The show that made FX a legitimate network is about to end. The Shield's last season begins September 2. They've got 13 episodes left to address all that Vic and the strike team have done. Sporting his Vic Mackey shaved head, series creator Shawn Ryan teased the finale in perhaps his last Shield interview.
Crave Online: How do you wrap things up in a way that can satisfy all the fans?
Shawn Ryan: I don't like selling the stuff too much. I'll just say if you're a fan of The Shield, there's nothing about the last season that will make you not like it anymore. In fact, we just sort of let ourselves go free in the last season. Excuse my language, but sh*t that you don't expect to see happen, especially between the characters, we let it happen and we follow through. It was really a fun, fun time to write that and it was fun to see the actors' reactions when they were given the scripts at the table read.
Crave Online: Is there more fan anticipation since it's been so long a wait? Does that set up undue pressure?
Crave Online: Is there more fan anticipation since it's been so long a wait? Does that set up undue pressure?
Shawn Ryan: I'm not worried about the expectations as much as just get used to not looking for you on TV. One reason why I come to a place like this and talk with people like you is hopefully you'll report back to them. It's September 2nd, we're going to be back and it's the final, final last 13 episodes.
Crave Online: Did you get to do what you wanted to all along?
Shawn Ryan: Yes. Listen, I work for some very smart people. Kevin Reilly was there the first few years and then John Landgraf after that. When you work for very smart people, you're stupid not to listen to what they say. So there were times that they disagreed with certain things we did in scripts or things in cuts and I listened to them. I'd say more often than not, I took their advice and I made changes. But they always let me be the final arbiter. It was never that any changes were imposed on me. I would say I censored myself and I censored my show far more than the network ever censored me.
Crave Online: Did how you want to end it change along the way?
Shawn Ryan: Yes. You have notions that you want to go to. Every year, I would take one or two of our writers in and we'd go into FX and we'd pitch essentially what we viewed the season as being. This last year, we pitched a certain kind of ending for a couple of the characters and we got about four or five episodes into writing it and we got a different, what I thought was a better, idea. Something that felt it was organically coming out of the episodes we were already writing. We called them up and said we had a change in plans and here's what we want to do now. I spent about five minutes talking through it, it was on the phone, speakerphone. Five minutes talking and I finished and asked what they wanted to do. There was literally about 15 seconds of silence and then John Landgraf finally just said, "Wow. Great." And that was it.
Crave Online: You don't have to say who, but does someone die?
Shawn Ryan: I don't want to say yes or no to that. First of all, people die on our show all the time. They're just not series regulars.
Crave Online: Wouldn't certain characters have to pay with their lives?
Shawn Ryan: I don't know, who are you worried about?
Crave Online: Well, Vic, and maybe Shane.
Shawn Ryan: Let me put it this way. When you're in a writer's room for a number of years like we were, the subject of killing people off always comes up. I will just say that I always took it extraordinarily seriously, so I would never do it just because we were coming to the end. Whatever decision we made in terms of your question was driven strictly by the story. So I don't think it's necessary. Having said that, if the story dictates it, maybe, but I don't even accept the premise that someone necessarily has to pay a price. I look at a movie like Crimes and Misdemeanors which I think is a particularly brilliant film. So I'm just trying to give you a perspective of where my mind was when the season began, that we didn't start from a premise of someone's got to pay a price. We didn't start with a premise of they've gotta get away with it. We started with a premise of okay, what feels real? Here's the situation. We still have a season. What do we want to do? How do we want to wrap it up? So all the cards were available to us and we ended up choosing the ones we thought were best for us.
Crave Online: Could some characters get off scot free since that happens in real life?
Shawn Ryan: Sure, absolutely. Like I said, Crimes and Misdemeanors is a perfect example of that. I'm not saying that that happens but I'm saying absolutely that it might happen and it could happen.
Crave Online: NYPD Blue kind of started it but The Shield really pushed the boundaries with language. Do you think someone will ever say f*** on TV?
Shawn Ryan: I tried a couple times on my show.
Crave Online: When would it have been?
Shawn Ryan: The first time was in the David Mamet episode that he directed in season three. I actually put it in my wife's mouth and it had to do with she was expressing a lot of rage and anger about autism, which two of their kids were afflicted with on the show. We had the phrase "this f***ing autism" which I just felt was really appropriate what a mother who has that job of raising two kids like that would say. I think I might have been able to make the case and then the damn Janet Jackson exposed her breast on the Superbowl and we were screwed.
Crave Online: Would've been hard to argue about autism.
Shawn Ryan: It was the perfect time to do it, so there was that time and there was one other time but I never felt the show suffered from it. We always had just enough salty language judiciously used to make you feel the coarseness of that world. I think, like I said, I cross out a lot more profanity that my writers wrote than I ever had standards and practices tell me to cut out because I felt that there was an appropriate amount for that show. What we have in the show is exactly the level I wanted.
Crave Online: Are there any standalone episodes in the last season?
Shawn Ryan: We always have standalone stories within episodes. There are certainly stories that begin, middle and end within the episode, but I would say especially starting at episode six, I think you'll see once episode six hits, it's very serialized and it just sort of takes off. We don't ever come down from that.
Crave Online: What's your process in the writer's room?
Shawn Ryan: I had written a long document after we made the pilot about where I wanted the first season to do. Kevin Reilly really loved that document. We stuck to a lot of the document so there were never any big fights. But you do get a lot of attention. If there's anything even very small that starts to go wrong, everyone's all over it, so there's a lot of pressure. Very quickly, I was able to talk Kevin Reilly out of making us write outlines because I made the point that for our process, it wasn't really helpful and it was a waste of time. We did it for the first five or six episodes but we would only have one notes call on scripts with the studio and the network, whereas most network shows you have to go to the studio first and you start feeling really overnoted and you lose the passion for the episodes oftentimes. So we were able to write the sort of rules of how FX would treat us on the show.
Crave Online: Since you couldn't be on set for the last episode because it filmed during the strike, how did you finish the series?
Shawn Ryan: Well, I could've been. I chose not to. They weren't boxing me out. What was hardest was making the decision. Once the decision was made, it wasn't hard at all. It wasn't just me. It was every writer on my show chose to do the same thing so it's helpful to make a principled stand as a group, rather than be out there on your own. So I had the support of the other writers. Listen, by that time, I had a lot of faith. My only concern was how was the episode going to turn out. I didn't have to have big, teary goodbyes. I knew what my contribution to the show was. I didn't need to be there for the final thing. My concern was will I ever get to edit these episodes? I knew that that was something that I might not get to do with the stand I was taking. But when the strike ended, I went back. All our editors were still available fortunately and we just went right back into it. That was actually great to be able to do something on the show after the strike ended. I wouldn't say that it was easy but I was home that day with my kids. My camera operator sent me little video clips online. Here's Michael saying goodbye. Here's Jay saying goodbye. So I actually got to see just a little bit of it.
Crave Online: You still have The Unit going on but do you have any new ideas for series?
Shawn Ryan: I'm working with a development executive on a few things that we're trying to sell within the next month. A lot time it's working with other writers which is really my favorite thing to do, is to collaborate, the way I collaborated with David Mamet on The Unit, trying to do that with some other writers whose work I respect, but I think the people who only know me for The Shield will be surprised because it'll run the gamut of genres.
Crave Online: So some non testosterone things?
Shawn Ryan: Yeah, well you know, I originally came out here to be a sitcom writer. Seriously, I'd won a comedy playwriting award. The Shield was really just my dark reaction to having been for three years on Nash Bridges. I just wrote this pilot I didn't think anyone would ever make, and then I got stuck with it for seven years. That's what people know me for now, but the show, you really start living your shows a little bit. That show was really created out of an innate fear that I had when our first child was born, like how am I going to keep this child safe in the world? A lot of Vic Mackey and The Shield sprung out of that. The Shield's been a dark place to live for seven years and I'm not a dark person at all. So I think the next things I do, I could certainly do something in that vein again. I would never try to repeat myself, but I want to explore more comedic things. I want to explore more relationship type shows and give those things a crack too. This is going to sound very egotistical but I want to try and be like the Billy Wilder of TV, in the sense that Billy Wilder made Double Indemnity but he also made Some Like It Hot and also did The Apartment. He was able to transcend any one genre and make really good stuff. You couldn't necessarily tell that it was him behind the typewriter on any of those movies. I don't want my writing to be recognized. I don't want my writing to be so unique that when you apply it to different genres, it seems like the previous show that people know you from.
Crave Online: I've always wondered, whose hair came first, yours or Vic's?
Shawn Ryan: Oh, mine I think. We all saw him as The Commish. I had shaved my head before that. He would probably say him. I think we independently both realized there's not enough hair here to keep any of it so when he came in to audition for us, he had shaved it. Cathy I think on our fifth date I had shaved my head, so it's been a while for us.
