10 Best TV Show Twists You Never Saw Coming
5. Vic Kills Terry Crowley - The Shield
Generally speaking TV shows wait a good while before walloping audiences with a twist, because they tend to be far more effective when they've been built up over the course of an entire season or perhaps multiple seasons.
Yet FX's gritty cop drama The Shield wasted no time at all by shocking viewers with a brilliantly expectation-defying twist in its mere pilot episode.
The bulk of the pilot paints it as a pretty familiar police procedural focused on the operations of corrupt Detective Vic Mackey (Michael Chiklis) and his close-knit Strike Team of similarly dubiously-motivated officers.
New LAPD Captain David Aceveda (Benito Martinez) wants to clean up the force for the sake of his political career and so has inserted a mole, Terry Crowley (Reed Diamond), into the outfit in the hope of exposing the Strike Team's corrupt activities.
However, at the end of the episode when the team raids a drug dealer's apartment, Mackey grabs the dealer's gun and shoots Terry in the face with it, killing him. Mackey evidently knew what Crowley was up to and took action to protect the team.
This immediately cemented Vic as one of TV's all-time most fascinating anti-heroes - very light on the "hero" - whose increasingly indefensible actions throughout the show lead to one of the most satisfying series finales in the history of the medium.