Live Wire

Why doesn't anyone watch this show?

I know, I know: Today is the Iowa Caucus and the kickoff of the most interesting political season of my lifetime, but there is something more important coming our way this Sunday: Season 5 of The Wire.

I can count on one hand the number of people I know who have seen multiple episodes of this HBO drama. Its ratings are consistently terrible. Not low. Terrible. While other HBO phenomenon like The Sopranos, Sex and the City, and Entourage rack up millions of devoted fans and Emmy awards, The Wire remains largely ignored. As journalist Joe Klein puts it, “The Wire hasn’t won an Emmy? It should have won the Nobel Prize for literature by now.”

My job for the remainder of this column, as I see it, is to convince you to repent, and first thing tomorrow go out and rent, buy, or borrow the first season so that you can see what so very few of us already know: That it makes The Sopranos look like a glorified soap opera; that calling The Wire the greatest television show in the history of time is almost an insult to how good it is.

The show began as an intense, extensive fictionalized look at police surveillance of drug gangs in inner-city Baltimore but has since expanded to include in-depth storylines involving the city’s dying ports, political apparatus, and—in its most recent and powerful season yet—public schools. The sum total of these seasons, which weave and coagulate together like the fluid in a lava lamp, form what is approximately a fifty hour movie. Creators David Simon and Ed Burns (themselves formerly of Baltimore police beats, newspapers, and public schools) are unafraid to challenge the viewer, asking him or her to recall characters and incidents from the first season in the middle of the fourth, stitching disparate storylines into a tapestry that is too complex to reduce in any review. You literally have to watch all four seasons (make it five starting January 6th) before you can fully grasp the scale of this achievement.

It is not—I repeat not—an exaggeration to say that The Wire is one of the best pieces of art ever committed to celluloid.

What makes the show so captivating? That’s like asking someone to describe why an orgasm is fun. I could say it is the astonishing acting, ranging from the troubled heroes on the embattled police force to the cold stares of the corner boys, but that wouldn’t be right. Certainly the show is implausibly well-acted by a cast of relative unknowns and complete unknowns. The fourth season focuses on four troubled 8th graders, who are so eerily good that frankly they deserve whatever acting accolades are ever handed out to Hollywood’s typical stars of bloated salary and ego.

So is it the writing? Again, no; although the writing is spectacular as well. Suffused through this bleak urban landscape is a sense of humor and irony that somehow make the unrelentingly depressing realities of the drug world palatable. Sometimes I think about how the funniest joke I ever heard was told to me on September 12th, 2001. I laughed out loud heartily and without reserve even as the sickness and dread I felt from the events of the previous day waited to get back in the driver’s seat. I mention this only because the writers of The Wire manage to capture this sensation of hilarity in the midst of unquestionable tragedy. In this world where teenagers are gunned down over spare change and good police are shackled by a politically incapacitated bureaucracy, you can still find the absurdity remarkably amusing.




So you ask, "Then why the hell’s it so good, Markley? Because the majority of the cast is black?"

I admit one of the appeals of this show is that it takes place in a version of America that actually looks like America. Mainstream television is more segregated than an Alabama drinking fountain circa 1950. Minorities are confined to token roles and introduced more to break up the all-white billboard than because a particular character calls for a black, brown, or yellow face. If you think of any major minority character in a mainstream show, ask yourself, would the character or the show be any different if the role were recast with a white actor or actress? There’s a fairly simple explanation, of course. Black people don’t buy as much shit as white people, and advertisers don’t see the point in catering to a largely low-income, urban population segment without a whole lot of disposable income. This is why you can’t find a black lead on a network television show today.

But, no, The Wire is about more than race (although it tackles that issue with ferocity and courage, as well). The HBO drama succeeds so overwhelmingly because while the rest of television is meant to distract us from our sins, The Wire dives into them headfirst.

From the failed war on drugs to the flight of manufacturing jobs to under-funded inner-city schools, the show tackles all the things politicians talk about, and then goes and shows you why those politicians are full of shit. It depicts unflinchingly a nightmarescape of junkies, dealers, and citizens caught in the crossfire, but more than that it creeps under the surface of these stereotypes (which other shows and movies have tackled) to shed light on the interconnected pattern of why things are the way they are. In doing so, it enlists dozens and dozens of main and peripheral characters—all as fleshed out and fully realized as any you’ll find in your typical hour-long drama that focuses on only one or two. From the police informant and perpetual junkie Bubbles, to Omar, the gay stick-up man, who only robs drug dealers—from the stoic, embattled Lieutenant Daniels to Detective Jimmy McNulty, who would be the show’s hero if he wasn’t such a self-involved, womanizing, alcoholic prick (but come on, who isn’t?).

Through dozens of characters from both sides of the drug war, Simon, Burns, and their writing staff craft an entire world that runs all the way from the lowest kid sitting on the stoop to the highest office in Baltimore.

Thematically, the show plays off of its own title. “The wire” not only describes a device the police use to chase those elusive drug kingpins (and by season 4 that aspect of the surveillance process has been rendered all but obsolete by dealers adapting to police methods), but also the act of the viewer eavesdropping on this world where he or she does not belong.

Similarly, The Wire is a show that is served by its existence in a post-9/11 world. The war on drugs, after all, is a fine metaphor for the war on terrorism: Both are indefinite and fought against vague, barely-definable enemies who seem to only grow more stubborn and cutthroat when challenged. Both are wars fought by ideologues with hard-nosed tactics that have failed miserably yet are served by a populace and political structure that is stringently hostile to reform. Both are sucking up American lives and treasure at an alarming rate. In one of my favorite motifs of the show, the police force is constantly told by the higher-ups how to deal with terrorist attacks—a prospect they find laughable as the ghettos rot all around them.

I realize, after all this praise, many of you will go out, rent the show, find the first two or three episodes unremarkable and dismiss me immediately. Rest assured, The Wire is not easy. You can’t watch it while you do homework or read People. It requires a level of attention usually devoted to reading a novel. The Wire returns for its fifth and final season on January 6th. If you start tomorrow and don’t sleep or go to work or talk to anyone you love, you can be caught up by then. Trust me that it is worth it. You’ll never see a piece of fiction as downright haunting.




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