How to Watch The Shield Online in 2020: It’s Gonna Be a Long Night

The Shield is a fantastic exercise in storytelling that follows a group of corrupt police officers in Los Angeles during the first decade of the 21st century. It aired between 2002 and 2008, so it was overshadowed by The Wire, making it less of a hit than it should have been. This guide on how to watch The Shield will set you on the right path to experience it, though.

At its core, The Shield is a procedural that follows the officers of the Barn, a police precinct in Farmington, a fictional district of LA. The focus is on Vic Mackey and his three henchmen, who form an unorthodox strike team that goes after crime in their own way. Their special status has led them to believe they’re above the law, causing them to become so dirty it defies belief.

What makes the situation so intriguing, and sets The Shield apart from the million other cop shows, is that not only is the main protagonist also a villain, he’s also deeply sympathetic and likeable. That’s in no small part because of the fantastic performance by Michael Chiklis, who has you rooting for Vic and the others even while they’re committing brutal crimes.

Add to that tautly told storylines featuring an anemic nerd turning into a master interrogator, a diabolically ambitious police captain, as well as season-long appearances by Forest Whitaker and Glenn Close, and you get seven seasons of TV that’ll have you on the edge of your seat. Let’s see where to watch The Shield online.

Watch The Shield Online

Unlike some iconic shows, such as Doctor Who, you have several options for legally watching The Shield online. It originally aired on FX, so you can find all seven seasons on FX+, the network’s streaming service. It only costs $6 per month and you get a free seven-day trial. 

Like many U.S.-based services, though, it’s only available to residents of the U.S., meaning you’ll need a virtual private network to spoof your location. A VPN routes your internet connection through a secure server, not only allowing you to pretend like you’re where that server is, but also encrypting your connection, hiding your presence on the internet.

They’re a great bit of technology, and a quick look around shows that our overall best VPN, ExpressVPN, works just fine with FX+, so we recommend giving it a spin. It comes with a 30-day refund policy in case you’re not happy with it.

That said, if you’re not too interested in spending that money because you already have enough streaming subscriptions, you have other options, too. The Shield is also on Amazon Prime Video, but we recommend pairing it with one of our best VPNs for Amazon Prime Video picks unless you want your data hoovered up by Bezos’ data collection thugs.

A third option is to watch The Shield is Hulu, which, like FX+, is only available in the U.S. If you’re outside of the U.S. and want access to Hulu’s large streaming library, check out our best VPN for Hulu selection to get access.

Netflix doesn’t have the rights to The Shield anywhere in the world, so you’re out of luck if you’re a hardcore fan of the service. You might consider a more comedic twist on the cops-n-robbers genre instead, and check out our guide on how to watch Brooklyn Nine-Nine

Watch The Shield Online for Free

If you’re not a fan of paying to watch shows, though, you can always go the illegal route. There are several options open to you, the easiest of which is streaming websites. We looked at some of those websites and found that at the time of writing only Putlocker offered streams of The Shield for free. All the links we found on other websites were dead as doornails.

As we mentioned in our article on how to watch Outlander, watching anything on Putlocker involves navigating your way through a minefield of pop-up ads, many of them laced with malware of some description. If you’re going to use the website, install one of the best pop-up blockers and the best antivirus software or bad things will happen to your computer.

Watch The Shield with Kodi

As with illegal streaming, it’s hard to find The Shield on Kodi. A quick look shows that only Poseidon, which you’ll find under one of the best Kodi repositories, Kodil, carries it at present.

If you’re reading this and have no idea what Kodi is, but you’re intrigued, check out our Kodi guide to get started with it. That said, because using Kodi isn’t exactly legal, you may also want to take a look at our best VPN for Kodi article to find out how to protect yourself against nasty fines for watching pirated content.

The Shield Torrents

The last option we can give you is to simply torrent The Shield. It’s about as illegal as using Kodi or Putlocker, but it comes with the problem that it’s easy to get caught doing it. We recommend using one of our best VPNs for torrenting if you go the torrenting route or face stiff fines and maybe even jail time.

The granddaddy of torrenting websites, The Pirate Bay — or in this case, a mirror of it — has plenty of options, but the massive files with all seven seasons look like the best bet. A quick look around alternative torrent websites shows there’s no shortage of The Shield torrents there, either.

Final Thoughts

The Shield is a groundbreaking show that is an absolute must-see for anybody who likes a good story told well. Though it features the boys in blue doing their job on the surface, it’s a wonderful study into good and evil and, at times, the human condition. Hopefully, one of the avenues above will help you watch it.

What do you think of The Shield? Do you love it or hate it? Do you have tips for things you feel we’ve missed? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below and, as always, thank you for reading.