While The Sopranos’ return has garnered the bulk of the attention in the press, another groundbreaking, critically lauded drama is also back, one that features a compelling, yet problematic gay character who, unlike poor doomed Vito, has a more uncertain future

I’m talking about The Shield, FX’s gritty police drama featuring Michael Chiklis as Vic Mackey, a corrupt cop working in a section of LA ravaged by gang violence. The show premiered in 2002, and is now in its 6th season before a final season set for 2008.

From the very first episode, officer Julien Lowe (Michael Jace) has been a featured character, one who, like The Sopranos’ Vito, defies stereotypes; he’s a tough cop fully capable of standing up to violent criminals and resorting to violent responses when necessary.

Julian is also something we rarely see in network TV – not just a gay person of color but someone actively struggling with his sexuality, which he views as a violation of the religious doctrines he upholds. While I’d prefer to see more gay characters on television who are out and proud, I recognize that Julian’s struggle is one all too real for many gay men, and The Shield’s handling of it is in keeping with the harsh, dark realism with which it handles almost everything.

I also thought that, in its first seasons, the show used Julien to make an interesting commentary about the morality not of sexuality but of the closet. It’s not Julien’s sexuality that leads him down a morally compromised path, but his being in the closet that does.

This occurs when, trying to hide his sexuality from his cop colleagues, he participates in the brutal bashing of a cross-dressing perp (a situation that becomes cruelly ironic when Julien himself is subjected to this kind of bashing from his peers). And it occurs when Mackey utilizes his knowledge of Julien’s sexuality to blackmail him into covering up his own illegal dealings.

When Julien underwent sexual conversion therapy and decided to get married, I thought the show was setting this up as a part of his struggle, one that might lead to more conflict surrounding his sexuality but ultimately help him come to terms with it. What's deeply troubling is that this development instead seems to have settled his sexuality, which has since only emerged occasionally, usually in the context of police cases with a gay element.

We know next to nothing about how his marriage is going, or if he’s had any more sexual encounters with other men. Given how much the show focused on these issues in its first few seasons, it’s strange how those plotlines have dropped. And in fact, Julien as a character has been pushed to the sidelines in recent seasons, primarily called upon by superior officers to restrain violent suspects.

But I’m also hopeful that Julien’s story is not over. In this penultimate season, The Shield is clearly gathering loose plot strands, many dating back to the first season, and building toward what promises to be a pretty dramatic concluding series.

I’m hoping it returns to Julien as well, and I’m watching to see what kind of ending the show will give him. It might not be a happy one, but I hope that, like so much else on The Shield, it at least rings true.