Friday, April 16, 2010
Since mid-January of this year, I’ve been taking care of some unfinished business: catching up on all five seasons of the acclaimed HBO series The Wire, a landmark in television drama whose excellence shames me for having missed, neglected or otherwise ignored it during its original run, back when I actually subscribed to HBO.
I can offer no reasonable or acceptable excuse for my offense. After all, The Wire’s creator, onetime Baltimore Sun reporter David Simon, literally wrote the book that became one of my favorite TV series of all time, NBC’s Homicide: Life on the Street. Simon wrote for that series after being downsized by the Sun, and his education in the creation of television drama — facilitated by some of the best writers, producers and directors working in the medium — fused seamlessly with both the reportorial style of storytelling Simon mastered in his previous life in that other, slowly dying but still tenacious medium and the novelistic approach of such esteemed series contributors as George Pelicanos, Dennis Lehane and Richard Price, crime-fiction authors all. Combine those styles with Simon’s and writer-producer Ed Burns’ intimate knowledge of the series’ main character — the city of Baltimore itself — and you have nothing less than a perfect storm of narrative fiction.
The Wire is an American tragedy on a grand scale — the slow, systemic death of a once-great city, one person, one neighborhood, one establishment at a time. It is goodness outnumbered, righteousness outgunned, innocence unprotected and progress underfunded to the point of bankruptcy and defeat. It is the truth beaten, bloodied and left for dead in the street because the lies are too big not to be believed. It is the road to hell made manifest by the cumulative wreckage of good intentions scattered along its path. It is the devil buying up real estate one corner at a time. It is the lowering of standards to accommodate the bottom line. It is David running out of stones and getting the shit kicked out of him by Goliath.
Which is not to say that The Wire is without humor. On the contrary, it is often slyly, matter-of-factly, darkly, even laugh-out-loud funny, without ever going for the cheap, easy joke. Its humor instead reveals character, underscores theme, relieves tension and, most importantly, respects the intelligence of its audience, directing our attention to a moment’s absurdity with a nod instead of a Klieg light. As a writer, I can say that rare was the episode in which a beat or a throwaway line didn’t fill me with professional jealousy.
As I neared the end of the series, its particular genius — but one example of it, anyway — became clear to me: Like Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather before it, The Wire made me identify with its criminal element on a deeply personal level.
The difference being that, in all my countless viewings of the Godfather saga, I have never stopped feeling sympathy for Michael, whose tragic failure to make the Corleone family a legitimate enterprise is the engine that drives his and the saga’s dramatic arc. On the contrary, there was rarely, if ever, an instance when I didn’t want justice duly administered to the criminals of the Wire’s Baltimore. That is, after all, what we, the audience, traditionally desire most from a crime drama: a resolution in which the cops prevail over the robbers, right prevails over wrong, good prevails over evil. And yet I can name off the top of my head a half dozen figures in The Wire’s criminal underworld — though I won’t spoil them here — whose death at the hands of other criminals affected me in ways I hadn’t anticipated.1
Simply put: It was often at the moment of each character’s demise that I discovered that I cared for them, that they had ceased to be archetypes or caricatures in my imagination. They had become real to me, and I mourned the sudden, all too poignant loss of their unrealized potential.2
On the side of quote-unquote good, the tragedy lies in the flawed natures of the characters and institutions representing good. Unusually for the genre The Wire both occupies and defies, death rarely befalls a Baltimore street cop, detective, politician or city official, yet they all find themselves, one way or another, on the receiving end of tragedy’s bitch slap. As often as not, they bring it on themselves — Det. Jimmy McNulty, the show’s de facto star as portrayed by Dominic West, being the standout among them.
Over the course of the series, this futile inability to prevail — over the system, over the enemy, over paralyzing inertia or hellbent momentum, over corruption, ambition and hubris, over one’s own personal demons and shortcomings — emerges not as a free pass from the writers that allows characters to cheat death but as an ineluctable path to fates more pointed, personal and illuminating than death.3
In the world of The Wire, everybody gets precisely what’s coming to them.
In the midst of this rich tapestry of characters, two figures in particular stand out for me:
The first is the confidential informant known as Bubbles, who begins his arc as Det. Shakima Greggs’ eyes and ears on the street and evolves into nothing less than the series’ greatest example of redemption. Portrayed with warmth, pathos and humor by Andre Royo, Bubbles is the Wire equivalent of the proverbial hooker with a heart of gold: a scheming but sweet-natured heroin addict, adrift in the Baltimore underworld, beset at every turn by his own weakness, vulnerability and powerlessness over his addiction. His transformation over the course of the series — a body of work in itself, if you will — his every moment onscreen marked by struggle, stands as one of the most remarkable performances I’ve ever watched. I defy you to watch the series and point to a scene in which Royo is guilty of acting.
The second noteworthy figure is stickup man extraordinaire Omar Little, portrayed by the insanely charismatic Michael K. Williams. Unlike Royo, Williams may in fact be guilty of acting, but that is only because Omar is swagger personified, bravado incarnate, audacity made flesh and walking among us. He is a curious combination of Robin Hood and Anton Chigurh, an inexorable force, an instrument of vengeance hovering over the streets, corners and alleys of East Baltimore like a malevolent mist. Preying only on drug dealers, never on civilians, Omar is patient, methodical, ruthlessly efficient, fiendishly clever and bound by his own strict moral code — the archangel Michael with a sawed-off shotgun instead of a sword. (That Omar is, incidentally, revealed to be a) a homosexual, generally monogamous, and b) deeply devoted to the churchgoing grandmother who raised him adds unexpected depth to a character who was already one of the most complex and colorful antagonists ever written for the medium.)
Remarkably, over its five season run (2002-08), The Wire earned a grand total of only two Emmy nominations — both for writing — and no wins, overshadowed by its HBO stablemate The Sopranos, which, during the same period, racked up 55 nominations and 12 wins.4 Notwithstanding all that hardware, I would argue that The Wire is the superior series, broader in scope, truer to its vision, more fully realized, and smart enough to quit while it was ahead.
Is The Wire, as some have claimed, the best series ever? Having only just watched the series finale, I am still turning it all over in my head, and this entry is by no means comprehensive or conclusive. That said, it has definitely earned a spot on my own short list.
Because it is both a master class in dramatic writing and a virtual graduate-level syllabus of dissertations on criminology, business administration, political science, public education, social reform, and journalistic ethics,5 I will almost certainly circle back, watch again, peel away more layers, and continue to learn from and be surprised by The Wire.
1 As actor Wendell Pierce, who portrays Baltimore Homicide Det. Bunk Moreland on the show, very astutely noted on a DVD commentary track, no one who watched the show will ever be able to drive past one of those street-corner drug dealers without imagining his back story and seeing his basic humanity.
2 Except Marlo Stanfield. I was just itchin’ to see that stone-cold motherf—r get got, yo.
3 Witness, for example, Ziggy Sobotka (played by James Ransone) — stevedore scion, hapless schemer, wannabe smuggler, thug and big shot, easily one of the four or five most annoying characters in the history of television and a living exemplar of the phrase “stupid should hurt.” Rarely have I waited with such breathless anticipation, from episode to episode, for a character so destined to have a cap busted in his ass to be summarily dispatched and put out of everyone’s misery, dramatis personae and audience members alike. In typical Wire fashion, however, Ziggy’s fate is one of devastating self-realization in the aftermath of becoming that which he most wanted to be. A brilliant dramatic reversal, totally worth the price of admission to season two.
4 All told, The Sopranos received 111 Emmy nominations and 21 wins.
5 No joke: Professors at a number of major American universities presently teach courses in which The Wire is used as a textbook, as it were.
