MILD SPOILERS

Ever heard of the Twin Films phenomena, where rival studios release films of incredibly similar, or in some cases identical, subject matter within a few months of each other? The most famous example is probably Disney’s A Bug’s Life, launched in the same year as Pixar’s Antz, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. During 1998 also, Deep Impact and Armageddon both hit the silver screen, while between March 2006 and May 2007, cinema-goers were treated to The Zodiac, Zodiac and Curse of the Zodiac – all produced by separate parties and all detailing the infamous story of the Zodiac Killer.

Perhaps that’s how HBO’s critically acclaimed The Wire first came to air just three months after The Shield hit FX back in 2002, only to conclude nine months prior to its apparent twin in 2008. Both shows centre around near identical subject matter; thought-provoking critiques of dysfunctional police departments around the turn of the millennium, in cities that had become the ultra-violent frontlines in America’s War Against Drugs – The Wire hailing out of Baltimore, Maryland (often referred to as Bodymoor, Murderland) and The Shield being set in Farmington, a fictional district of Los Angeles, California.

And yet, that is largely where the similarities end. From the sheer tones of each series to the lessons they try to teach us, The Wire and The Shield both evolved into two incredibly different television shows, both compelling in their own right and both intriguing additions to the already overpacked Crime Drama genre.

The differences in tone and style are perhaps best illustrated through the parallels with the hip-hop cultures of each geographical region. Like the east coast scene, The Wire is grungy, gloomy, dissonant and lives off the intellect of its dialogue – it’s cute turns of phrase, it’s memorable lines and most distinctively of all, the instrumental use of local dialect so authentic that some scenes require translating of slang-riddled subtitles to truly understand what is being said.

The Shield, on the other hand, representing west coast legends like Tupac, Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg, is inherently more mainstream, more accessible and more melodic. Edgy and dynamic camera angles obtained through hand-held technique may have been revolutionary for the time, but fail to cover up the fact The Shield is a largely Hollywood-esque production; theatrical, wise-cracking and action-packed throughout, with some big names (Forest Whitaker, Glenn Close) later drafted in as guest stars to further boost its natural appeal.

It favours entertainment over The Wire’s almost ultra-realism, to the point where numerous episodes end with its main set of protagonists, Farmington’s corruption-addled four-man Strike Team, staring down whichever superior they happen to have crossed in a manner equally befitting of opponents in the main event at Wrestlemania, often to a new metal backing track.

You can weave in and out of The Shield, skip a few episodes here and there or miss the middle 10 minutes because you were hanging out the laundry, and still follow the storylines with relative ease, the script containing more than enough built-in recaps to help you fill any gaps. The Wire contrastingly demands thorough examination from start to finish to truly understand what’s going on and why we’re being told it, requiring almost as much investigative skill as that shown by the policemen on screen, and that’s maybe that’s why The Wire is usually held in much greater esteem than its west coast counterpart.

The Shield pushes boundaries, often through the nature of the cases involved such as Detective Wagenbach’s relentless hunt for serial killers or the many ongoing subplots within the police station itself, a half-renovated church known simply as The Barn, like Julien Lowe’s battle with his sexuality, doubled-down on through the fact he’s entrenched in three largely homophobic communities – Christianity, Black America and the Police Force.

The Wire though, operates almost in a different stratosphere. It makes you work hard to reap the benefits of the story its telling through an almost painfully linear narrative and purposefully subtle scenes (most famously a five-minute search of a crime scene conducted by Detectives Bunk and McNulty in which they only utter the word “fuck” continuously, each time expressed with slightly different emotion), and ultimately that story becomes less and less about the police force and more and more about the city of Baltimore, its inherent systematic failings from the dockyards to City Hall and the resulting inevitability of history repeating itself, to the extent that its final scenes become a montage of younger characters making the same mistakes as those who ensembled for its first few episodes.

The Wire grows into something existential that shines a light on the dark side of American society. The Shield, meanwhile, remains content to operate largely within the same confines of which it started, tracking the accomplishments, indiscretions and emotional inner-conflicts of its main characters as they’re confronted by situations made increasingly complex by their own difficult decisions. Whilst the screen-time of The Wire’s cast members grows and fades throughout depending on which aspect of Baltimore society the story has moved to revolve around (season 4, for example, focuses on Baltimore schools), most of The Shield’s ensemble remain consistent in their significance throughout.

But that does come with one significant advantage, which is laced into the fabric of the subject The Shield is truly designed to tackle: corruption in the police force. There is corruption in The Wire also, but it’s largely of a different, more benign nature that focuses on incompetence and political objectives. Instead, the overriding fable of David Simon’s masterpiece is that the traditional idea of good guys and bad guys, especially within the context of a cop drama, is pure fallacy.

The Wire argues that in real life, there is no right or wrong or good and evil, just different people on different sides with different agendas, due to the different situations life has put them in. You root as much for the dealers slinging coke on ghetto corners as you do the detectives trying to stop them, and develop deep sympathy for its even most gruesome characters such as Omar – a shotgun-wielding stick-up artist whose gay lover is murdered as punishment for his spree of robbing stash houses – or Chris Partlow – a cold-blooded killer responsible for countless point-blank executions but nonetheless one who is humanised by subtle implications that he was sexually abused as a child.

The Shield presents a different moral conundrum altogether, walked and breathed through Michael Chiklis’ excellent portrayal of Vic Mackey; what do you do when your best cop is also your most corrupt, and even more troublingly, what do you do when he runs rings around everybody – aided by his ferociously loyal Strike Team – to get away with it time and again? Mackey’s colleagues are continuously left asking whether the hassle of catching him is actually worth the cost of not having him on the streets, and whether turning a blind eye is a necessary trade-off for curtailing the influence of LA’s increasingly powerful drug gangs.

Of course, cops bending the rules to produce results and then coming under scrutiny for it is a classic Crime Drama narrative – everybody loves an Internal Affairs inevestigation. Where Mackey differs though, is the fact he’s inherently corrupt, so inherently corrupt that he spends almost as much time making money for himself and protecting the criminals he works with as he does actual police work. Think less inappropriate interrogation techniques and bribes and more murdering colleagues and robbing the Armenian mafia for millions of dollars.

Forest Whitaker’s character, Jon Kavanaugh, who is brought in by IED to finally bring down Mackey once and for all, once declared to his superiors as they attempted to shut down his investigation…

“Vic Mackey kills cops, he deals drugs, he beats suspects. Do you know what he did yesterday? He screwed my ex-wife with the sole purpose of making this investigation seem like a personal vendetta, he may have assassinated a gang-leader, and that’s just all in one day. What do you think he’s going to do today? Tomorrow? This guy is pissing all over us, he’s pissing all over you. What does it taste like chief? Because you know what, it tastes like piss to me.”

That statement, albeit one that fell on deaf ears, captured the nature of Mackey in a nutshell – a bully, a pathological liar and a de facto gangster with a badge who insists on having his cake and eating it, no matter what cost or whose shoes he pisses on. But what’s so brilliant about The Shield is that, despite his obvious, inherent, extensive and unquestionably destructive wrong-doing, you never stop rooting for Mackey. You never wish for him to be caught, and you always want him solve the case while earning a few personal perks along the journey. You wouldn’t want it any other way.

And that, in itself, formulates a moral lesson as intriguing as The Wire’s meticulous assassination of good versus evil: The Shield’s characters and narratives teach us that good people are capable of very bad things, and sometimes bad people are capable of good things too, like the career criminals who – albeit often for some shape of reward – help end genuine crises, such as lone nut killing sprees and drug wars. It is less a question of whether the ends justify the means, and more a question of whether the ends can be justified when they’re accompanied by such significant and immoral personal gains.

So which of these twin cop dramas is the dominant one? Who is the smarter, handsomer, more successful sibling, and who is the runt stuck in the other’s shadow. It must be said that The Wire will always be revered as the more compelling, unique and revolutionary entity; ultimately, The Shield is still a conventional cop drama in most senses of the phrase, albeit revolving more predominantly around corruption, executed exceptionally well. The Wire is something different altogether, something much greater and wider-spread than the majority of its genre.

But in many ways, that’s precisely the point. These two twins may have been released at the same time and may share the same Crime Drama DNA, but have gone on contrasting journeys. Twin shows indeed, yet separated at birth, sent off to different parents and allowed to live their own lives. They tell us different stories in different cities in different ways with different moral battlegrounds, and each is a masterpiece of the genre in its own right. Don’t pick a favourite and just enjoy the rides.