'The Shield': Seven Seasons of Defying Expectations

By Maureen Ryan
Chicago Tribune
http://www.chicagotribune.com/
Originally posted: August 28, 2008

At every turn, “The Shield,” which begins its long-awaited final season 9 p.m. Tuesday on FX, has defied expectations.

The first person to be surprised was the show’s creator, Rockford native Shawn Ryan. He assumed each season might be “The Shield’s” last, despite the critical acclaim and ratings success it enjoyed when it debuted on FX six years ago.

Well before that dazzling debut, however, Ryan got an even bigger shock, when FX decided to make his uncompromising pilot script in the first place.

“I didn’t think anyone would make it the way I was writing it. I thought maybe somebody might like it and make me change it to be network-friendly,” he said in a recent phone interview.

He wasn’t alone in that belief. (Now would be a good time to exit this story if you've never seen "The Shield" and plan to catch up with it on DVD. This piece does not contain spoilers about Season 7. The video clips in this story are from Episode 1 of "The Shield's" final season. More video clips from Episodes 1-6 [and soon, complete episodes] are available here.)

Damon Lindelof, the executive producer of “Lost,” recalled reading Ryan’s well-regarded “Shield” script when it was making the Hollywood rounds almost a decade ago. As he turned the pages, he waited for elite cop Vic Mackey to be revealed as someone who resembled “NYPD Blue’s” Andy Sipowicz – “a good guy despite his gruff exterior,” Lindelof said.

That never happened. In the final moments of the first episode of “The Shield,” Mackey (Michael Chiklis) committed an act that he would spend years trying to redeem.

“Mackey murders an Internal Affairs rat in cold blood. He kills a cop. Shoots him in the head,” Lindelof said. “And when I read that, I thought to myself, ‘Shawn Ryan will never get this ending on the air.’ ”
“Well, I stand corrected,” Lindelof added.

Not only did FX shoot that shocking ending, Peter Liguori and Kevin Reilly, who were then the top executives at FX and who are now the heads of the Fox network, put Ryan in charge of “The Shield.”

It’s not uncommon for the person who creates a TV show to be elbowed aside once it goes into production, and “The Shield” was a critical project for FX ,which was then trying to put itself on the map with original programming. Despite his lack of production experience, FX trusted Ryan to bring the show to life. He was 34.

“I think one thing that helped me was, frankly, my ignorance,” said Ryan. “I had not done a lot of TV producing at that point. I had written for a couple of shows [‘Angel,’ ‘Nash Bridges’] , but I wasn’t involved in a lot of production decisions … I didn’t have any kind of preconceived notions about how these things were supposed to be done.”

Ryan credits fellow “Shield” executive producer and director Scott Brazil, who died in 2006, as well as the show’s first director, Clark Johnson, with coming up with the production strategies that gave the show its distinctive style. Money was tight: In its first two years, the show’s budget was $1.3 million per episode, which was “minuscule” compared to many network budgets, Ryan recalled.

“We didn’t want the show to be 85 percent of a network show, even though we had 85 percent of the budget,” he said.

When it arrived, “The Shield” certainly looked like nothing else on TV—except, perhaps, the more adventurous documentaries on HBO and PBS.
“The Shield” was shot in an immediate, fluid style, often with handheld cameras. Many scenes were filmed in hardscrabble locations in and around the show’s scruffy Los Angeles studio. As they tried to keep the peace on violent, gang-controlled streets, Mackey and his fellow Strike Team members found themselves in corner stores, in messy apartments, in claustrophobic interrogation rooms and in innumerable alleys.

You couldn’t count on tidy endings on this densely plotted show – thank goodness – but you could always count on the fact that Mackey and his team would run down a litter-encrusted alley at some point. Thanks to the show’s “you are there,” kinetic shooting style and energetic editing, you could almost smell the stench coming off the garbage.


Walton Goggins, Michael Chiklis, David Rees Snell and Alex Laughlin

“A lot of other shows have a tendency to try to glamorize the characters,” said Laurie Holden, who has a recurring role in Season 7 as federal agent Olivia Murray. “Working on this show, they like it if you have circles under your eyes.”

Mackey and his crew work out of a battered precinct house nicknamed the Barn, and on a July 2007 visit to that set, during filming of the final set of episodes, the show’s commitment to battered realism was much in evidence. Holes festooned the carpets, paint was peeling off battered walls and everything looked dirty. When a cup of coffee was accidentally knocked over, crew members grinned at the attempts to clean it up.

“I wouldn’t worry too much about that,” one said.

Despite, or perhaps because of, its unconventional depiction of life in the big city, “The Shield ” got noticed, and not just by awards-giving organizations and critics. In the 2003 and 2004, Ryan said, Brazil got calls from other TV producers and executives, who wanted to know how they made a show that won Michael Chiklis an Emmy and garnered truckloads of praise, all on a cable-TV budget.

Ryan has a deep-seated aversion to singing his own praises (compliments are usually met by attempts to give most of the credit to his “Shield” colleagues). Yet he does allow that “The Shield” did play a role in helping to create a bolder and more risk-taking aesthetic, especially in the cable realm.

“It wasn’t solely because of the creative success of ‘The Shield’ and [FX’s] ‘Nip/Tuck,’ but a lot of it was the economic success of ‘The Shield.’ It inspired people to get into this [original series] business, because we were making the show for a price that made sense,” Ryan said.

But the show’s budget dictated several deviations from the usual TV formulas. Complicated lighting setups took too long to set up, so artificial lighting was kept to a minimum. Shooting in small rooms necessitated the use of small, handheld cameras. Filming on location was routine.

“24” and “The Wire,” which premiered a few months before and after “The Shield,” respectively, as well as later series such as “Friday Night Lights” and “Battlestar Galactica” helped make that kind of “on the fly” aesthetic popular. But “The Shield’s” lasting influence can be seen in the popularity of its various directors, who are now working on everything from “Dexter” and “Saving Grace” to “Law & Order.”

“But that’s the nature of TV and film. It’s not the same as copying a test in school,” Ryan said of the influence of “The Shield,” which, he noted, owes a debt to everything from “The Sopranos” to “L.A. Confidential.” “I can’t say I was lying in the weeds, waiting to change television. I just took the circumstances I was in and did the best I could with them. And I think other people in my same position would have found similar ways to do things. I do like the fact that we were sort of the first to do it.”

For the first episode, Ryan trusted the vision of Johnson, an actor who’s both appeared in and directed episodes of “Homicide” and “The Wire,” but Ryan said he did have one request when the pilot was being shot.

“He and I had both been on police ride-alongs, him as research for being an actor on ‘Homicide,’ me when I was a writer on ‘Nash Bridges,’” Ryan recalled. “I just said to Clark, ‘I just want the viewer to feel like they’re on a police ride-along.’ And that’s what he brought to it.”

Perhaps the only similarity between Ryan and Mackey is that both work best when underestimated. When “The Shield” pilot was being shot, FX was also filming a pilot called “Dope,” starring Jason Priestly as a drug addict. Ryan had heard rumblings that that the network’s executives might be leaning toward picking up that show instead of “The Shield.”

“Not being the favorite helped us,” Ryan said. “We were able to make the pilot in such a go-for-it style that we eventually won the day, I think, on execution. I think our director out-directed their director. I think we out-cast their show. They had Jason Priestly playing a drug addict. And that seemed like a casting coup at the time, because nobody wanted to put themselves in an FX show.”

Few in Hollywood thought Michael Chiklis was right for the role of a volatile cop. At that time, Chiklis was best known for his much milder role in “The Commish.” Nobody could see back then that his star turn as the compelling Mackey would eventually inspire the creation of dozens of copycat bad boys, TV antiheroes with lots of flaws but little of Mackey’s depth.

But Chiklis, who lost weight and shaved his head before starting work on “The Shield,” brought a ferocious vigor to the role, which won him an Emmy in 2002. But the show’s intensity takes a toll, Chiklis said in a 2007 interview on the show’s set. (A longer version of that interview is here.)

“Some roles are exhausting physically, some are exhausting mentally. Some are really devastating psychologically. [Vic] is all of that,” Chiklis said. “You ever take a face cloth and soak it and wring it out? That’s me, at the end of the day. I’m a wrung-out washcloth. An overcooked noodle.”

CA - MARCH 27: Actor Michael Chiklis and Creator/producer Shawn Ryan (r) attend "The Shield" seasons 5 and 6 DVD launch party March 27, 2007 at the Cabana Club in Hollywood, California. (Photo by Mark Mainz/Getty Images)

As cast member Walton Goggins, who plays Strike Team member Shane Vendrell, noted in a separate interview, it can be especially difficult to work when the show’s shooting on location. Consecutive days of shooting in the grimier areas of Los Angeles, especially in the summer heat, are not unusual.

“An inordinate amount of focus is required to do our work on this job. And it’s not just the words, it’s not just the density and the complexities of the story. It’s the traffic. It’s the noises on the street,” Goggins said. (My interview with Goggins is here.)

Part of the reason for that exhaustion at the end of the day springs from nature of the show’s storytelling, which mixes complicated plots with the expert excavations of moral grey areas. Vic Mackey spends most episodes trying to escape the consequences of his canny but shortsighted actions, and that constant juggling act takes a toll on him and everyone around him. But the genius of “The Shield” is that it’s impossible to think of Mackey as purely evil. He’s convinced that he’s doing the right thing.

“Really, it harkens back to that Jack Nicholson speech in ‘A Few Good Men,’ ” Chiklis said. “He is the embodiment of that argument: ‘I am the man on the wall, you people who sit in your suburban households can look at what I do from a distance, and go, “Oh, isn’t that terrible, isn’t he awful?” But you can’t handle the truth of what we need to do to protect ourselves.’”

Though the show’s distinctive style and characters have been imitated – sometimes skillfully – on dozens of network and cable shows over the years, few have come close to making entertainment that creates such suspense within such a tangible, complicated world. After seven seasons, the cops in the Barn – Dutch (Jay Karnes), Claudette (C.C.H. Pounder), Shane, Ronnie (David Rees Snell) and Billings (David Marciano) – seem utterly real. It’s hard to picture the TV landscape without them.

“One thing I learned from Joss Whedon that I blatantly stole was the idea of approaching the stories first from character,” said Ryan, who is also executive producer of “The Unit” and has several new projects in development, including a private-eye dramedy for FX, a drama he’s working on with novelist James Ellroy for A&E, a sitcom for Fox and an adaptation of the book “Confessions of a Contractor” for CBS.

“The cop stories were always the last thing we’d figure out on a ‘Shield’ episode,” Ryan continued. “You just start from the premise of, ‘What do you want to happen to Vic and Shane this week? What do you want to happen to [fellow cops] Dutch and Claudette or Danny and Julien, or [Vic’s ex-wife] Corrine? What hoops do you want them to jump through?’ And then you figure out, what are the best stories that allow you to do that.”

I'll post a full transcript of my interview with Ryan soon. For other "Shield" interviews and features, go here.

(Click on link below to access video clips)
http://featuresblogs.chicagotribune.com/entertainment_tv/2008/08/the-shield-seve.html


Shawn Ryan, Michael Chiklis Ride ‘Shield’s’ Final Season

FX Taking Steps to Pull in Fans
By Jon Lafayette
http://www.tvweek.com/
August 29, 2008 5:25pm

Michael Chiklis is pleased with the way FX’s “The Shield” is coming to an end—with a bang, not a whimper.

“I feel like we really finished it in an incredibly strong way,” said the series’ Emmy Award-winning lead actor. “Especially the last seven episodes, it becomes like a moving freight train and it becomes quite explosive in the final episodes.”

The series, which begins its final season Tuesday, made a bang in the TV world, opening the door to a new type of edgy drama on ad-supported cable TV and creating an identity for FX.

Series creator Shawn Ryan said the freight train described by Mr. Chiklis has been stuck in the yard for a long time.

“It’s been the longest goodbye in TV history,” Mr. Ryan said.

Shooting finished in November, but post-production work couldn’t be done until the Writers Guild of America strike ended in February. The final four episodes were edited in March.

“It feels like a movie. We’re waiting for that release,” Mr. Ryan said.

While fans of the show are no doubt eagerly awaiting the final season of the groundbreaking basic-cable series, the show has lost viewers over the years. FX President John Landgraf is conservative in his estimates of how the last season will perform in the ratings.

FX is taking steps to retain viewers. For example, the News Corp.-owned network is creating a two-minute recap of each episode that viewers can watch to keep up with the series if they miss the show for a week.


Actors Jay Karnes (L), Michael Chiklis (C) and Walton Goggins arrive for "The Shield" season 5 DVD release party in Hollywood, CA 27 March 2007

The recaps are designed to be automatically recorded by digital video recorders when viewers tape full episodes, giving them the option of watching the full hour or the two-minute update to keep them from falling behind on the serialized storyline.

Even with those efforts, “I am skeptical that we’re going to see a lot of new viewers,” Mr. Landgraf said.

“Over time, you have a lot of viewers who for whatever reason fall by the wayside,” he said. “Now that they know it’s the end, they may come back to check it out. But I’m not expecting that ratings this season will be significantly higher than the one that just aired.”

Ratings for the show peaked in season two with an average of 3.2 million total viewers. Last season the show averaged 2.2 million viewers.
Mr. Landgraf wants FX to stay in business with both Mr. Ryan and Mr. Chiklis.

Mr. Ryan is working on a buddy show about detectives with a relationship that’s comedic in a “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” way, Mr. Landgraf said. Mr. Ryan is working on the project with Ted Griffin, who wrote “Matchstick Men” and “Ocean’s Eleven.”

Mr. Landgraf said Mr. Chiklis, in the role of an executive producer, brought a family drama to the network that involves financial chicanery and fraud. The network is in the process of hiring a writer to create a script.
Of course, the network would love to have Mr. Chiklis in front of the camera as well.

“In a heartbeat, if we had the right part for him,” Mr. Landgraf said. “The guy is to us what Johnny Carson was to NBC. He helped us build this network.”

Everyone involved in “The Shield” still seems slightly shocked that the show ever got on television.

Part of the credit goes to Kevin Reilly, who was head of programming at FX then and is president of entertainment at Fox now. He had been previously been at HBO, and when the story of Vic Mackey hit his desk, he wasn’t worried about a show featuring an antihero.

“Our biggest concern was not, is it too far out there?” he said. Rather, FX executives worried about whether their cop show would stand out from the crowded field.

Mr. Ryan had written “The Shield” as a sample script. He was surprised to get a call from FX.

“I had no reason to believe that anyone outside of HBO would make a script like that,” Mr. Ryan said. “The basic idea of your central character killing another cop at the end of the pilot, you didn’t see TV shows like that on the major networks.”

Mr. Ryan said he didn’t know much about FX then.

“I had no idea who Peter Liguori or Kevin Reilley were,” he said, referring to FX’s president and programming chief at the time. “I had no idea why they’d be interested in my script. I spent a lot of time talking to Kevin and it became clear that I had stumbled into the zone that they were trying to hit.”

Mr. Ryan said he wasn’t trying to break new ground in what could be shown on basic cable.

“I think if we start from a place of, ‘Hey, let’s break down barriers,’ the audience can sniff that out and things can seem a little gratuitous,” Mr. Ryan said. “We just tried to tell the best story we could week to week, and we did it without having the usual network filter on how we told those stories or how admirable we had to make our characters. The result was something that a lot of people found groundbreaking.”

Another difficulty in getting “The Shield” on the air was finding the right person to play Vic.

“Like any great alignment of the stars, it’s hard to imagine now that anybody else could have played it,” Mr. Reilly recalled. “But in fact we were struggling casting the role. Michael’s name came up early on. His agents wanted us to offer it to him. I wasn’t going to do it because I knew Michael Chiklis as a fantastic actor, but a very different kind of guy than we had in mind.”

Mr. Chiklis had starred as ABC’s cuddly “Commish.”

Mr. Reilly said he’ll never forget Mr. Chiklis’ reading.

“It was one of the great moments in my show-business career,” Mr. Reilly said. “When Liguori and I walked upstairs to the casting room, Chiklis was sitting there chewing Nicorette gum in a leather jacket with the shaved head. We both looked at each other like, ‘I think that’s him.’”

“There was no chit-chat. There was no small talk. He launched right into the scene like Vic Mackey. He was Vic Mackey. He literally knocked us on our asses and then blew out of the door with that same sort of magnetic energy that he brought to the role.”

Mr. Reilly and Mr. Liguori just looked at each other when the reading was done, almost speechless.

“I just said, ‘That works,’” Mr. Reilly recalled.

Mr. Reilly said fighting for the role turned out to be a move that realigned Mr. Chiklis’ career.

“There were other more lucrative options out there, and the important thing is that in these fragile careers you have a guy who said, ‘This is the right role for the right moment in time for me and I’m not going to just chase the money,’” Mr. Reilly said.

Mr. Chiklis said the success of “The Shield” vindicated that decision for him.
“People were telling me that I was insane and I’d never work again if I did it,” he said. “Had the show not worked for whatever reason, I would have definitely taken a big hit in terms of taking that kind of risk. But thank God I did. I had to go with the material and the people involved.”

Before taking the role, Mr. Chiklis said, he wanted to be absolutely sure the network was going to shoot the script he fought so hard to be a part of.

“That was my biggest thing. Am I going to show up on day one on the set and the pink pages are going to come down and this is going to be boiled into its least common denominator, because I’ll quit,” he said.

Mr. Chiklis said he’s concentrating on movie work after “The Shield” wraps, but wouldn’t rule out doing another series.

“If some great writer wrote something phenomenal tomorrow and it landed on my desk and it happened to be on television, I’d probably damn well do it,” he said. “A lot of the greatest stuff that’s being made right now happens to be made for the small screen, I believe.”