20 Years Later, 'The Shield' Is Still a Shock to the System

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https://www.thrillist.com/entertainm...th-anniversary

When "Bawitdaba" kicks on during the last five minutes of the pilot of The Shield, coupled with the image of a police officer cracking open a door and slipping on a backwards baseball cap, it's only natural to feel your stomach turn. The song, released as the third single from Kid Rock's 1998 breakthrough Devil Without a Cause, is a churning mix of bombast, grit, and intensity, opening with the singer shouting his name as a way to mark his arrival as a hellraiser. Memorably, the CD itself had an image of a middle finger on it. In its own way, the cop drama The Shield, which debuted 20 years ago this week, kept the same energy across seven seasons.

Starring Michael Chiklis, then best known for his role in the early-to-mid '90s network cop dramedy The Commish, The Shield arrived with a nü-metal bang on March 12, 2002. The pilot, penned by creator Shawn Ryan, famously ends with Chiklis' bald-headed cop Vic Mackey shooting a fellow officer, a rat infiltrating Mackey's elite Strike Team crew played by Reed Diamond, right in the head with little hesitation. It's the original sin that drove the white-knuckle drama of the series, delivering Emmys, reinventing Chiklis as a prestige TV hard-ass, and putting FX—then the home of X-Files re-runs and the Howard Stern-produced sitcom Son of the Beach—on the map as a place for original programming suffused with sardonic bite, aggressive style, and ethical ambiguity. The show wasn't interested in cookie-cutter solutions or heavy moralizing. Like Kid Rock sings on "Bawitdaba," "This is for the questions that don't have an answer."