Haven't seen The Shield, but am familiar with the Rampart Scandal of the 90's...arguably the most horrible case of police misconduct in U.S. history. Massive corruption in the anti-gang unit that worked the Rampart district, every kind of abuse of the office imaginable. If you were going for realism in a fictional tale about that time, you would definitely have repellent characters.

Anonymous -- is it just me, or is there something kind of anal about having to nail down "who" the Bard was?

People often say that it doesn’t matter who wrote the works, we still have the works themselves. Noel Coward puts this into song:

Christopher Marlowe or Francis Bacon,
The author of Lear remains unshaken.
Willie Herbert or Mary Fitton,
What does it matter? The Sonnets were written.

But it does matter. Utterly. To claim otherwise is to deny history, the nature of historical evidence, and also to sever from the works any understanding of the humanity and personality behind them. As people we want to know as much as possible about the artist responsible for the work. Even though we don’t have as much personal information about Shakespeare of the kind we should like to have – diaries, letters, account books– our desire to know as much as possible remains unabated. That is where the art of Shakespearian biography commences.

He was the Bard. The Bard abides. Can't think of any reason to plunk down money for this.

It's always seemed highly unlikely to me that a nobleman would allow someone else to take credit for his own successful work, regardless of the pressures of the time. I might believe that the nobleman's wife would--but that's another movie.