The Wire: A Retrospective

THE WIRE
HBO
THE NATIONAL POST

For a show that prides itself on being tough, The Wire has had an extraordinary knack of making its viewers cry. That quality wasn’t too much in evidence in Sunday night’s concluding episode: a bumper-length tying-up of loose ends or to – to put it with appropriate grandeur - arranging of destinies. But it was going full blast the previous week, one in which the emotional focus was on the Baltimore corner-kids who have been tugging at our consciences and our tear-ducts for the last two of the show’s five years. That episode ended with Michael on the run and Dukie disappearing into the crack-house that from now on he would have to call home.

Before breaking our hearts, that same episode had made them race faster by showing us the mass arrest of the Marlo Stanfield crew, finally secured by the indefatigable sleuths of the Major Crimes Unit. It was the march of the good guys: a rare occurrence on The Wire and one that any other show would have saved for the finale. On this one we knew it couldn’t last. And sure enough, the following week, corruption and face-saving at every level meant that the case crumbled

I wonder if The Wire may come to be known as the Show of Great Penultimates. It has consistently reached its peak in the last-but-one week of each season: I think for example of the second series, the one that focused on the docks, with Frank Sobotka, the flawed but decent union leader, literally marching to his doom at the hands of the drug-lords. It’s either fitting or ironic, take your choice, that the one season that defied that rule was itself the one before last. The magnificent fourth season – the one that focused on the inner-city schools – did have a wonderful penultimate episode, but it had an even better ultimate one, a rain of emotional hammer-blows that may be the most powerful hour of television drama ever. (When it was over, one just sat there, drained and shattered.) What hit the hardest was the fate of Randy, the most easily likeable of the four central kids. driven by desperation to reveal his knowledge of a murder and branded a snitch for ever after. We left him, after he’d fallen through the system, consigned to a group-home from which he stood a very good chance of emerging dead. The Wire has been very good at keeping track of past characters, if only in the briefest of cameos, but unless I missed something, it has never been able to bring itself to tell us what became of Randy. [Note: I did miss something. A brief bit in the last season showed him still alive but horribly hardened.]

David Simon, The Wire’s creator, is fond of likening his show to Greek tragedy, in the sense that all its characters are trapped by fate, which in their case is Baltimore’s decayed municipal system, itself an especially stark microcosm of modern America. He compares it to The Sopranos (The Wire’s only peer) which he calls Shakespearean, in the sense that its people have free will. There’s something in that, though the contrast between the two theatrical forms isn’t watertight, and there’s quite a lot of overlap between the two TV shows. Tony Soprano is a figure of Falstaffian amplitude (in more senses than one) but he’s still trapped in his own inheritance. And there are at least one and a half characters in The Wire who aren’t creatures of the system. The one is Omar, the freelance who makes his living by robbing the organised dealers; he is what he is, with his own code (completely ruthless with other criminals, he’s “never hurt a taxpayer”), and he makes no excuses. He’s also the greatest of the show’s many wits; its comic highlight was the trial scene in which he informed a crooked lawyer that they were both in the same business. The half is Jimmy McNulty, the rebellious cop, whose demons are his own, even though they’re let loose by his frustration with the department in which he works. You can’t, to make the most obvious Sopranos comparison, imagine any character in The Wire going to a shrink, but if one did Jimmy, the most tormentedly self-aware, would be the best candidate. A mock-tragic hero, he received the fitting finale tribute of a fake wake.

I called Jimmy a cop. Nobody on the show does. For them, whether they’re inside or outside the law, the word is always “police”. The way they pronounce it, with the accent often on the first syllable, it takes on mythological resonance. The highest compliment the force can bestow on one of its own is to say that he – or she – was “good police.” This isn’t always the same as what Bubbles the recovered (hooray) addict would call “good people” but there’s a rough correlation. They exist at all ranks, but they become rarer the higher up you go; idealists like Cedric Daniels (upstanding even when sitting down), or even practical reformers like the twice-bitten Bunny Colvin, don’t survive. Compromise pays, and outright malignity often takes the jackpot. The pattern has been repeated at every interconnected level the show has explored: the docks, City Hall, the schools, the press. The last of these, by common consent, has been the show’s weakest link; the characters, so morally complex at every other point, are here reduced to good guys, bad guys and nonentities. Even worse, the stated theme – that society gets worse because the media have given up on in-depth reportage – is only stated, never felt. We never believed that anything would be different if the Baltimore Sun (Simon’s old employer and at least magnanimous enough to let its name be used) had higher standards. It was never, as everything else on the show has been, a life-and-death issue. It has made this last series the least good of the five.

It was also threatened by what seemed to be a classic case of shark-jumping: McNulty’s invention of a serial killer in order to get back the slashed funds for Major Crimes. However, this justified itself at the last when the scheme unravelled and we saw everybody running for cover, the charge headed by the mayor who had won office on a program of “change” in which he at least seemed to believe. (A white politician in a black city, he sometimes seemed like a photo-negative Barack Obama.) The only change we actually saw was life getting more brutal; on the streets the Barksdales, who had family loyalty and some recognition of honour (“he a man” said Avon Barksdale when Cutty, the former “soldier”, walked out of the life) gave place to Marlo Stansfield, young sociopath, and he in turn to some brawling subalterns. Rawls, the consummate police politician, went on to state-capital glory; Major Valchek, prick of pricks, became commissioner. There were also a few redemptions: Bubbles, Cutty, Prez who went from hopeless cop to hope-inspiring teacher, Carver who stayed in the force and was increasingly impressive. Bodie, his opposite number on the street, went down but at least went down fighting. And some people, like Bunk and Kima, just went decently on, which is a kind of redemption.

Mayor Carcetti and Bodie had never heard of one another, but every decision the former took, or failed to take, affected the latter. It’s one thing to have that vision (a truly “Dickensian” one, incidentally); it’s another to flesh it out as triumphantly and consistently as The Wire has. It hasn’t had a lame episode, and The Sopranos, though still my hairsbreadth favourite, had a few. Anyway, they’re the twin peaks (ha) of American television. One final comparison: The Sopranos ended as abruptly as it did because it was about individual characters, and it had told us all it knew. The Wire ended with montage because it was about a world, which goes on and replicates itself. I haven’t mentioned the acting. That would take another article, and it would be rhapsodic.