The Wire: The Beginning of the End
THE WIRE
HBO
THE NATIONAL POST
If you look on US television as a Goliath, then it makes a sort of sense that the writers who have most successfully challenged the conventions of the drama series should all be called David. David Chase gave us The Sopranos, David Milch Deadwood, and David Simon The Wire. Of these three HBO treasures, the first has run its course, the second was cut unconscionably off in its prime, the third is about to begin its fifth and last season.
All three Davids produce their shows, and by all accounts exercise tight control. Chase and Milch also direct, but Simon is the only one of these auteurs who is strictly an author. He writes or co-writes an impressive proportion of The Wire’s scripts, and has a story credit on every episode. Before coming into television he was a journalist, a crime reporter on the Baltimore Sun. His experiences on that beat were the inspiration for The Wire, the story of a beleaguered police detail trying to bring down the drug-lords controlling the housing projects of West Baltimore. The show’s first series concentrated on that theme while casting side-glances at a few others: municipal corruption for example. Subsequent series, while keeping the same core of characters, have widened the focus to look at Baltimore’s politics, its waterfront, its school system. The general picture has been one of greed, graft and hopelessness: a world from which drugs – doing them, or dealing them, or both – offer the only hopes of escape.
This new series introduces us to another level of Baltimore society, the press - specifically Simon’s old employer the Sun with which he has a well-documented love-hate relationship. Strangely, this world of which he was actually part rings less true on the screen than do the cops and gangsters whom he merely observed. Both the setting and the characters look right (one of the newsroom veterans happens to be a dead ringer for a senior writer at the Toronto Star) and there is a nice weary swagger to some of the dialogue: “at the Sun, God still resides in the details” says an editor, instructing a reporter in the difference between evacuating a building and evacuating a person. But there is, at least in the first two episodes, something self-consciously expository about both the writing and the acting of these guys; though it’s interesting that the city editor, who seems to be the focal figure, is played by Clark Johnson, the director who piloted The Wire’s pilot.
It’s taking time for these scenes to connect with the rest of the show on a narrative level, though there are promises from the publicity department that we’ll be seeing hard-hitting stories muzzled by the paper’s corporate owners. That’s what’s always been happening to the cops on The Wire, in constant danger of having their investigations thwarted or muzzled by jealous or incompetent superiors, fearful of having their own secrets uncovered. And already there’s a thematic connection. The paper is threatened by downsizing; so are the cops. They can’t even get overtime. The boys (and girls) on The Wire have seen their detail dissolved, reformed, dissolved again, ever since it first got together in Episode One. It’s all of course a question of priorities. “One thieving politician trumps 22 dead bodies” says the perpetually angry Detective Jimmy McNulty. “That’s good to know.” One of the recurring ironies in The Wire is that even those who might be on the side of the angels make careful, self-interested choices as to which angels they’ll serve.
There are people who think The Wire even better than The Sopranos, and certainly it tells us more about the texture of Baltimore than The Sopranos ever did about New Jersey. It has a wider focus. But it also has a shallower one. It’s more about plot than about character. It’s impossible to imagine The Wire depicting a relationship as deep and tangled as that between Tony and Carmela, or coming up with a figure as juicy as, say, Paulie Walnuts. There are certainly engaging figures; my own favourite is Bubbles, the junkie informant (Andre Royo) surprisingly still with us and even on his feet after five years. It’s also been nice to chart the rise of Lester, the supercool cop with a genius for processing information, doing what he does best after years relegated to the pawn-shop control. (He’s played, with superb unflappability, by Clarke Peters, whom I remember as a fixture in London musicals in the 70s and 80s. Style’s always good.) On the whole though we react to, and sympathise with, the cops as a team rather than as individuals. We do sympathise with them, even though Simon has emphatically disclaimed any possibility of glorifying or ennobling them. They are guys, doing a job, for their own reasons, mainly self-interested. But it seems to be a job worth doing, even though the show acknowledges its hopelessness. Strike down one gang and another appears. (The Wire is the best possible argument for drug legalisation.) This is almost the first show (not quite – there was the ill-fated Line of Fire) to give equal time to cops and criminals. The most haunting figure among the outlaws has been the young D’Angelo Barksdale who, in the first series, went down to serious time so that his gang-lord uncle might get off. It was his mother who persuaded him to do this, and it was horrifying, but her arguments made a certain sense. What other support-system was he going to find? In the new series one of the newsmen suggests a story on “Dickensian lives of city children.” He’s being sentimental and opportunistic as hell, but he’s also right. These conditions are out of Dickens. And these TV shows are the new form of novel that chronicles them for us.