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00:01So we still have these. Some people still have them. I wonder if they're collector's items now.
00:17Prior to The Shield, I had been known for playing sort of roly-poly, affable guys. You know, the commish.
00:26And then suddenly he's Vic Mackie. And holy cow. Is this that guy? Is this the same guy? I mean, he's slimmer. He looks younger. He's swaggering. He looks so dangerous. It was a complete transformation.
00:43My wife said something brilliant to me at the time. She said, it's not incumbent upon the studios to reinvent you. It's incumbent upon you to reinvent yourself.
00:52When it came time to cast the show, there were lots of agents who essentially said, I'm not going to send my client to read for your show. I mean, how good could it possibly be on FX?
01:03And there were people in my camp at the time who were like, you can't read for this. It's FX. It's not even a, you know, you're a network television star. This is what was being said to me at the time.
01:11And I said, did you read this? This is the best pilot script I've ever read.
01:17Usually the sentence would go, there's a really good new show on FX. The next response in that conversation would be, what is FX? Tell me what an FX is. Like, no, like, it was not well known.
01:28Most people thought it was a sci-fi network, F slash X. There's no slash between F and X, but there was a problem that people didn't understand what it was.
01:38Peter Liguori and Kevin Reilly said, we've seen what HBO is doing with The Sopranos. Maybe we can do a basic cable version of that.
01:45Here we go, game time.
01:46And no one had tried that before. Everyone just assumed that what HBO was doing was unique to HBO. It's like, oh, there's them and there's everyone else and we can't do that. Shield did it.
01:57Vic Mackey is giving people what they wanted.
01:59I always say that Tony Soprano opened the door. Vic Mackey beat it down and just shot it for good measure.
02:07It was absolutely putting that network on the map, no question.
02:11I need you.
02:15Before The Shield, ad-supported television just was totally different. Like, The Shield was the show that changed ad-supported television.
02:24You just didn't have that kind of content in terms of ambition or adult content.
02:30When I finally got the role, I said, are we going to make this script or am I going to come to set one day and it's going to be the pink pages and it's going to be all watered down and networked?
02:39You know what I mean? Boiled. Safe. Because then I'll quit. I don't want to do that.
02:46And Peter fixed me with a look and he said, we'll go further because we've got to swing for the fences here.
02:52When people saw The Shield, they were blown away by it. Part of what was great about The Shield is it took the cop genre and turned it on its head.
02:59Your turn to play bad cop?
03:01No. Good cop and bad cop left for the day. I'm a different kind of cop.
03:08It was acclaimed right out of the gate. It got nominated for Emmys that first year. Chicklis won an Emmy that first year for a brand new show on a network with no kind of awards pedigree whatsoever.
03:20I mean, this thing exploded.
03:22Just glad I could help.
03:24You got a missing kid?
03:27Eight years old. We found our mother stabbed to death.
03:32Everyone was really shocked the next day after our pilot aired because it had broken all records for basic cable.
03:40Sean was the head chef. Everybody knew their place in it and we rocked it.
03:47I was told four and a half million people and I was like, oh, well, that's not really big by network numbers. Is that good? Is it not good? And it was explaining to me, this is a record, you fool. Like, this is actually really, really good.
03:58And nothing was precious. Again, they let us go. The network said, here's the money, here's the time, go.
04:05The first season of The Shield was a million three an episode, which is a very small number in that time. Most people didn't think that you could produce series television for that.
04:16It's one thing to have potential. It's another thing to have an audience that you don't want to lose. And so I had to do a lot of soul searching.
04:26You know, how much do I continue trying to push the boundaries? How much do I continue doing things, you know, that may not be the most audience pleasing, but are the right things artistically?
04:39Or do we just try to give them what we gave them in season one and just try to keep it going as long as we can?
04:44And ultimately, I decided that the show had to move forward and had to progress.
04:49One of the things that The Shield did that I think is a huge foundational part of its legacy is it got better every season.
05:04Rise and shine, party people!
05:06I thought The Shield did very well. It did not rest on its laurels at all. And there's a sense that, you know, Vic killing Terry in the pilot creates this perpetual sense of danger,
05:17because you can't ever ease off of who he really is and what he's done and what the stakes are here.
05:22Palms on the back of your head! Now, asshole!
05:28This was not a sophomore slump kind of show.
05:30And I think it's to the credit of Sean Ryan and all of the people who worked on that show and the executives at FX.
05:38They did not become complacent. They thought very hard about what to do every season, how to take the story forward,
05:46how to take the journey of the characters forward in a way that was still exciting and felt very vital.
05:52We're going to find out who did this. We're going to kill him.
05:59It's rare as an actor to be able to create an arc for a character over the course of seven years.
06:06That's extraordinary. And it's a great experience as a writer, I'm sure, and as an actor, for sure.
06:13During a raid on a drug dealer named Two Time, I shot and killed Detective Terry Crowley.
06:31It's always been my instinct that if people feel valued, loose, welcome, that they're going to do their best shit.
06:40Remember, the team comes first. We take care of each other, alright? Cheers. Cheers.
06:48The show was very dense. The show was, you know, you really had to immerse yourself in the episodes to understand what was going on.
06:56And so over time, you know, the audience sort of fell a little bit, although I think now we live in 2018 and we see that, well, the audience didn't quite fall so much.
07:03It may have fallen in terms of overnight numbers, but people were suddenly buying DVDs and watching the show that way.
07:09A lot of people loved to wait until a season was out on DVD and then sort of binge all the episodes at once. This was pre-Netflix.
07:16Pre-DVD, it was impossible to find an older show. And even if you didn't see it the first season on FX, you could go and watch it and catch up and jump in for season two or three and just ride that train.
07:28I always got the sense that our audience started big, stayed big, but over the course of the run, the audience started to watch in different ways in the same way that we're accustomed to now.
07:38But, you know, we were a hit right away.
07:40These streets are mine.
07:41And that was kind of frightening. And our world changed overnight because of that.
07:45Because until then, we had been working anonymously on this little show that we thought was good, but will anyone even watch this? And it turns out they did.
07:53On this job, you're the boss.
07:55Sean had never run his own show. And Fox Television Studios had the idea to bring in a partner for him. And that's when Scott Brazile came on board.
08:05Well, if I was employee number one on the show when I wrote the pilot, Scott Brazile was employee number two. He was the very first person I hired.
08:11I knew nothing about making a pilot. I knew nothing about making a TV series other than what I had sort of viewed from the two writers' rooms on the two previous shows I'd worked on.
08:20So the very first thing I said was, I need to know somebody that knows a lot more about television than me.
08:26Scott really taught me how to be an executive. You know, he would call me up and say, Eric, that's not how you're supposed to handle something.
08:32Or you should do it this way.
08:33And I met with him for what was supposed to be like a 45-minute meeting. And we ended up talking about my pilot script for five hours.
08:40And at the end of it, I was like, you know, will you please partner up with me and help me do this?
08:47I owe a lot of gratitude to him for my success and my career.
08:51He was the one that kept the trains running on time. He was the one that hired the crew. He was the one that kept everything going.
08:57But I also knew he was a director. And he ended up directing a couple episodes in the first season. But it wasn't until later in the first season. And we were scrambling.
09:06And it wasn't until near the end of the first season, when I looked at the two episodes he directed, I was like, oh, my God, these are like really well-directed episodes.
09:14And very quickly, he became the best director that we had on the show.
09:18I learned from him as a director in a big way because rather than imposing himself on you as a director, he would pose things as a question.
09:27That was a classic Scott Brazil direction.
09:30Can you hang in there? Can you stay in the game with her?
09:33He would do, you know, two or three episodes a year while keeping everything else running. And he was our rock.
09:40He was the guy who'd been through all the wars, who, when we didn't know what we should do in a situation, we could go talk to him.
09:46He was a very calming influence.
09:48He'd ask if there was any value in looking at a moment or a scene in this particular way.
09:53And in that way, we're collaborating. He opened it up to collaboration.
09:57And it's theirs. It's their idea. I just, I let the fuse. They're the ones that explode.
10:04Remember when you flipped the table and smashed your hands on the wall? Let that live in you at the top.
10:09And, you know, sometime in the middle of season four, he started to develop a limp.
10:15And you're like, oh, what's going on with the limp? Oh, I don't know what's going on.
10:18And his health, you know, just got progressively worse and it turned out to be Lou Gehrig's disease, ALS.
10:26That was the biggest blow as a family that we took during the run of The Shield was, you know, to lose.
10:33You know, I may have been the creator of the show, but in many ways Scott was the patriarch of the show.
10:37In tribute to Scott, he had set up such a good system and he, as he got sick, he really knew that he might not be able to continue working on the show.
10:45And he had trained people so well that the machine was still able to run.
10:49You know, the great gift that Scott gave us was he spent the previous five years really teaching us how to make this TV show.
10:55And now we've got to take that mantle and do it without him.
10:58And we did the best we could, but we never forgot him and we miss him to this day.
11:04Sean is one of the true great showrunners in this business and I think the work speaks for itself.
11:34I would say the big pivot for us was when we realized that we could sort of go outside what the show had become known for.
11:41And so in season four, we cast Glenn Close, you know, for 13 episodes in the show.
11:47Glenn Close brought a weird kind of legitimacy to The Shield and also helped slowly start to eradicate this barrier between movies and TV.
11:56Bringing her into this environment, but part of what we were trying to do is point an arrow at just the extraordinary quality of the writing, the directing, the acting.
12:03Any questions, Captain?
12:04There was still the sense that there are TV actors and there are movie actors.
12:08And occasionally a TV actor is allowed to go up to the movies.
12:12It doesn't really work the other way.
12:13So let's do it right.
12:14And here's, you know, big Oscar nominated movie star, Glenn Close.
12:18And she's coming in to, like, play the new captain of the barn.
12:25Nice work, detective.
12:27I'll take it from here.
12:28Glenn Close also helped highlight the level of creative ambition we were bringing to the show.
12:33It was a commercial hit, it was a commercial juggernaut, but we wanted to make it clear this is not just commerce.
12:38This is art.
12:39And I think, I think Glenn really helped us to achieve that.
12:42I think that that helped pave the way to what we see now, which is everybody, every A-list actor just about is making a TV show.
12:49You know, just at a time where I think our critical attention might have started to wane otherwise, suddenly Glenn Close is really invigorating, you know, season four, really challenging our actors to do their best work.
13:02Keep up the outstanding work.
13:05And then when she's done and over with, Forest Whitaker comes in, you know, the next season, which in my mind still may be our best season, season five.
13:16Are you happy now, Detective Matthew?
13:20For the first time, we were, we were in a serialized situation where they could set the pick for something in season two and not have it come to fruition until season five.
13:32It's pretty extraordinary.
13:33I mean, if you just look at season five, which is Forest Whitaker's season, we didn't come face to face until the third or fourth episode.
13:42Somebody here to see you.
13:44John Kavanaugh.
13:45Turn on the face.
13:46McMackey.
13:47Yeah.
13:48And they spent the first three episodes building up the hate that these two guys had.
13:56And it actually bled into our lives a little bit.
13:59I mean, by the time we met each other, we were, it was, you could taste it.
14:06It was in the room, you know, that's good shit.
14:11It is good to meet you.
14:13It actually won its Peabody Award and it's won its, it's two AFI distinctions as one of the ten best television shows in the year, very late in its run.
14:23And I think part of that was the quality of the, of the writing and quality of storytelling never flagged.
14:28In fact, it got better and better and better.
14:29I think The Shield would be viewed by many in the critical community as maybe one of the five best final seasons and finales of all time.
14:36Somehow on a show that's as plot driven as this one with so many balls in the air by the end, Sean Ryan was able to make the greatest ending in the history of TV drama.
14:48What I will say is right in that final season, I've been terrified every season of The Shield that this is going to be the season where the show sucks.
14:56And that we will be sort of discovered to be frauds and that we won't be able to find the creative juices to do a good season.
15:04And so as we crept towards the end, I was extremely excited, like, oh my God, we're going to do this.
15:09We're going to pull this off.
15:11But then I was also on the negotiating committee for the Writers Guild as we were negotiating with the companies.
15:17And I realized that, well, if I don't get the script done, you know, if we do end up on strike, I'm certainly not going to be able to do any work.
15:23And so there was a lot of pressure to get that final script in.
15:26And that's what I was able to do.
15:28I got some help from some of the other writers on the show with some scenes and did the rest myself and wrote the episode and got it in.
15:37And then there was a strike.
15:46I was hoping there wouldn't be a strike.
15:47But then there was a strike and I was like, OK, well, I'm out now.
15:50The writer's strike came.
15:52Sean decided he was going to respect the strike so he wasn't able to be on the set.
15:56In fact, Michael Chiklis stepped up and he was a producer on the set.
15:59And we waited for the writer's strike to end so that Sean could come in and look at the material.
16:03So he came in after the fact he'd written this material, but he hadn't seen it because he didn't watch the dailies and he wasn't on the set because he was basically respecting the writer's strike.
16:11So he went in and he looked at all the material and he started to work on the cut and he said,
16:16Michael Chiklis showed me things about Vic Mackey's character in those final episodes that I didn't know existed.
16:26We went, hey, let's do this. Let's do it till it's over, till the last shot. I don't, let's not blow this. There's nothing worse than a great series that fizzles out or, you know, it doesn't live up to a promise.
16:42It's just right to the last frame, I want this to be great. And everybody was on board for that. Awesome.
16:50I want people to be watching this show forever because it's really important in the legacy of television because how many shows can you point to started out strong, got better, got deeper, got richer, became more fascinating on a character level, on a story level, on a thematic level, and finished as strong as they started, if not stronger. It's just, that's a very, very small group of shows.
17:19You know, the bravery that was brought to this network by people like Sean Ryan has formed like the DNA of what this place really is, which is the basic idea about what entertainment should be at its best and what process you should use to get there is actually already present here in this series and in this process.
17:37What if we could replicate that process times 10 times 20 times 30 times multiple different creators, but all the while sort of sticking to that basic idea of don't compromise.
17:49You know, The Shield taught me how to be a showrunner. The Shield taught me how to deal with actors. The Shield taught me what to do in the editing room. The Shield taught me how to be a mentor to writers rather than to be a mentee of other writers.
18:03But what I learned, most of all, was if I surrounded myself with really talented, passionate writers and actors and directors, and we all worked to support each other, that something great could come out of it. And that's what I think did. Seven seasons of The Shield that I'm extraordinarily proud of.
18:20If I was to say something to the fans, most of all, it would be thank you.
18:25He's like an angel when he's sleeping.
18:30Stop asking me about sequels. I don't, it's not in my control.
18:40I can't help you there. But thank you for everything.
18:50Come here.
19:03Cut it!
19:05Hm. What a mess.
19:07K.
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