While waiting, impatiently, for the next seasons of Six Feet Under and Deadwood to come out on DVD, I’ve been watching another HBO show, The Wire. It’s a cop show set in Baltimore, written and produced by the guy who wrote Homicide, the other cop show set in Baltimore. The Wire feels a lot like what Homicide would have been had it been on HBO – grittier, harder, not cancelled …
The Wire is sparing with the life-affirming moments. Come to think of it, I haven’t seen in any in the first season and a half—certainly not a glimmer of hope that was allowed to last beyond an initial flicker. When the kid Wallace considers leaving the drug trade and going back to school he’s executed. When D’Angelo attempts to sever ties with his family he’s executed. When the endearing junkie/informant Bubbs seems for a moment to be getting himself clean, it’s already over.
The hopelessness and frustration that the show works in comes in part from the creators’ experience. Simon has said in a Salon interview that when they were working on early scripts for the show “Enron was happening. And the Catholic Church. It became more of a treatise about institutions and individuals than a straight cop show.” All of the institutions on the show – the police department, the FBI, the politicians, the drug gangs, the Greek mafia and the stevedore’s union in season two – are clannish and corrupt, some of them are bureaucratic and inept.
Part of the hopelessness and frustration has to do with the structure of the show. Each season takes a different focus, season one the drug trade in the projects, season two the waterfront ports. That makes it different from other long arc shows where the story is protracted. In The Wire the change of scene feels at first like something different, that is until you realize that point the show is making is that it’s the same everywhere. Nothing will ever be solved, and short of that, nothing will ever be finished. At the end of the first season, there were too many interested parties—local judges, Homeland Security, and high-ranking cops with ulterior motives—to allow the main characters’ much in the way of satisfaction. Some of their bad guys went away, but for shorter times, and not for the crimes that should have been punished. No one was happy. Those characters have come back in season two, but just to demonstrate how wide that web is and the extent to which the drug world is interconnected with the rest of the world.
Finally, the show aims to be endless, hopeless, unwieldy in keeping with its subject, a war on drugs:
[The government] created war zones where the only economic engine is the self-perpetuating drug trade. It survives no matter what, and they expect people to walk away from it. The naiveté is just incredible. They've spent 34 years taking these neighborhoods and basically divesting them from the rest of America. We've embraced a permanent war of attrition against the underclass and it can't work.
[…]
I'll tell you what, this would be enough for me: The next time the drug czar or Ashcroft or any of these guys stands up and declares, "With a little fine-tuning, with a few more prison cells, and a few more lawyers, a few more cops, a little better armament, and another omnibus crime bill that adds 15 more death-penalty statutes, we can win the war on drugs" – if a slightly larger percentage of the American population looks at him and goes, "You are so full of shit" ... that would be gratifying.
Fortunately, as fans of The Wire must know, a show doesn’t need to give a viewer “hope” to be any good. But if you think that it does, don’t worry, that’s what we’ve got ABC for.
I remember Homicide very fondly. It had good acting and complex plots that didn't seem too contrived. But I also remember it going down hill when it began to have more emotional bonding moments and shark-jumpy sentimentality. If The Wire is better than that, then I'm in!
Changing the focus every season sounds really interesting.
So does the element of pleasure come from recognition, from pride in knowing the worst and feeling one's pessimism vindicated, or from some mix of sadism and sympathy? Or is it the meat and potatoes of plot and character?
It seems to me that what the show has going for it is character. Many of them (Lester, Prez, D'Angelo...) are complex and develop slowly and subtly enough that viewers' impressions don't just change at some point, they are continually revised. The plot is interesting, but I'm worried that mid-way through season 2 it feels a bit like season 1 in different clothes.
As to shark-jumpy moments — it's still early, but no sign of Richard Belzer with a microphone.
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