Friday, July 14, 2006
Men at work
BURLY! The Shield, Five, 11.00pm
LOWCULTURE is not an island, you know, and we don't exist in a vacuum. As much as we tend to pluck our recommendation ideas from the shows we like to watch, we also like to consult our close friends every so often to see what they're watching. Friend of LOWCULTURE Katy has generally very good taste in television, despite the fact that we caught her watching Love Island this week. She's rather fond of The Shield, so we asked her to tell us about it.
From what we gathered from her description, the show follows a specialist police strike unit which is charged with monitoring gang culture in an especially rundown area, except they have somewhat unorthodox ways of doing this. For starters, they don't bother to try to eliminate the drug trade, but rather to keep it under control so that the drugs being dealt are not spiked with anything nasty or being targeted at children, and the whole trade is kept in some degree of order. Of course, if people get too cocky or don't toe the line, the Strike Unit might step in to mess things up again and give the power to another gang, or to prevent another rival gang from coming in and messing up the effective system they've got going. And perhaps unsurprisingly, they like to skim off some of the trade to keep them all in tight t-shirts. Obviously the high-ups are not meant to find out that this is what they're doing, and there are regular visits from internal affairs which they have to cover up, and various people are out to unseat boss man Vic Mackey. That appears to be the gist, anyway. So: rule breaky, manly, gunly and brutaly. That all make sense so far?
We asked Katy why she likes this show so much, and she replied gleefully: "Lem's big burly shoulders! And the fact that it's just so unashamedly gritty and...testosteroney." So there you have it. Big, burly, macho men doing lots of posturing with guns. It's practically porn, isn't it? If it sounds up your street, have a look tonight. Just remember to thank Katy if it turns out you like it.
By Steve :: Post link
:: 
::
0 pop-up comments
:: Discuss on messageboard
