10. (The best is, indeed, last. Sorry about the length.)
The Wire: Simply put, the best television show I’ve ever seen-- and if you’ve been paying attention, you know I watch A LOT of TV, so I am pretty equipped to make that statement mean something. You also know I don’t resort to hyperbole much, so you know I mean it when I say: This is the best television show I’ve ever seen.
Created by former journalist David Simon and former homicide detective and schoolteacher Ed Burns, The Wire explores urban city America in the creators’ hometown of Baltimore. More specifically, the streets of East Baltimore. Using characters who are drug dealers, police, dock workers, addicts, school teachers, politicians, lawyers, newspapermen, and just regular people, the show explores the greater questions about our society and how we are failing it.
Simon explained that each season was meticulously planned out as a “novel”, with each episode being a single chapter of that novel. It may sound pretentious to describe it that way, but it’s very accurate. Each season told a story. There were no cliffhangers. The first couple of episodes set the scene for the season, the middle episodes furthered the plots, and the last two or three episodes contained the climax, with the last episode usually having the aftermath of the season’s events. Each season finale contained a montage with snippets showing what most of the primary and secondary characters were up to; a true ending to that story.
The first season introduces us to the series and focuses on the drug war. It’s not a new statement to say the War on Drugs is a complete failure, but by showing the struggles between police and drug dealers on the East Baltimore streets, we got a very human picture of the toll this farce has taken. Cops are hamstrung by the legalities of convoluted lawsuits that have changed the nature of the work, and the increasingly business-minded “drug lords” are able to stay one step ahead of them because of it. The Major Crimes Unit is formed to deal with the increasing threat of the drug trade, but the unit is composed of the dregs of the police force; the people the department wants to “lose”. They have become pariahs amongst their own people simply because they have always put the job—or honor-- first. The unit is expected to fail, even though they have some of the best police in the city on it.
The second season moves to the docks of Baltimore Harbor, which are quickly becoming less relevant to the city and the country as a whole. East European women brought to America via a cargo container to become paid escorts die on their trip, and the Major Crimes Unit gets put on that case as it’s expected to be a dog. Meanwhile, the drug trade heats up on the streets.
The third season deals with reform through a number of storylines. First, an honest and noble police major on his way to retirement and constantly berated by his superiors in front of his peers for not lowering his crime numbers takes a different approach to the drug problem: what if he secretly stopped cracking down on drug crime and corralled the drug trade into an “open market” of empty lots? It’s a brilliant idea, and the series takes a very close look at the ramifications of that idea. The next major storyline follows a young city councilman who wants to better the city and decides to become a crusader for major change. But he learns he has to play the game to be successful; it’s a catch-22: he can’t create change without working the system that makes change nearly impossible. The third main reform storyline follows a drug lord’s attempts to funnel his drug money into a more legitimate enterprise, real estate, in the hopes of getting even more money.
The fourth season takes a critical look at the school system through the stories of four at-risk boys from the streets. The school system is broken. Teachers and administrators, facing an ever-worsening budget, have been forced to no longer teach the kids general information, but teach the kids to be successful for the test that determines how much government funding they’ll get. One rookie teacher is learning the hard way that he can’t actually teach—and he also can’t seem to make a difference to his kids. On the other side of the fence, the kids from the streets are expected to work the drug trade to make good money and take care of their families—or just because they have no other alternatives in life. They have no incentive to learn at school because they all expect to be dead within a few years. Meanwhile, the police force can’t figure out why the homicide victim rate has gone down. They know the murders are still happening because the drugs are still out on the streets; they just can’t find the bodies.
Finally, the fifth season asks the question: if we know things are bad, why can’t we make the changes needed to better society? The focus is on the media, which is supposed to shine a light on the problems in society, by specifically following the struggles of the Baltimore Sun newspaper, which has been greatly weakened due to corporate greed, lazy writing, and reduced readership. Also, the police force is experiencing the effects of massive budget cuts—which hurt the efforts to reign in the drug traffic. And the city is experiencing a shortfall of money due to pumping so much of it into the schools; now the police department can’t react to the rash of murders that popped up. But not everyone is willing to settle for “there’s nothing that can be done”; they take actions to make their own and others’ lives better. A newspaper editor still demands the truth in an increasingly hostile corporate structure and is one of the last remaining voices of integrity in his newsroom. A drug renegade seeks revenge for a death and takes on an entire gang, one person at a time. A former addict tries his hand at recovery—and self-forgiveness. A detective forces an increased police budget by committing a terribly unethical act. A mayor fights the system to make the city better. And the whole series comes racing to a very satisfying (and yes: the best I’ve ever seen) series finale.
This is a very challenging series. It demands that viewers pay attention. It took two-and-a-half seasons for me to start putting all the pieces of the puzzle together; to “get” the storytelling method. This show takes a very real-world approach to how it tells its stories. Characters are not reintroduced every episode, events are not recounted step-by-step. You have to work out the relationships yourself. But telling the story like that also gives a massive payoff. You can see how one bad choice by a police officer can affect his career—and then you can trace how that single choice damages others’ lives. There are reverberations that go through the dozens upon dozens (and that’s literal) of characters.
The show also deals with heroes and villains in different ways. One of the best cops on the show makes terrible moral decisions—and constantly sabotages his career. And the worst drug dealers are often shown to be human; they are just doing the only thing they know. There were a number of dealers I really liked and was devastated when they were killed. And speaking of killing: you’d expect a police show like this to have lots of gunfights as that’s what we’re used to seeing in TV and movies. But because this show deals with those things in a real-world fashion, we see that gun fights are short—usually not even a fight at all. The drug dealers who get on the wrong side of a rival gang are usually sneaked up on, and get a “pop-pop” to the back of the head. These men/boys know that to start a street-wide gunfight is a losing proposition (and often involves immediate police action), so it’s quick and dirty—and done.
Every aspect of this show is nearly flawless. The writing is outstanding. I was flabbergasted to learn that there were more than one or two writers; that there was a whole team of very accomplished authors working on the scripts. Every episode feels like one part of a larger story, and there is a “flow” from episode to episode that teams of writers usually can’t accomplish.
The directing is extremely skillful. With the vast number of characters on the show, every scene is perfectly timed to fit exactly how it needs to in relation to the story. There are very few “wasted” scenes because each second is so precious that they couldn’t afford to have any weak moments. And even the more humorous scenes (some of which I’ve posted in this blog) fulfill a purpose, whether it is to ease tension or give us a glimpse into the larger aspects of the characters.
Finally, the acting. Magnificent. There were amazing things happening there. The show is about the city-- the characters are just ways to humanize the story—so every actor had the more-difficult-than-usual task of getting us to care about their characters. Even with all that, and with the fact that there were, easily, one hundred “important” characters (imdb.com lists 324 cast members) in these 60 episodes, I cared. I cared very deeply about many of them. Weeks after I watched the last episode, I still have tears well up in my eyes when I think about some of them. The writing and directing played a key part, but the actors playing those characters made these characters very much human. I doubt I’ll forget about any of them; they felt that real to me.
And a final thought on the acting: while there are a number of great, accomplished (or well on their way to becoming accomplished) actors in these roles, I found it very interesting that a large number of the minor characters were played by non-traditional actors. Most surprising to me was that the Deacon (a church-going man who is working at a grassroots level to better the community) was played by Melvin Williams, who was one of the largest drug lords of Baltimore of decades ago. He was arrested (by co-creator/producer Ed Burns when he was a cop, and the journalist who covered the arrest was creator/writer/producer David Simon), convicted, got rehabilitated as he did his time, and became a part of this show when he helped the producers learn about how the drug trade really works. And they cast him as a very inspirational role model for the community on the show because that’s the role he has tried to take in his life since his jail stint.
Another non-traditional acting choice was made in Felicia “Snoop” Pearson. I just finished her autobiography Grace After Midnight, and I learned that this woman, who died twice when she was born (she was a crack-baby) and grew up as a girl who liked doing boy things better (which involved working the Baltimore street corner drug trade), ended up in jail, got rehabilitated, tried getting legitimate jobs (that were ultimately taken from her when they learned of her felonious past) and then ended up back on the streets, was saved because of this show. She had tried so hard to be the best worker at the intensive-labor jobs she got out of jail, but was still thrown out when she admitted her past and ultimately had to go back to the corners because she had nowhere else to work. She was at a club when Michael K. Williams, who played the vigilante Omar on the show, spotted her and told her to go down to the set the next morning and get some camera tests taken. Snoop did as he instructed, earned $150 for the camera tests (which she noted wasn’t as much as she made in the same time while her dealers were working the streets) and was asked to come back. She did, and ended up with a fairly substantial role as a drug enforcer named Snoop (she was pleasantly surprised they used her actual street name in the series) in the last seasons of the show. It took a while, but she eventually gave up the drug trade (which she still worked while filming the show) and has acted in a number of films since. It’s an amazing story and shows the credibility the show was trying to achieve by taking real people from the real streets to fill out their cast.
And the show thrived very much on its credibility. Baltimore politicians and leaders may have claimed the show was making the streets look worse than they are, but the people who live on those streets often point to the show as saying it’s as real as it gets. David Simon said on a DVD extra that he was gratified when he heard that the HBO subscribers in Baltimore were a much higher percentage than in other cities in similar economic circumstances. He knew if people who had trouble paying their bills subscribed to HBO just to watch his TV show, then he must be telling the story correctly; that his show was giving those people a voice. Watching The Wire Sunday nights at viewing parties when the new episodes aired became a popular event for many B-More natives.
I could probably write ten times more than I have in this already long post about The Wire, and it would deserve every word. And, of course, I cannot even begin to do justice to the series by any of the words I write. This is a rare series that has helped me redefine my definition of what television is capable of. It is simply amazing. Do what you can to see this. Rent the DVDs at a video store (or maybe NetFlix), borrow them from the library or a friend, catch them on HBO OnDemand (and hopefully someday on repeats on the network), watch the sales (Best Buy has HBO-centric sales 2-3 times a year) and buy them yourself. Do what it takes to attain the episodes and give yourself completely over to that world that is just outside your window, yet one you probably never saw before.
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