Reviving this thread because I finally tried watching it (and I think I'm tapping out after finishing S3).
First off this shit is junkfood TV. It's a really trashy show. I dunno why people even put this in the same category as The Wire (which is probably my favorite TV show) when doling out recommendations (Vic is what Herc from The Wire imagines himself to be, and I mean that in the worst way possible). It's also definitely copaganda but in the "have your cake and eat it too" style where the cops are undeniably corrupt assholes and the writers are at least aware how real police function to protect themselves and their interests first, yet "the thin blue line" is in full effect where if some skinhead skull-cracking dumbass isn't out there busting heads, it means some meth addict will try to kill your baby or you're gonna get murdered and raped. The show definitely indirectly substantiates the use of illegal force to parrot that 'ol "gotta do the things that have to be done to protect others" BS. You seriously telling me a guy who killed a fellow cop wouldn't be accidentally murdering and imprisoning the wrong people in the streets all the time? Lmao.
The show rarely addresses underlying systemic issues and the few times it looks like it's about to actually do so, those threads just get dropped because we have some dumb power fantasy with Vic to enact where he has to bust skulls or fuck some random woman that will be forgotten about in a few episodes. The amount of problems Vic solves by shoving a gun in somebody's mouth is comical. That shit doesn't work. Forcibly interrogating people like that should have Vic hitting dead-ends and getting nowhere, yet trash TV fucking
loooooves to pretend that torture is an effective way of gathering intel. The absolute worst thing about the show is that it pretends Vic's methods are effective, and so effective in-universe that it literally gives Vic gravitas to do whatever he wants while gaining respect even from those who are trying to uncover his dirty shit.
Having Vic be the MC is a fucking farcical power fantasy that's so grating to watch. Like after just a few episodes, I didn't want Vic to be the MC anymore and that only grew stronger until I stopped after finishing S3. The show isn't actually interested in exploring what it means for a city to be so crime-infested and where the systems in-place are failing from a conceptual standpoint, because that would take away time from Vic fucking another random woman he has zero chemistry with, so it uses the grizzly crime stuff as this glossy edgy try-hard veneer. The show doesn't actually respect the degree of violence it loves to regularly relish in. The few times the show gets close to making a point and actually exploring it in-depth, it backs off because it's clearly incapable of handling it with any sort of finesse and it's easier to just be an edgy binge-able trashfire fueled by shock value.
If it wasn't for CCH Pounder, I probably wouldn't have made it all the way to the end of S3. Seems unlikely the show will change much (plus I am so fucking bored of the Strike Team already), so I'm not feeling compelled to finish it. Many issues (the copaganda is the main one) frustrate me way too much for me to enjoy this sort of junkfood.
In this interview, Shawn Ryan said this about Vic:
"
Ninety-eight percent of the time, he's doing the right thing,"
I have no idea how somebody could claim The Shield isn't copaganda when it was made with that perspective.
