before it, was a way better show, as was Oz), chances are you won’t be that impressed, and I just really think the hype around this show needs to be severely curbed.