Raising 'The Shield' — Show's success opened doors on basic cable

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — At the dawn of the new millennium, programmers at a little cable network were looking for a way to do something that had never been done before.

They wanted to go into hourlong scripted drama business — successfully.

What the guys running the then-struggling FX network didn't want was the show they ended up buying — "The Shield."

"Their only rule starting out (was) they'd do anything except a cop show," said "Shield" creator/executive producer Shawn Ryan. "And then they read the script and they decided ... to put it on the air."

(Those guys, Peter Liguori and Kevin Reilly, have since gone on to run the Fox broadcast network.)

"The Shield" is a show that Ryan himself never expected to see on the air, let alone run for 85 episodes spread over almost six years.

"There was no original plan. I mean, I wrote this as a spec script and never thought it would get made," Ryan said. (A spec script is a sample generally intended to solicit work on another show.)

And yet current FX president John Landgraf doesn't hesitate to say, "I think 'The Shield' has probably been the single-most important series in the young history of ad-supported cable television." And not just because it made FX, "a network that no one had ever heard of," a household name and a player in the TV business.

Even taking into consideration the penchant TV executives have for Hollywood hyperbole, Landgraf has a point. The success of "The Shield" changed the television landscape, offering viewers more choices on more channels than ever before.

"It was a very audacious bet," Landgraf said. "At that point in cable history, only HBO had had any success with scripted series. And basic cable had never before attempted the type of high-quality serialized dramas for which HBO was renowned."

The conventional wisdom was that scripted dramas were too expensive and too hard to get viewers to watch on basic cable. Scripted dramas has certainly been tried before, but without much success.

For example, in 2004 TNT general manager Steve Koonin told USA Today that he preferred the safety of NBA basketball, movies and "Law & Order" reruns to original dramas like "Bull" and "Witchblade," which had failed to garner much attention on his network.

"Series enhance the brand," he said. "But if the series becomes your brand, inevitably one day your brand will be canceled."