The Shield gets the oral history treatment ahead of its 20th anniversary: How Nash Bridges influenced the groundbreaking FX cop drama

Entertainment Weekly

Shawn Ryan's The Shield, which celebrates its 20th anniversary in March, kicked off FX's run as a home of Prestige TV shows with Michael Chiklis starring as Vic Mackey, the leader of a small anti-gang unit in the LAPD. "I had gone on a couple ride-alongs for my work on Nash Bridges and was seeing and hearing things not appropriate for a CBS procedural," Ryan says in EW's oral history. "And I was having all these disaster fantasies about, 'Oh my god, how do I protect this little girl from the world?' I really wrote that pilot script thinking that I would just get it out of my system, so it was almost more a writing exercise for me than anything else. I wasn't a very experienced TV writer at this point; it didn't even occur to me that someone would want to make this. I was just hoping it would be a good enough sample that it might help me get my next staff job." Writer Glen Mazzara adds: "This was Homicide meets Sopranos. Shawn and I were both big fans of Homicide and the work of Tom Fontana. We wrote a number of scripts together, and I was not the best match for Nash Bridges. I was pitching grittier, more realistic, crime-driven material than CBS could handle. The seeds of The Shield are in Nash Bridges. It was an opening of an episode in which Nash (Don Johnson) and Joe (Cheech Marin) are getting the typical perfunctory information that you would at a crime scene. It was really a boring scene. They put the Kid Rock song ['Bawitdaba'] over this teaser — and it worked. Don loved it and said, 'That's what I'm talking about! That feels like the old days, like Miami Vice.' And so then that song got stuck in Shawn's head as he was writing The Shield and became the famous ending of the pilot." ALSO: Michael Chiklis says The Shield is unlikely to get a revival.