Well, to be fair, each season only contains about 12-13 episodes.
By the same token, that's why Curb Your Enthusiasm is still good.

The Shield was one of the very few shows, for me, where I was bummed when it was over each week.
Each hour flew by.

I hated seeing Shawn Ryan's credit pop up on the blackdrop, as it meant I had to wait another week for the story to continue.

If I could, I wish I could watch it again for the first time. Great show.

Tom

I can gauge a complete stranger's pompousity just by reading this sort of statement.

I prefer to use criteria such as proper use of tense, subject/verb agreement, reliance on sentence fragments, etc.

Ah, but at this point in your marathon, you've basked in the glory that is Gina Torres' rear end...

most def.

so i just started season 7. season 6 was real good till about half way then i didnt like a few episodes to much. the ones that pretty much only focused on the machete killers kinda bored me. but the last two episodes of the season made up for it. im missing forest whitaker though. i really liked his character.

finished it over the weekend. man i couldnt stop watching this show! it took me less than 2 weeks to watch the entire series. loved the finally, loved the series. as soon as i was finished i was already missing it, i will def. watch it again in the future. by far my fav tv drama ever.

i saw some talk about homicide life on the streets in some very old shield threads. should i check that out next? how does it compare to the shield?

Glad you enjoyed it. It's a very rewatchable show.

As for Homicide: Life on the Streets, I highly recommend it. It's less visceral than The Shield, and I think it got weaker in its later seasons, but the first few seasons are definitely worth watching.

Give The Wire another shot first though

If he watches Homicide, he should be perfectly primed to watch The Wire afterward.

I blind bought this on Amazon for $30 nearly two years ago (February, 2014) and good ol' Michael Chiklis gave me the death stare from the packaging for a long time. I watched my way through Seasons 1-5 between Thanksgiving and Christmas, and picked up the final two season here in the new year. I've never seen The Wire, I absolutely love every moment of Justified, and didn't know anything about The Shield except it was an FX show that had some dirty cops and pushed the boundaries of cable TV content.

Here I am, with two episodes left to go. I think I'll watch them Thursday or Friday night, we'll see.

P.S. A lot of tiny threads about this show, but this is the closest we get to a "definitive" overview-of-the-series thread, as far as I can tell, so I'm posting this here.

Watched this through twice now. Such a great show. Happy to see people are finding it and enjoying it so many years later.

Hope you enjoy the final two episodes, Story. They're a doozy.

Holy cow, just watched the second-to-last episode. That is some crazy, crazy, crazy stuff. I didn't see any of it coming, just wow. I'll watch the finale tomorrow.

The person I feel the most for, at this point?



Okay. I'll post after I watch the finale.

Still the best finale of any show.

The way things ended for Shane haunted me for days...

Oh boy.

That was a heckuva ending. It had plenty of surprises (see above), though everything that happened made sense for the story at the same time, if that makes sense. Turns out I voted correctly in the poll about Vic's fate, at least, from a certain point of view.

The emotion of so many of these creative, talented people in the DVD extra about the finale is heartwarming. They really enjoyed making the show and making it with each other, that's so great to see.

Believe it or not, my favorite characters were Dutch and Claudette. I liked watching this guy do his best to be on the right side of doing things and tasting a little bit of corruption here and there along the way. And I was always rooting for Claudette because she was always rooting for justice. And I really appreciated the way they looked out for each other. Even when they were angry with each other, they were there for each other. It's probably the healthiest relationship in the show.

Overall, I enjoyed the series. There were a few episodes here and there that really felt like filler / dragging the story on when it didn't need to be, and a few storylines got dropped (Julian) and others had such anti-climactic endings they were pretty much red herrings (the many women of Dutch), but it was a compelling story throughout the series. I don't know if it's worth a rewatch alone, when there are so many other series to get to for the first time, but I can see myself watching it with my spouse or a friend down the road. Good blind buy, though, and I got it because people here at DVDTalk kept talking about it. Good job, people.

Finally, wow, the cops bust in on a lot of suspects having sex. Is there a supercut of all of that?! Because it had to be at least twice per season!

Wish this was streaming someplace. You'd think that Hulu's deal with FX would have it up, or FX now.

http://www.hulu.com/the-shield

Uhhh, all 7 seasons are there.

My second favorite show of all time after The Wire.

I'd swear that they weren't last time I checked. Maybe it's the mobile interface I was using. Or maybe I'm just a moron. The latter certainly has significant evidence to back it up.

Yeah, that ending for Shane and his family was real messed up.

I wouldn't say Dutch and Claudette were my favorites but I did think they were great together. When you really take a look at the characters you realize that the ones you were following around were the bad guys. It's something you should really realize after the first episode but for a lot of people that realization didn't come till the end, if it came at all. But the real heroes ended up being the ones you felt like you were supposed to dislike (Aceveda) or the ones that were painted as underlings (Dutch and Claudette).

I'm in the vast minority when I say this but my favorite character was Shane. Not that I was rooting for him but he was very interesting. Vic's actions effected those around him and that's what created the monster that Shane ended up being. Vic was always trying to be both good and bad. The bad rubbed off on Shane and he couldn't shake it. In a lot of ways Shane is like Jesse Pinkman (Breaking Bad).

What I loved most about this show is how it took 7 seasons for Vic to finally pay for the crimes of the first episode. It really made the series more fulfilling.