Vic Mackey's last beat-down will be on a projectionist on the Fox lot

On Monday, FX offered L.A. TV journalists a screening of "The Shield's" final two episodes - they're not sending out screeners for fear of spoilers getting out. So no spoilers here (we'll discuss the episodes closer to their air dates - the series wraps Nov. 25), except to say that fans should be wholly satisfied with the show's resonant conclusion. If you've strayed from the series, it's time to return to see whether Vic Mackey (Michael Chiklis) gets his just desserts.

Afterwards, series creator Shawn Ryan, who wrote the finale, sat down with writers to discuss his creation. I asked if how mindful he was of "The Sopranos"' famously controversial finale when putting the final touches on his own show. ("The Sopranos" was airing its last episodes just as "The Shield" was in production on its final season.)

"I was very paranoid," Ryan admitted. "We were coming up with stuff, and I was very aware the shows co-exist in a similar corner of the TV universe. We had an obligation to do something else. So I watched (the "Sopranos" swan song) differently than anyone else - petrified that they'd send us scrambling to the chalkboard to come up with something different."

Fortunately, "Sopranos" ended with its notoriously ambiguous cut-to-black (an ending Ryan confessed he "wasn't crazy about"), and so Ryan and company were able to hold on to their ideas.

"We never settled for the easy way out" in concluding the series, Ryan said. "I was always suspicious of ideas that came to us in the first hour of talking - if they came to us that easily, they would probably occur to the audience, too. You want it so that the audience doesn't get ahead of you."

Oh, and by the way, before the screening, Ryan and an FX publicist made a special point of talking about the end credits, that they did something with them so that FX wouldn't be able to squeeze them to the side of the screen and run a promo, as has become standard practice, only to learn that the network had already decided to let them take up the full screen. So this was something kind of special, we were told. And Ryan and the publicist had explained this very clearly to the projectionist, so that he wouldn't shut off the projector before the credits rolled. So what happened? Naturally, another projectionist took over - and shut off the projector just as the credits were about to roll.

They were able to cajole the projectionist into showing them, but at that point it was kind of anticlimactic. Still, that was about the only disappointment in those two last episodes.