is easy to sympathize with. He writes, "It's hard to say that Vic Mackey was even an anti-hero, as anti-heroes at least have redeemable qualities. That's not to say that Mackey didn't exhibit some fine police work at times. Mackey put away bad guys just as well as the best TV cops. He did have a family that he cared for, but with Mackey you got a general sense that his family was just a buoy that at the back of his mind he needed to help him validate all the evil things he had done. [...] In the very first episode, Mackey murders a detective and covers it up solely for the purposes of hiding his corruption. For Mackey, it was all about his "retirement fund". [...] When the team came across an illegal Armenian money train, policing was not at the forefront of his thoughts; it was all about 'How can we steal this thing? Pete Clark for the Evening Standard also remarks that "the only flicker of humanity in Mackey is his desire to get back his family", but even then "The reason for this is not love, but the burning desire to get back what rightly belongs to him." In a less than complimentary review, Ken Tucker, in an article for Entertainment Weekly, takes issue with some of the scenes depicting Mackey's brutality, in particular a scene from the series two episode "Dead Soldiers", writing "a squirmy scene in which Mackey holds a naughty man's face against the red-hot coils of a stovetop. Rather than seeming like the logical climax to a harrowing manhunt, the scene comes off as an abrupt but contrived display of shock tacticsa way to maintain media-buzz momentum." He adds "The Shield seems to think that its core premise (Mackey: a hero who does brutal, illegal things) is so intrinsically engrossing, we're not going to notice how recklessly dumb his actions are." Daniel Feinberg and Inkoo Kang of The Hollywood Reporter highlight that police brutality in the United States is an issue seldom touched upon on television. They both use Vic Mackey to highlight that when such brutality is portrayed, it is often rationalised as necessary. Kang states that The Shield "sensationalized Vic Mackey (Michael Chiklis) and his crew's aggression while frequently contextualizing their violence as part of some larger effort — and therefore of strategic necessity (even if there was never