Walton Goggins' 7-Part Breaking Bad Predecessor Has Aged Like Fine Wine

Before Breaking Bad, there was another prestige crime drama that featured Walton Goggins in an early role, and 18 years after it ended, it's only gotten better. Breaking Bad is one of those series that every other massively popular, critically acclaimed series has to be compared to.

Even the show's creator, Vince Gilligan, has to put up with the comparisons. The first season of his latest series, Pluribus, was frequently held up to BB to look for defects and cross-show themes. However, Breaking Bad isn't the first prestige crime drama to ever air, not by a long shot.

The Sopranos is an easy origin point, though there's an argument that it's the origin point for nearly every show that has aired in the 21st century. The Shield is the real inspiration for Breaking Bad, though. This seven-season crime drama aired on FX between 2002 and 2008, and is the forgotten "great" series, lost among the usual list toppers of Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, The Wire, and Mad Men.

The series stars Michael Chiklis as Vic Mackey, an LAPD Detective who works out of the fictional Farmington district. Mackey leads the Strike Team, a specialized force given extreme latitude to fight crime, which they use to cover for their criminal activity, which involves coercion, theft, and more.

The cast is rounded out by Catherine Dent, Reed Diamond, Michael Jace, Jay Karnes, Benito Martinez, CCH Pounder, and Walton Goggins in his first major role. Here he plays Shane Vandrell, another member of Strike Team, and a very bad cop in his own special way.

The Shield Paved The Way For Crime Dramas Like Breaking Bad

The Shield doesn't always get remembered the same way shows like Breaking Bad and The Sopranos do, but its influence is crucial to prestige television and crime dramas. Series like Breaking Bad, Barry, True Detective, and The Americans owe so much of their success to The Shield.

While Tony Soprano and many protagonists of The Wire are very bad people, we're not always forced to root for them in the same way we are for Vic Mackey. In those older shows, the characters we watch are part of a larger tapestry, an examination of America and the culture that makes it and it makes.

The Shield pushes the audience to go along with a truly despicable character, and that idea helped propel a show like Breaking Bad. In both series, we are told time and time again how awful Mackey and Walter White (Bryan Cranston) are, and yet, because of the complex plots and brilliant storytelling, you can't help but root for these characters.

Walton Goggins Deserved To Be A Major Star Years Before His Rise

If The Shield proved anything else, it was that we as a culture noticed Walton Goggins far too late in his career. Some understood what kind of actor he was after Justified, but for most people, it wasn't until 2015 and The Hateful Eight that he rose to prominence.

Since then, he has been one of our major stars, but his talents were already obvious back in 2002 when he first appeared in The Shield. It's worth going back for Goggins alone, to see the early career of someone who would go on to become a staple of prestige television.