<table> </table> The return of &#8220;The Shield&#8221; isn&#8217;t until a week from Tuesday. But I&#8217;m giving it and the new FX show &#8220;Sons of Anarchy&#8221; early reviews for two reasons: A lot of people are gone over the Labor Day weekend and might want to preset their DVRs, and &#8220;The Shield&#8221; is far and away the series whose absence my readers have noticed the most.</p><p>The seventh and final season of &#8220;The Shield&#8221; begins at 9 p.m. Sept. 2 on FX, 15 months after the Season 6 finale aired. The show begins with one of its usual nonlinear recap reels, followed by a violent confrontation between bad cop Shane (Walton Goggins) and even badder cop Vic Mackey (Michael Chiklis). Watching these bang-bang-bang opening minutes could be compared to being hustled into a room with a bag over your head, having the bag torn off and then getting dunked in a tub of ice water. Yes, it gets your attention, but you still aren&#8217;t sure what the hell is going on.</p><p>Well, for starters, Vic knows that Shane killed their partner Lem at the end of Season 5. Vic doesn&#8217;t know, but Shane does, that the head of the so-called &#8220;Armenian money train&#8221; knows that Vic and his boys ripped them off way back in Season 2. And neither Shane nor Vic knows &#8212; but their former boss Aceveda (Benito Martinez) does &#8212; why a group of south-of-the-border outlaws are muscling into &#8220;the Farm,&#8221; as the fictional Farmington district of urban L.A. is known on the show.</p><p>Eventually the action moves back inside precinct headquarters, aka &#8220;the Barn,&#8221; and that&#8217;s when, for me, at least, familiarity returned.</p><p>Claudette (CCH Pounder), who&#8217;s running the precinct, wants Vic out. Her chief obstacles are a crippling case of lupus and Councilman Aceveda, who now wants to run the city.</p><p>In a back room at the precinct, Vic puts it succinctly. &#8220;We both know that we&#8217;re just here for survival,&#8221; he tells Aceveda. &#8220;You want to be mayor, and all I want to do is keep being a cop.&#8221;</p><p>And ultimately that&#8217;s why &#8220;The Shield&#8221; keeps so many pots on the boil at one time. Mackey has been running from justice since the first minutes of the first hour of this show. And yet he&#8217;s still a cop.</p><p>With perverse interest, we&#8217;ve followed all his escapes, watching him get pushed into a corner and then, somehow, wriggling away, whether from suspicious bosses (of which Monica, Glenn Close&#8217;s character from Season 4, might have been the most formidable), gang bosses (like Antwon Mitchell, played by Anthony Anderson, who will resurface this season) or dangerous wild cards (like the unhinged internal affairs cop played by Forest Whitaker in Seasons 5 and 6).</p><p>And it&#8217;s why, even at this late date in &#8220;The Shield&#8217;s&#8221; amazing run, we still have no idea how it will turn out. Things may end badly for Vic, or not, but this I know for sure: The next time &#8220;The Shield&#8221; cheats its viewers will be the first.</p><p>&#8220;Sons of Anarchy,&#8221; which begins at 9 p.m. Sept. 3 on FX, would have reminded me of &#8220;The Sopranos,&#8221; even if I hadn&#8217;t heard the interview with one of its producers who used the phrase &#8220;West Coast Sopranos.&#8221;</p><p>I mean, there just aren&#8217;t that many TV shows I can think of that revolve around an aging, all-male mob society that operates with impunity in its sleepy communities, that has a flotilla of female enablers watching its back and that sees its protected world crumbling under pressure from interlopers &#8212; not just aggressive cops who refuse to take a bribe but these young punks who have no respect, none whatsoever, for the values that made America what it is today.