Shawn Ryan wasn't sure which surprised him more: that somebody wanted to make his insane cop-show script -- full of four-letter words, racist rants, unspeakable violence and profoundly anti-social behavior -- into a TV show or that the interest was coming from an obscure little cable channel devoted almost exclusively to reruns of desiccated old 1970s programs.

''I had done the script mainly as a writing sample, to use when I applied for jobs,'' he recalls. 'And when I heard FX was looking at it, my first thought was, `That's not even really a network. That's where I watch M*A*S*H reruns.' ''

Not for long. The Shield, Ryan's over-the-top story about renegade cops so violent and crooked that they could barely be distinguished from the criminals they pursued, would redefine the police genre, turn FX into one of the most influential networks in television and even remake the face of basic-cable television.

''Before The Shield, basic cable was generally considered a place where you went to watch old reruns of Trapper John, M.D.,'' says Robert Thompson, head of Syracuse University's Center for the Study of Popular Culture.

``Now it's the home of high-quality, high-pedigreed shows. And FX is right up there with HBO as one of the most exciting places on television.''

The Shield starts its seventh and final season Tuesday, but the mark it left on television will linger. It doubled FX's ratings overnight and turned the channel -- originally designed as a vehicle to wring some extra revenue out of old movies and TV series produced by Fox's studios -- into a creative force to be reckoned with.

From Starved, a poop-and-puke sitcom about eating disorders, to Over There, an excruciatingly tense drama about U.S. soldiers in Iraq, there was little FX executives weren't willing to try. Even when they weren't commercial successes, the shows were provocative, challenging the conventional wisdom that basic cable was a wasteland of reruns and network castoffs.

And enough were commercial successes that other cable channels began taking chances. From the drunken, misogynist ad executives of AMC's Mad Men to the wrung-out, rehabbing detective hero of Saving Grace, cable's most celebrated shows trace their roots to TheShield.

As The Shield heads for what promises to be a spectacularly violent conclusion, there's a fluctuating mixture of melancholy and pride around FX. Though the network has had heaping helpings of Nielsen ratings and critical acclaim for the series that have followed, The Shield -- it's no longer even FX's top-rated show -- paved the way for everything that followed.

''If FX were a building and you laid a cornerstone, it would be The Shield,'' says network president John Landgraf. ``You can count everything FX has ever done in terms of before and after The Shield. But FX has proven not to be a one-trick pony. We'll be diminished by losing The Shield but not like HBO, which lost Rome, Deadwood and The Sopranos in the span of a year and hasn't been able to replace them.''

`SONS OF ANARCHY'

Landgraf hopes he has a replacement for The Shield on hand with Sons of Anarchy, a new drama that premieres Wednesday night. Certainly it follows squarely in The Shield's cockeyed tradition of mapping new territory on the TV frontier: It's a family drama about a motorcycle gang.

And we're not talking about The Waltons. The family matriarch, for instance, celebrates the birth of her first grandchild by trying to murder the baby's mother in her hospital bed with an overdose of meth. ''I love this character,'' says Katey Sagal, who plays the Lady-Macbeth-in-a-leather-jacket Gemma Morrow. ``I have that instinct where I feel I could kill someone who threatened my kids. But she might actually do it.''

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