I'll get to football, Kevin Kolb, Eagles sucking, etc. tomorrow, but today I want to talk about the greatest injustice in the history of award shows.
Hopefully most of you by now are familiar with The Shield, the FX cop drama that ended its seven season run this year. For those not familiar, the show stars Michael Chiklis (The Thing from Fantastic Four) as Vic Mackey, a cop who frequently uses questionable (that's putting it lightly) police tactics, but always gets the job done. Needless to say, Vic gets into a lot of trouble along the way, and has to go deeper and deeper into seedy tactics to get himself out.
I accidentally stumbled upon The Shield during its pilot, and I was immediately hooked after the first five minutes. The pilot is easily the best I've ever seen, and the end of the first episode affects everything that happens in the rest of the series. I'm not the only one who has become addicted to the show at first view. Anyone who has watched it with me has to watch the next episode, and then the next episode, and then start from the beginning, and watch them all, you get the idea.
Although the show has always been praised by critics, it hasn't been recognized by the awards shows anywhere near what it should have been. Chiklis won the Emmy for Best Actor in 2002, but the show has had a dry spell since then. I figured the final season of The Shield would finally get the show the recognition it so richly deserved. The season was amazing after all. Episodes were great from start to (especially) finish, and every actor saved their best performance for last. Chiklis was amazing as always, but Walton Goggins as Shane and David Rees Snell as Ronnie really stepped up for the last season.
So how many Emmy nominations did The Shield receive for its final season?
Zero.
Absolutely none.
None for Best Actor (Chiklis), none for Best Supporting Actor (Goggins or Rees Snell), none for Best Supporting Actress (CCH Pounder), none for Best Writing (the last episode), and most egregiously, none for Best Drama.
I don't watch every show on TV. I don't watch Mad Men, but I'm sure it's good. But honestly, how do four Mad Men episodes get nominated for Best Writing, and the final episode of the The Shield gets none?
I can't stress enough how great Goggins and Rees Snell were in this season. I might even say they deserved nominations more than Chiklis, they were that good. Vic Mackey has pretty much been the same since season 1, but it's incredible to see how much the characters of Shane and Ronnie have evolved since the beginning. Shane went from being an unlikable jackass to, well, and unlikable jackass but for many different reasons. Even though he was the de facto villain in the last season, you had to feel incredibly bad for him, and a lot of that comes from Goggins' performance.
Ronnie wasn't even supposed to be a regular character on the show. However, the writers decided to write him into the stories more because Rees Snell was so great in the role and fans loved him. He goes from having about two lines in the first season to becoming the third-main character on the show in the last season. I guess the Emmy voters didn't see his last scene in the final episode.
It wouldn't really bother me too much if The Shield didn't win any Emmys. The newer shows usually get the awards anyway. But to have ZERO nominations for the last season of one the greatest cop dramas ever is a crime. If only Vic was still around to crack some Emmy nominator skulls.
Do yourself a favor, watch The Shield, all of it, and you'll understand.
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