One of my all time favorite shows is the gritty cop drama, The Shield. It’s the most tightly written and compelling seven seasons of any show I’ve ever seen. From the first episode to the last, it’s completely engaging. It’s a fictionalized story loosely based on the LA Police Rampart scandal. I periodically rewatch the whole series and frequently see things that I missed on previous watches.
If anyone who feels very ACAB doubts the recommendation of a cop show from the early to mid 00s: understandable. But consider:
spoilers for the first minute of the first episode
The first episode opens with the main character cops murdering a fellow cop and framing it on a suspect they also murdered.
The show doesn’t explicitly say ACAB, but is very much about how the system let these cops exist and how they use it to evade justice. If you’re old enough to remember the advertising campaign FX did for it at the time, they made it sound like a typical cop show and it’s really not.
One of my all time favorite shows is the gritty cop drama, The Shield. It’s the most tightly written and compelling seven seasons of any show I’ve ever seen. From the first episode to the last, it’s completely engaging. It’s a fictionalized story loosely based on the LA Police Rampart scandal. I periodically rewatch the whole series and frequently see things that I missed on previous watches.
If anyone who feels very ACAB doubts the recommendation of a cop show from the early to mid 00s: understandable. But consider:
spoilers for the first minute of the first episode
The first episode opens with the main character cops murdering a fellow cop and framing it on a suspect they also murdered.
The show doesn’t explicitly say ACAB, but is very much about how the system let these cops exist and how they use it to evade justice. If you’re old enough to remember the advertising campaign FX did for it at the time, they made it sound like a typical cop show and it’s really not.
If you know anything about the Rampart scandal that this is based on, you know it’s not a normal cop show. Gritty doesn’t begin to describe it.