“Gritty.” “Riveting.” “Uncompromising.” “Innovative.” The critics are describing a new cable series — but it’s on basic cable, not HBO or Showtime, and certainly not on network TV.
It embodies basic cable’s latest move in its endless balancing act between premium cable and the networks, as they all battle to differentiate themselves from their dozens of competitors.
The series is “The Shield,” whose premiere last Tuesday was the highest-rated debut of a scripted series in basic cable history, with more than 4.8 million viewers. It’s the first original program created by FX , a channel more commonly known for its repeats of “The X-Files,” “Ally McBeal,” “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “M*A*S*H.”
Tough but not hardcore
“The Shield,” which repeats its pilot episode at 8 p.m. Tuesday before running a new episode at 9 p.m., tells the story of morally ambiguous police officers in a struggling section of Los Angeles and features nudity, violence and language that even ABC’s “NYPD Blue” hasn’t dared to touch. But it’s not as hardcore as, say, HBO’s “The Sopranos,” and that’s the point. “The Shield” is the latest prototype for a basic-cable action program that’s edgier than network fare but not as unsettling as some premium cable offerings.
“It’s clear that the smaller basic cable outlets are trying to find their niche audience,” says Bruce A. Williams, a professor in the Institute of Communications Research for the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
“I think that we’re going to see more of these shows,” he adds, “because you can really think differently about how you’re going to build an audience and how you’re going to attract that audience.”
Sometimes the magic doesn’t work. A&E’s “100 Centre Street,” which the basic cable channel recently canceled after two seasons for low viewership, used stronger language (compared with NBC’s “Law & Order,” for example) in its depiction of the inner workings of New York’s criminal justice system. It also had story lines that didn’t tie up neatly, and characters who sometimes had five-minute conversations about the morality of the law, an unheard of amount of time without some type of action on TV, which may have ultimately doomed it.
For some of these basic cable shows, it’s not the grit but the look that sets them apart. TNT’s supernatural action series “Witchblade,” for example, relies on a visual style reminiscent of “The Matrix” as it follows a detective (Yancy Butler) who wields a magical gauntlet.
“If you’re going to go into sort of the supernatural realm, where a suspension of disbelief is necessary, you’ve really got to sell the world and you’ve really got to make it feel as real and as rich as possible,” says executive producer Ralph Hemecker.
Hemecker adds that being on basic cable, “we have a little more latitude than we would if we were in a more traditional setup” as an action series on a broadcast network.
Sometimes, being edgy isn’t the key to outflanking network TV. Lifetime’s “The Division” doesn’t have its female cops trolling the underside of San Francisco like the cops on “The Shield” because, says “Division” creator Deborah Joy Levine, “it’s not what we do best.”
“We have to realize what our limitations are, and our limitations really are our strengths,” explains Levine, who grew up on Chicago’s North Side. “We get to concentrate on stuff that I don’t know if network television really wants to concentrate on, which is that we get to concentrate on the whole person as much as we do the cop.
“And because they’re women, we get to concentrate on the balance of what it’s like to be a woman and have a very pressurized, tough, life-and-death job.”
The most brutal of the “Shield” cops is bald-headed, muscular tactical detective Vic Mackey, played by Michael Chiklis, known for years as roly-poly, straight-arrow top cop Tony Scali on ABC’s 1991-95 series “The Commish.”
Chiklis says television in general owes “a debt of gratitude to the people at HBO” for taking risks with such series as “Six Feet Under.”
Doing something bold
“What’s happening . . . is the audience has a lot to choose from,” says Chiklis, 38. “So obviously, you have to come out of the gate with something that’s going to grab people.”
Basic cable’s limitations compared with pay cable (the FCC in the past has frowned on overtly hardcore language and extreme sex and nudity) force its networks and producers to become more creative if they want to lure viewers, Williams says.
When “The Shield’s” creator and executive producer, Rockford native Shawn Ryan, made the pilot, “I never set out to write anything shocking . . . for me, there was a truth in cop shows that was being unexamined.”
It is that mindset that Peter Liguori, president and chief executive officer of FX Networks, says is the crux of any show on basic cable competing with a “Six Feet Under”: A series doesn’t have to be edgy or disturbing. It just needs to be good.
“I think you need to do something bold,” he says. “It’s those bold, distinctive moves which will get a show on the mark in a very crowded environment, not merely being edgy. Edgy alone, you’ll fall on your face.”
