My empire of dirt

I chuckle sometimes when I hear shows described as the "Best Show on TV." 24, The Closer, The Sopranos, various reality shows. That is because nothing can possibly touch the greatness that is The Shield. I started watching it with the premier of season two and at no point has it taken a step back in quality. Two episodes last season were spent setting up the relationship between the main character and Oscar winner Forest Whitaker, but the payoff was worth it. In some shows (like The Sopranos, Deadwood, and Lost) months are spent building up to a confrontation that never happens. That would never happen in the world of The Shield, because the characters could never let their anger simmer for anything more than a day.

To summarize the plot of The Shield, there is a dilapidated police station in the Farmington district of L.A. The characters get deeper and deeper into some dirty shit while fighting gang warfare, serial killers, and other crimes. The cops that were dirty to start the show get dirtier and dirtier, and the ones that weren't are dragged down by the dirty cops. It works because every storyline feels like the natural progression of the characters, and every new character brought in feels necessary to that progression. And it helps that these characters are stars like Whitaker, Glenn Close, Franka Potente (Bourne Identity), Michael Pena (Crash), Sticky Fingaz, Guy Torry (American History X), and Andre Benjamin.

The penultimate episode of the penultimate season (that one's for you, dad) was last night, dropping two absolute stunners in the last three minutes to promise a bloodbath in the season finale next week. And I know they will deliver; no one's going to die of natural causes or in a car accident, no one is going to skip town, and no ridiculous deus ex machina event is going to take place. So when The Sopranos ends with a whimper in two weeks, I won't be able to help comparing it to next week's The Shield and I imagine that it will be a one-sided comparison.