The Wire


This show could be good watching if…

- You like your shows with a liberal smattering of social commentary
- You’ve got the patience of a saint and an eternal attention-span
- You think that there aren’t enough multi-racial (okay, okay – bi-racial) casts on television
- You have an appreciation for Greek tragedy

Interested yet? Well hopefully you are, because this is by far the best show that I've ever had the good fortune to come across.

I love “The Wire.” It’s just… GUH.

Okay, right. Not squeeing. Converting people over to my new twisted obsession. 



So the thing about “The Wire” is that it’s a cop show, done in a way that is so brilliant, wide-sweeping and revolutionary that to call it a cop show is almost an insult. It’s a drug show, a political show, a comedy, a tragedy, etc. etc. etc.

Simply, it’s a novel, which is an astonishing thing to pull off on a television show. After all, writing a novel (with a format that is pretty much up to interpretation) is hard enough – just imagine trying to get that level of complexity and nuance conveyed in a visual form, maintaining all of the subtleties of the writing, and making sure you have actors talented enough to express this multi-layered message. Add on to that the necessity for an audience who can appreciate and recognize the intelligence of the thing they’re watching, and the fact that The Wire got to finish up its five seasons at all is amazing (never mind all the stop and gos along the way).

Dammit! I said I wasn’t going to squee. How about we go with a classic summary instead?

We begin The Wire with Jimmy McNulty, a homicide detective in Baltimore (the real star of the show) with an alcohol problem, a pending divorce, no respect for the BPD’s chain of command, and an inflated ego roughly the size of the city he’s policing. Not that the ego’s not earned, of course –McNulty’s a better detective than most of the guys in his division put together, but it doesn’t make him any less of a pain in the ass for his superiors to deal with. This is especially true when he gets tired of the fact that he hasn’t had a real case in years, and wants to shake up the department and go after Baltimore’s number one drug lord, Avon Barksdale, so he can take the department’s status quo and love of statistics and shove them up his boss’s ass.

Oh, Jimmy.

That enough would be more than an average show could tackle. A backward police system in a broken city with a flawed protagonist. That could keep a network show busy for at least ten years. But this is The Wire, and it’s not just about McNulty’s world. It’s also about the world of Avon Barksdale, and his nephew D’Angelo, a man just recently pardoned for a murder he committed because his uncle’s goons intimidated a key witness into silence. D’Angelo is deep in The Game, and although we can see that he’s a good solider for his uncle’s heroine dealing army, it slowly becomes apparent that he doesn’t agree with the rules that are being shoved down his throat. Here, too, is a broken system and our hero stuck in the middle of it.

I should also point out that David Simon (one of the creators of the show and a former journalist at the Baltimore Sun) is a big fan of the parallel story structure. It takes on different forms as the series goes on, but keep it in mind. Ed Burns, the co-creator, is a former Baltimore Police Department cop who helped bring down the drug kingpin Melvin Williams (he was big in the 80s, hence the outdated technology used throughout the first season), who the character of Avon Barksdale is loosely based off of. Melvin Williams later has a recurring role in the show, along with several other real-life drug dealers. The other writers on staff are a multitude of journalists and several police-novel writers, including George Pelecanos, the guy who gets the honor of writing the second to
last episode every season.

Now there are problems with The Wire – or at least things that can make a person lose patience and give up on it. This show is all about the set-up. There won’t be too many explosions you didn’t see coming, and even when something surprising does happen, you’re left with a sort of, “Well, duh,” feeling at the end of it. It’s slow, measured, and it requires active participation form the audience, otherwise the show’s going to leave you behind and make you feel stupid, which no one really likes. Similarly, it’s sad. It’s a social commentary on the systems that have destroyed Baltimore and, similarly, America, so of course it’s not going to exactly be happy, but these writers really know how to kick you when you’re down. They deserve medals for it, really. Yes, there’s humor, but when it’s stark you feel it.

But on the flip side of that, a show’s never made me happier for the hard-earned success of its characters, and I’ve never laughed so much at some of the shenanigans that get pulled. It’s a sad, happy, brilliant web that Simon and his crew weave here, and the acting of the fine cast and a highly stylized directorial job only heightens how great this show is. So I suppose, more than anything else, The Wire is so amazing because it provides a staggering example of exactly what television has the capacity to become. And with any luck, everyone will like it as much as I do, otherwise I’m going to have an even more challenging time trying to convince people that TV is good.