The Leader-Post (Regina, Saskatchewan) Canada
March 7, 2005 Monday
Final Edition
Strong language and strong stories are on ‘The Shield’
by Alex Strachan, Special to The Leader-Post
The Shield, one of television’s most intense, violent and profane
dramas, returns for a third season, with Michael Chiklis reprising
his back-to-back Emmy Award-winning role of ethically enabled inner
city police detective Vic Mackey, last seen liberating millions of
carefully stacked greenbacks from the Armenian mob while fending off
yet another internal affairs investigation.
Mackey is one of the great characters on TV at the moment, a
personality so unremittingly awful he’s compelling to watch.
It’s also a sign of the TV audience’s maturity that The Shield can
run on a mainstream network virtually unedited — if you’re easily
offended, please, please heed the viewer advisories –without
prompting a stream of complaints.
Tonight’s season opener features music by Rupert Holmes and Kings of
Leon, but that’s just background. The foreground is Mackey’s world
and the people who inhabit it, and it’s unlike any other cop show
you’ve seen.
As for the violence, The Shield’s creator Shawn Ryan has this to say:
“There are far more violent shows on television, but they tend to be
cartoonish and big and you dismiss the violence. The problem some
people have with our show is that our violence doesn’t feel
cartoonish. It’s real. It’s visceral. We don’t flinch from it, and
that makes some people uncomfortable.”
You’re supposed to be uncomfortable, in other words. It’s one of the
things that makes The Shield what it is. CH
n Despite running off the rails in the final 10 minutes with F-words
and crude, scatological humour, Fat Actress is a promising new
hour-hour series in the vein of Curb Your Enthusiasm that combines
inside jabs at the TV industry with a broad overview of
larger-than-life social issues, such as self-image and the way
overweight people are perceived in a diet-obsessed society.
Kirstie Alley plays herself as an overweight, former sitcom star
hoping to land a prime-time gig in a comeback TV show. She’s
surrounded by sycophants and hangers-on, and when she meets a network
executive, played by actual NBC/Universal Television president Jeff
Zucker, she’s filled with unrealistic expectations.
Fat Actress is both funny and true when it riffs on the double
standard separating actors from actresses — “Jason Alexander looks
like a fricking bowling ball, and James Gandolfino is like the size
of a whale; he’s way, way, way fatter than I am,” she yells at her
agent on the phone, while chowing down on a cheeseburger — and when
it lampoons celebrity self-obsession.
Take a good look at Zucker, by the way. His scenes are meant to play
as comedy, but they’re more real than you might imagine. And if
you’re looking for who to blame –for cancelling Boomtown, moving
Scrubs all over the schedule, “super-sizing” Friends and Will &
Grace, running some shows long by a couple of minutes and shortening
others, and subjecting viewers to a slew of reality programs like Dog
Eat Dog, For Love or Money, Meet My Folks, Who Wants to Marry My
Dad?, Next Action Star and The Biggest Loser — that’s your man right
there. Movie Network, Movie Central
n George Findlay (Ken Finkleman) is invited to talk to a class of
journalism students in a typically wry outing of The Newsroom. As bad
ideas go — for the students, not for you — that’s a doozy.
The episode is called Lolita, by the way, so you can fill in the
blanks yourself. When things go wrong — and they do — watching
George try to weasel his way out of yet another jam, oozing a slime
trail wherever he goes, is a delight.
The Newsroom is having arguably its strongest, most consistent season
yet. The rumour is this will be the show’s last, but the last few
weeks have shown there’s life in the old saw yet. Provided Finkleman
stays away from the dream sequences and Fellini allusions, that is.
CBC