Ellen Gray | Looking for the right ending

THE SHIELD. 10 tonight, FX.

I'VE BEEN thinking a lot about endings lately.

Hard not to, really, with HBO's "The Sopranos" now a third of the way through its final nine, and the producers of ABC's "Desperate Housewives" and "Lost" indicating that they don't share "Law & Order" producer Dick Wolf's obsession with outlasting "Gunsmoke."

Even the CW's "7th Heaven" is planning a May 13 series finale - just a year after its first one failed to take.

On FX, "The Shield" is in its next-to-last season, that very knowledge a luxury too often found only on cable.

I might have wrapped up things sooner there, before it began to seem that Vic Mackey (Michael Chiklis) had more lives than a cat.

Or maybe not. I'd certainly not have missed Glenn Close's season. Or Forest Whitaker's, which extended into this one.

And there's something compelling about watching Vic tear apart half of Los Angeles searching for the guy who wielded the grenade that killed Lem (Kenneth Johnson), never realizing the culprit's right under his nose.

"Shield" creator Shawn Ryan already had finished the 10 episodes that make up the last chunk of this season - the first 11 aired last fall - when he was cornered by a few reporters at a Fox party earlier this year.

So I asked him the question we always ask the writers of serialized dramas: Do you know how it's going to end?

"I don't know," he said. "I get ideas. Let me put it this way - before we start filming this year, I'll know how it ends. But I'm still figuring things out."

Not that Ryan's as much of a seat-of-the-pants writer as those daredevils over on "24."

"We have a very good plan for each season," he said, but for the last, "I sort of have a final image in mind, but not really a final story . . . We'll see if I get to use my final image or not."

Filming begins in June, with the final 13 episodes likely to begin airing in 2008.

Ryan knows that on FX, it's easier to craft an exit than it might be on a bigger network.

"The Shield" will end next season "because I feel like it's the right time to end it and end it strong," he said confidently.

The "Lost" producers might mean it when they say they're planning their endgame, but "I'm sure [ABC entertainment president] Steve McPherson will have something to say about that," Ryan said.

"An unfortunate reality of television is that a show really can live and exist without anyone, certainly anyone behind the camera, and . . . in some cases, anyone [in particular] in front of the camera," he said.

Television executives have to care about money, he said, but "at a certain point, if you worry that your network is much more concerned . . . with commerce than they are with the artistic aspect of the show, then who's going to safeguard that show? You have to. You know, the creators and executive producers do."

So I'm guessing I wasn't the only one a bit startled Sunday night by a storyline on "The Sopranos" that had a young Asian man (Ken Leung) with violent tendencies hanging out with Uncle Junior (Dominic Chianese) at the mental hospital where both are patients.

I don't know if television writers are unusually prescient when it comes to violence or if the medium's just so varied that every real-life tragedy seems to have a corresponding bit of fiction on the schedule, but events like those at Virginia Tech last week generally are followed by some scrambling on the part of TV execs to avoid inadvertent links to the news.

Fox, for instance, last week yanked an episode of "Bones" because it involved death on a college campus. In the wake of Columbine, the WB delayed the airing of a "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" episode containing far-from-realistic high school carnage (the town's mayor turned into a giant serpent, for one thing).

Meanwhile, of course, TV series continue to tackle school shootings in more realistic fashion, perhaps hoping they won't be caught in a coincidental bit of bad scheduling.

"The Sopranos" episode, which was filmed long before last week's massacre, shouldn't necessarily have set off alarms.

Carter Chong, like the actor who played him, was apparently Chinese-American, not Korean.

While his involvement with Junior seems to have incited him to aggression, it's not clear what led to his original commitment, and the only mention of campus violence is in connection with a fellow patient, a professor.

Maybe if Asian males weren't still something of a rarity on television - "Lost" and "Heroes" being two notable exceptions - this one popping up at this particular time would have been less distracting.

I really don't know. *

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