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Did you watch The Shield this season?
It's become commonplace for stars -- not super-duper huge stars, but legitimate household-name-y type stars -- to show up for these sort of extended cameos on cable shows. Glenn Close did it last year, doing an admirable (if not particularly strenuous) job of playing the stern new captain on The Shield. The show got a bit of heat -- Glenn Close is going TV! -- while the actor got a steady gig without the long-term commitment. Milk the cow, don't buy the cow, that sort of thing.
But Close bolted, of course, because one season is a fling but two seasons is a marriage, and pretty soon before you know it you're Christine Lahti. The Shield, naturally, had to make lemonade of this citrusy situation, and so drafted another sort-of star -- the estimable Forest Whitaker -- to come in and play Internal Affairs detective Jon Kavanaugh.
Yowza powza, was that ever a good idea.
We always knew Forest Whitaker was a talented actor. We've seen Ghost Dog and The Crying Game and Good Morning, Vietnam and, you know, Panic Room. But what Whitaker's done on The Shield greatly exceeded our expectations.
See, Close kind of breezed in and knocked off some quality work, like a visiting maestro at a second-tier city orchestra (and this is not to denigrate The Shield' s fine ensemble cast, including, but not limited to, Michael Chiklis, Walton Goggins, and the incomparable CCH Pounder). But Whitaker's holding a clinic. Whitaker's tearing shit up. Whitaker's like the guy who shows up at the ping-pong table and watches the other people play for awhile, then steps up and says -- softly, politely -- "Hey, did you know if you hold the racquet this way, you can do this," then uses some crazy-ass funky grip to make the ball float and dip in ways that have everyone looking for the hidden strings.
See, the IA detective is an easy part to play, usually. You know, you run around, froth at the mouth, scream about injustice, throw in a line like "This isn't what being a cop is all about!" Or, you can do what Forest Whitaker's done -- that is, if you're Forest Whitaker -- and create this monstrous, compelling, frightening, sympathetic, righteous, slightly loco, completely fascinating character who feels downright Shakesperean in his relentless whipsaw toggling between humanity and insanity.
Yeah. Wow. That's good TV.
The Shield has a fundamental problem, which is that every season -- and the current one wrapped up this week -- pretty much has to hinge on the same central question: when will Vic's lawlessness catch up with him? This year, though, the addition of Whitaker made for one of the best seasons yet. We don't know if Whitaker's going to return -- the season finale left it open -- but it would be great if Whitaker came back next year. Or got his own show. Or generally kept putting on the kind of ongoing spectacle he's been doing this year on The Shield, somewhere -- anywhere. (We'd love to see him land a role on Deadwood.)
All of which made us wonder: should he be more famous? He's pretty famous. He doesn't seem to want to be more famous. So we're only going to give it a slight top-up.
And add this: while we hate to define actors by race -- then again, Hollywood does -- we just want to point out that, as the handsome and not-at-all humble Terrence Howard is being ushered into that most rarefied of clubs, the Black Male A-List Club, there's this guy, Forest Whitaker, who right now is doing better work than Samuel L. Jackson, Laurence Fishburne, Denzel Washington, Morgan Freeman, and, yes, Terrence Howard combined.
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