"The Shield"
FX Networks

No good deed goes unpunished, runs the cliché. But how is punishment meted out when no deed is clearly "good?"

FX Networks' "The Shield," now wrapping up its fourth season, is the latest in a succession of unrelentingly gritty, morally polarizing police dramas. Like its predecessors, the show never hesitates to portray corrupt cops in the same hard light as rapists and murderers. But that light barely penetrates the moral ambiguity clouding its every scene. Just when the viewer expects prime-time brand redemption to wash over a sullied detective, a switch is thrown somewhere and corruption rears its head; just when a hero emerges, he falls. There are simply no good guys.

When former precinct captain David Aceveda (Benito Martinez) sat on the edge of a bed in a nondescript motel room gulping down liquor and looking miserable, the setup was so familiar it seemed boring. When a comely blonde hooker came in and began to console Aceveda for the recent deaths of his colleagues, the action was obvious. When she leaned in, flashed a smile and whispered, "Let me make you feel better," you could almost following the bouncing ball.

But "The Shield" is anything but predictable — and it does not allow anyone to feel better. The stock players digress from the usual formula and the sullen cops turn vengeful persecutors. Aceveda, a victum of rape himself, reenacts a half-frightening, half-pitiful rape scene with the hooker, culminating with a Glock pressed to her temple. It's but one of many scenes in which criminal evil pervades in the world of punishment.

Even the formidable and hard-bitten Captain Monica Rawling (Glenn Close) is forced, in the fourth season, to form an unlikely alliance with her rougher, more streetwise counterpart, Detective Vic Mackey (Michael Chiklis). Rawling is effective as an avenging paladin, an urban white knight; she doesn't work by the book, but that's only because the book demands crooked machinations. Rawling loses her conviction rarely and her vision never.

But alongside Mackey, Rawling's moral courage comes into question. Mackey, like protagonists of other police dramas (such as the haunted Lenny Briscoe of NBC's "Law and Order"), justifies his actions with an omelets-and-eggs mentality: he's not just an enforcer, he's an arbiter of the law. But Mackey never quite believes in his own moral subjectivity. When his strike team rips off an Armenian money-laundering ring, Mackey projects a crushed weariness throughout the entire operation; it bows his shoulders until, two seasons later, he desperately hands off his take to his estranged and bewildered wife.

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Captain Rawling's tolerance of Mackey's under-the-table ethics and disfigured past further complicate an already convoluted "morality." At first glance, her reasons seem somehow justified: Mackey has autistic children to support. Mackey means well. Mackey will go to bat for her. Mackey will crush a suspect's arms into a heap of broken glass if it means getting a tip. Mackey is not leaving his wingman.

Still, Mackey doesn't always earn Rawling's trust. Often, he finds himself embroiled in dubious allegiances, at one point inciting the wrath of Shane Vendrell (Walton Goggins), the most classically flawed character of the series. Eventually, when Vendrell decides to kill Mackey, it's evil vs. bad.

With two episodes of season four remaining, Mackey is still breathing and Vendrell has not been redeemed or condemned. Like every character on the show, their morality remains in a constant state of flux. Even the villainous Antwon Mitchell weeps when he is chastised: there is some pure good in the vilest sinner, the show tells us, and some unmitigated evil in the captain of the guard.

But perhaps in the primeval danger of the Rampart, the condition of your mortal soul isn't the point. There is only the certainty of victims, perpetrators, and avengers, a cycle that, on "The Shield," whirs so quickly one is never sure who's who. The fun is in seeing who wears which masks from episode to episode. When Aceveda is psychically demolished by being raped at gunpoint, he's cut down from his stature as the most fearsome and powerful protector of the peace to one of the victims he has ostensibly sworn to serve. When the gun is in his hand a season later, he is, if in somewhat broad strokes, the transgressor. But has he truly come full-circle? Is such a thing possible? And if it is, and he has, who's to say the wheel won't turn again?

— Eve Adams (ultimaluz at gmail dot com)