11 Grim TV Moments You Won't Watch Again

The question posed by the pilot episode of Shawn Ryan's The Shield was just what kind of cop drama it was going to be - and in the episode's final moments, the audience got its answer. Throughout the show, it's made clear that racist, corrupt Vic Mackey (Micael Chiklis) was being targeted by the Department of Justice for his illegal actions. So they plant Terry Crowley in Mackey's strike team to gather the evidence necessary to bring him down.

That so much of the pilot is centered around this premise suggests that it was a standard good cop/bad cop variation we've seen 100 times before. One could easily imagine an alternate universe of The Shield which found Mackey desperate to cover-up episodic dirty deeds.

But that was snuffed out in the episode's closing moments, when Mackey takes advantage of a violent drug bust to coldly execute his would-be rival with a single shot to the head. Future deaths and ignoble suicides would follow throughout the show's seven-season run - some even more effective than Crowley's, but it's hard to deny to game-changing bullet that sent the audience a message: this was not NYPD Blue, nor Hill Street Blues. This was something new, mean and unflinching.