Notes on The Wire

Overall, I incline toward the Slate dialoguers’ take (and Matt's) on this season of The Wire, rather than the more favorable view that you’ll find at the House Next Door. Not that the season isn’t riveting television; not that I’m not desperately anticipating for the finale; not that David Simon and Co. are guilty of anything except failing to live up to the ridiculously high standard that they’ve set for themselves. But it remains the case that they just haven’t quite lived up to it. The newspaper plot would be an entertaining morality play in a different, lesser show, but compared to what The Wire has done with other institutions and their inhabitants it’s weak stuff indeed: A succession of one-note characters acting out a story that’s at best tangential to the state of newspapers, circa 2008. (If only Pulitzer-hungry editors and scumbag fabulists were the biggest problems facing papers like the Sun!) The season as a whole has been at once more melodramatic and more didactic than the ones that have come before, and while I’ve come to terms with the lurch toward soap opera – fake serial killers! kidnapped homeless men! – in the police-procedural plotline, there have been too many moments when Simon's declinist worldview (and his view of himself as Jeremiah crying unheeded in the wilderness) has felt like an artistic weakness rather than the strength it's always been.

I wrote a post a while back arguing that it can be a good thing when great television shows either set early end-dates on their own or get saddled with them, and that many of the high points of recent television from The X-Files to The Sopranos would have benefited artistically if their creators had wound them up earlier than they actually did. I certainly wouldn't go so far as to suggest that The Wire has overstayed its welcome; even with all its weaknesses, this season is still vastly stronger than the some of the more middling stretches of The Sopranos. But having just re-watched the whole of Simon's creation, for start to (almost) finish, I do think that if you compare the show to literature, as so many of its admirers do, the first three seasons feel like an organic whole, a single masterpiece - whereas seasons four and (especially) five are interesting and imperfect sequels to the original Great American Novel.

I know this is a minority opinion, and many people think the fourth season, with its child's-eye view of the inner city, is easily The Wire's best. But while I agree that the depiction of the four kids is one of the finest stand-alone sections in the show's entire run, it's embedded in a larger narrative that feels more inconsistent, and less compelling, than the long duel between the Bell-Barksdale gang and the special crimes unit that dominated seasons one through three. I don't regret any of the extra time we've spent watching Marlo and Carcetti, Bubbles and the Bunk (though I've had just about enough of Jimmy McNulty), but it's still the case, I think, that the canvas has grown overbroad at times, and somewhat scattershot as a result. The Wire's greatest story was the rise and fall of Stringer Bell, and nothing's matched it since.

Comments

You forgot to close the italics tag

Posted by wiredog | March 7, 2008 1:29 PM

I basically agree with this. I am still surprised at how many people claim the 4th season as the clear high point and the 2nd as the low - I though season 4 represented a bit of a break and subtle decline from the first three seasons although it was still fascinating and wonderful as a stand-alone product. My favorite seasons were 2 and 3. For what it's worth, my wife, who taught in the public school system in Baltimore before we moved to D.C. (where she teaches now), liked the 4th season the best and found it a very accurate depiction on the whole.

For what it's worth, I also think the decline of the Sopranos was overstated a little bit, only the second-to-last sesaon (or the first half of the final season, however you describe it) was what I would describe as "middling." The Sopranos had a much broader fan base than the Wire, which really flew under the radar through the start of season 4, and that lead to loader shouts that it had declined than was really warranted by the material in my view.

For my money, neither topped the X-Files at its high points - granted the show was imperfect, and collapsed under its own storyline a few seasons before it eventually sputtered to an end, but for it to stay as good as it did for as long as it did was pretty darn impressive. Although the X-Files had a lot less to say than the Wire of Sopranos in terms of societal commentary or human nature, it made up for it in its probing of the nature of truth and its disection of the relationship between science and faith. Although mine was a vote for Whedon (and Minear, actually Wonderfalls was another one of my favorite shows) in the war of the three Davids post, so your mileage may vary.

Posted by hugo | March 7, 2008 1:38 PM

I admire the Wire, but I tend to think it's always been a little overrated, for the simple fact that its realist, journalist-eyed view of the world appeals so well to journalists, the actual folks in the positions of power to overrate popular art.

For my money, The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, and Deadwood had spiritual and aesthetic depths, and a more full-spectrum emotional shading, that just don't fit into the journalistic view of the world.

For instance, is it possible to imagine an episode of the Wire based on a dream? Or an episode of the Wire in which a traumatic event happens to a single character at the beginning and the camera follows that character to the exclusion of all others the rest of that episode, better to reflect the solitude and horror of what has just occurred?
Or the Wire using dialog in any kind of stylized or non-realis way, to express complex inner states of characters?

The Wire tells us a lot about the world we inhabit, but, as great art must in some way, does it tell us anything new?

Posted by Ban Johnson | March 7, 2008 2:36 PM

I fully agree. As far as I'm concerned, The Wire ended with Bubbles pushing his shopping cart through the ruins of Hamsterdam. Seasons 4 and 5 have been The Wire II, and I've enjoyed them greatly, and I'll be sorry to see them go, but they were a notch below The Wire I.

Posted by Ohioboy | March 7, 2008 4:06 PM

i view the wire as the story of baltimore first and foremost. we are introduced to the character through perhaps its most odorous problem: drugs. the show stays with this theme, following the streets in season one, the supply in season two, the political corruption in season three, and how it got this bad in season four. season five has a two-fold manifesto: show those that should be addressing the problem, and tie up as much of the plots as possible. by deemphasizing the importance of the wonderful characters and focusing on baltimore as a whole, i feel the connection.

Posted by eska | March 7, 2008 4:09 PM

Hell, I'm saying this everywhere else, I may as well say it here: I think Season Two is far and away the best season, significantly better than Season Three or Four. I also don't buy the hype that this season is so much worse.

I wrote a post over at The American Scene about The Wire that I hope Ross read.

Posted by Freddie | March 7, 2008 4:10 PM

I agree with you. I felt a substantial drop-off between season 3 and 4.

Posted by Nicholas Beaudrot | March 7, 2008 4:53 PM

4 was awesome. 4 was art. I dare you to forget Michael. Comparing that arc to the struggles of a dimwit like Ziggy? Res ipsa loquitur....

The problem with 5 is that David has never understood, or thinks it's bad TV, that newspapers' real problem isn't that they've lost an audience. Indeed, they merely have to share it. There's plenty of place for papers in the conversation. What newspapers are worse at -- indisputably -- than the Internet is classified advertising. And the model collapses without it. The real enemy is AutoTrader.com. But since Tribune and Times Mirror passed on the chance to invest in AT early....I'd have loved to see David send up an episode that actually happened, when Times Mirror CEO Mark Willes visited the Sun and was asked about his Web strategy. Since I left in 97, this was bwetween the Netscape IPO and mid-97. His answer was that his strategy was to let someone else lose the early money. And you see what that wrought. The guy who asked the question, if I remember right, was Scott Shane, who plays the long-suffering editor of the schools series when he's not scooping everyone on NSA stories for the NYT.

Critiquing the economiuc ignorance of newspaper editors i's an interesting opportunity to miss. I worked at the Sun with all of these people, and of all the things you could say about John Carroll, the worst IMHO is that he was shockingly ignorant of economics, including the economics of his own paper. It was never any wonder to me how he lost battles with the business side: He went into them unarmed with anything but the naive notion that no one should want to make any but a modest profit from a publicly traded newspaper company. Basically, his strategy in the face of this was what you see today: To sit in academia and piously counsel the singing of a heartfelt round of Kum-bye-a

Posted by tmullane | March 7, 2008 5:11 PM

I'd rate the Wire Seasons from best to worst 1, 3, 2, 4, 5. And 2 and 3 are pretty close. I agree completely the Stringer Bell was the most compelling character on the show. Season 5 has had its moments but it feels tacked on to me - it's nice if you're a fan to have it, but it's not essential.

The problem with the Wire vs. Sopranos and Deadwood is really that the Simon probably bought into the "21st century Dickens" hype, and has gone overboard with trying to make the show too comprehensive and trying to shoehorn every urban problem imaginable into the show. Especially this season - Carchetti is a waste of time, the journalist plot feels shoehorned in, the kids are getting short shrift, Prez hasn't even shown up yet, etc. I thought it was a stronger narrative when the focus was just cops vs. drug dealers and a lot of the other social points Simon was making were more implicit.

And people who love character driven drama will never rate the Wire as highly as the other shows we're throwing around - there is no single character on the Wire as memorable and as well explored as Tony Soprano or Al Swearengen (or Fox Mulder, Gaius Baltar or Buffy Summers for that matter). In that sense The Wire may suffer a little from being too realistic, the only real larger than life character was Omar - and he never quite fit in the texture of the show.

Posted by vanya | March 7, 2008 5:34 PM

I agree too. The Stringer Bell story was the peak. Stringer was an exceptional talent -- so smart that he could envision a different way to play the game, so smart that he stupidly thought he could change the game. He was a sort of street-wise Odysseus and, like Odysseus, his cleverness got him into as much trouble as it got him out of. In the end, the same brute, self-destructive forces that he thought he could put behind him, or elude through his wiles, rose up and claimed him just like everyone else. His fratricidal conflict with Avon was poignant if not tragic. The high drama of it was thrown into relief by the epigones who followed. In this sense, the downward trajectory of the last two seasons fits with the overall dramatic scheme.

Season two was the low point. Sabotka and his way of life were utterly unsympathetic. Who cares that a petty thug and criminal -- Jimmy Hoffa's retarded cousin -- passed into the ashheap of history? Even Marx would agree that the passing of this sort of vaudeville feudalism is progress. And Ziggy's immolation was simply not believeable.

Posted by Mike Ditka | March 7, 2008 5:58 PM

"but I tend to think it's always been a little overrated, for the simple fact that its realist, journalist-eyed view of the world appeals so well to journalists, the actual folks in the positions of power to overrate popular art."

I tend to agree with this. I've tried to get into this show and it just never clicked. It does seem very respectable, just not very likeable. I really liked "Homicide", but it had a bit more energy and humor. You also didn't have to watch whole seasons to "get it." (Although it helped, it wasn't strictly necessary) Shrug, I just don't click with the 2000s way of doing drama series I guess.

Posted by Thomas R | March 7, 2008 6:38 PM

Sabotka was the best! The best season. Period.

Season 4 stunk.

Posted by Thomas Nelson | March 7, 2008 6:48 PM

Season 3 was the worst. It seemed to me that Simon and HBO were trying to appease the audience that disliked Season 2 and therefore wrapped up the Barksdale story line in a somewhat melodramatic fashion. Season 2 was pretty good because it presented a subculture --- Locust Point's Polish dockworkers -- that gets no attention, sympathetic or otherwise. Plus, Ziggy was an unappreciated tragic character -- a guy who was too smart to succeed in the environment he was stuck in.

With Season 4, The Wire became truly amazing. I had no hope for the season when I heard it was to be set in the educational system. How could something like that be anything other that an excuse for a lot of boring pieties. But I was totally turned around. I live in Baltimore and that was the first season that I felt watching The Wire was like having a video camera strapped to my back. The kids were like the kids I grew up with thirty years ago. Everyone here knows the stories behind the story -- who which character is based on and how each event "really" happened. This season has been a perfect continuation of last.

Fundamentally, I think the problem those who like later seasons less have is that they thought The Wire was a show about drug dealers. It's a lot more than that.

Posted by sj | March 7, 2008 10:42 PM

I think SJ has a point that there is a story to be told about the dock workers in season 2, but it's not the story told in the Wire. Given the sort of patriarchial, tribal world of these ethnic enclaves, there's a story to be told about the son who is better than his father and who can see a world and way of life beyond and other than that of his father. This would also be the story of the mischief, trouble, violence, and sense of loss resulting from the son's break with the world of his father and struggles to find his way by his own lights. There's also a story about how the old timers faded away, were replaced by the next wave of immigrant strivers, and with mixed emotions saw their sons and daughters move away to take different jobs and homes in the suburbs.

Of course, none of that is prescribed by the Wire's Marxist catechism.

Stripped of their ideological overlay, or even with it, the stories of Sabotka and Ziggy are not particularly interesting or compelling. Sabotka is a garden variety stooge, the fat ward heeler whose pinky ring you have to kiss, and keep kissing, to get some crap job and the privilege of doing his dirty work. He would rather let the world fall down around him than give up his sinecure. Ziggy is his no good, loser son.

Posted by MD | March 8, 2008 12:14 AM

Season 2 had terrible economics but awesome characters. Some comments above don't seem to be able to distinguish between those. I mean, if you didn't like the Sobotkas as much as I did, fine, but you'd better have a better reason than the fact that they were union members and unions are Marxist.

Posted by Consumatopia | March 8, 2008 9:37 AM

Indeed, indeed, where is the Prince Hal of Pimlico?

I can just see it. The touching tale of an obscure, pretentious princelet and his bawdy adventures with his lumpenproletariat Falstaff and Doll Tearsheet. One day our Hal rises to claim his patrimony and slay the Hot Spurs of Prince Georges County by acing his SAT, running off a sting of As in his econ major, and engaging in several character building and socially conscious extra-curricular activities. Many years later, after he has assumed the crown of partnership at McKinsey or an AM100 law firm, our now-Henry runs into Falstaff, who is a sales clerk at Home Depo. When Falstaff recognizes Henry and tries to regale him and his son with tales of Henry's old adventures, Henry coldly disavows him and his past -- I know thee not, sir, and please put the GrillMaster 1000 in the blue Ford Explorer out back.

To make the tattoed and ski cap wearing crowd happy, you could add some post-modern high jinks. Our Prince Hal could read Henry IV in college and even play the role in a college production. Then, he could direct his son in a grammar school production. The father would insist that the son play Hal, but the son would resist and insist on playing Hot Spur or Falstaff instead. This way one could artfully and tastefully dispose of that bourgeois comedy of manners that is wrongly called the Oedipal conflict, or some other nonsense, and that horribly ran off the rails somewhere around the time of that tumultuous tilt between Archie Bunker and the Meathead.

Now, this might not be Shakespearian, or Dickensian, or even Updikian or Foerian or Coetzian. Thankfully, it's not Franzian. But it is the sort of Nabokov-Bellow test tube baby that Martin Amis and David Mamet would, like Frankenstein and Igor, create if you locked them in a literary lab for a night.

Posted by Mike Ditka | March 8, 2008 9:58 AM

For instance, is it possible to imagine an episode of the Wire based on a dream? Or an episode of the Wire in which a traumatic event happens to a single character at the beginning and the camera follows that character to the exclusion of all others the rest of that episode, better to reflect the solitude and horror of what has just occurred?
Or the Wire using dialog in any kind of stylized or non-realis way, to express complex inner states of characters?

I think the way in which institutions and systemic problems become actual dynamic, evolving characters in the story represents a storytelling innovation. I'm not saying this innovation hasn't been explored before, but it isn't explored very often, and The Wire did a really fantastic job. What you have is a biography of a real city told by filling it with imaginary people.

There is a more stylized version of city institutions and life far more abstract and experimental than The Wire. Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities. Of course, that book had only two named characters.

To tell a story like The Wire with both evolving characters and dynamic institutions might just require realism. But it's still another view of the human condition--and I don't mean in a "Dickensian" political way, but in an aesthetic abstract way.

Posted by Consumatopia | March 8, 2008 10:06 AM

The problem with fancy, high falutin theories about telling stories about the evolution of institutions is that they miss a more basic objection to the Wire.

You need look no further than the Wire and the character of Templeton to see this objection. As Templeton did with the Iraqi vet's story, so the Wire has in the opinion of many written his story overly thick. That is, the Wire has focused on overly lurid, grim, sensationalistic details of failure and violence and neglect, and in doing so ignored and distorted the real story of what happened, to further his agenda rather than tell the tale as it lies. To use another one of Templeton's tales, the Wire tells a tale of America that is as myopic and pessimistic, and ultimately false and manipulative, as a story about the opening day of the baseball season that focuses on the fictive black baseball lover in the wheelchair who can't get in to see the game.

Posted by GWB | March 8, 2008 11:08 AM

I wanted to like the Sabotka story line because as a liberal I think the downfall of unions doesn't get enough attention and I get why he did what he did, even if I think it was wrong, yet I could never really get into season 2. I just wanted to punch Ziggy in the face the entire time. The Greeks just never were as compellingly drawn as other criminal characters on the show, especially Omar and Stringer. When I lived in Baltimore, I would hear people talk a lot about how their dad worked out at the docks and for Bethlehem Steel and stuff, yet I never connected emotionally to that as much as I did to the problems with the drug trade in Baltimore. Maybe it's because the solutions of what to do about drugs - often involving legalization, finding ways to improve our educational system and putting fewer people in jail over petty drug charges - are much simpler than figuring out a way to balance free trade and technological innovation while keeping jobs like those at Bethlehem and the docks around. Maybe I felt the Baltimore of the drug trade and drug street crime was more my Baltimore than the docks, after doing stuff like passing by armored SWAT vans while on my way to vote. Mostly I didn't find the characters in that season as interesting. I also felt a bit bored whenever McNulty was on the boat.

I do wonder if The Wire is a show you have to have lived in an urban environment that has seen the money and jobs leave (globalization and white flight) only to be replaced by drugs, attempts at regaining former glory that never come to pass and despair. That may have to do with its limited appeal to a larger audience. It may also be that the Italian Mafia's story has been better integrated into the broader American story than black urban drug crime, which may be why the Sopranos and some lesser Mafia movies (not classics like the Godfather) found more of an audience and made more of a cultural impact than The Wire and American Gangster, but I haven't seen the latter yet.

Posted by Reality Man | March 8, 2008 1:22 PM

"For instance, is it possible to imagine an episode of the Wire based on a dream?"

No. Thank God, no. Just what we need -- more episodes of TV shows based on dreams. What a tiresome gimmick.

I'd rate the seasons, best to worst, like this: 1, 4, 3, 2, 5. Five's the only one that I agree is deeply flawed (though the past two episodes have done their damndest to make up for that -- great stuff). Season 3 suffered from an uneven balance -- the first half, setting up the mayor plot line, was maybe the most boring stretch of the show. But the second half, once Avon is out of jail, was just epic.

Posted by John Williams | March 8, 2008 7:27 PM

"No. Thank God, no. Just what we need -- more episodes of TV shows based on dreams. What a tiresome gimmick." John Williams

TR: I'd kind of agree there. (Although there are shows that managed to have good episodes based on a dream, it usually doesn't work)

Still what I want to know, in case I ever decide to try it again, is more

Was there ever an episode of "The Wire" that had relatively well-adjusted characters living in a functional relationship?

Was there ever an episode that was funny?

Was there ever an episode with any hope or joy of any kind?

That was more the problem I had when I tried it. Everything seemed so slow and bleak. Was it all like that or was I watching an odd series of eps?

Note: I didn't watch Sopranos or OZ either.

Posted by Thomas R | March 8, 2008 11:06 PM

Of course The Wire was great because of it's realism. Not many other public outlets in America seem capable let alone even honest enough to try and tackle these real issues that are bringing this country down down down. The greatest country in the world? You've got to earn it - no matter how many times you repeat the mantra it won't be true just by speaking it.
I agree that Omar was the larger than life character, but he was sold out this season by the writers. Limping around like an idiot trying to gun down Marlo"s whole gang. Did he start taking drugs and no one bothered to let us know?

Posted by lastuncorruptedmanalive | March 9, 2008 3:40 AM

Thomas,

There was lots of humor scattered throughout the Wire, especially coming from Bunk Moreland. Lt. Daniels and Rhonda Pearlman are two well adjusted individuals in a functional relationship. And there is plenty of hope mixed in between the bleakness, especially with the reformed junkie, Bubbles. That being said, I like escapist entertainment but that isn't the point of the Wire. No piece of art has ever stuck with me like the Wire, which I find myself pondering on a regular basis, even in the months in between seasons.

Posted by Ethan | March 9, 2008 4:23 PM