The Wire

"The Wire" is the sort of show that draws die-hards or none at all. It's hard to be luke-warm about it. It's also (in my experience) a bit of a slow burn; you give it the whole season or likely you move on. As creator David Simon has said, it's conceived as a novel - a near-epic one, I'd say - not a short story. (Reasonable comparisons: Shakespeare, Greek tragedy, THE GODFATHER.)

There's probably little I can say that hasn't already been said. There is a budding "scholarship" developing about the show's evolution (and now denouement, as the final season, Season Five, has wrapped and will air in 2008). You know the phenomenon has fully "broken," arrived on the arts and culture scene, when The Profile shows up in The New Yorker (and lo and behold, see the Oct. 22 issue).

I've never in my life paid for cable, so I've seen "The Wire" - Seasons One, Two, and Three (eagerly awaiting the release of Season Four next month) - on DVD. I've watched each season three times. This may sound obsessive, but really, it's more a testament to the nature of the beast; it's a novel, remember (or a series of novels, really), conceived with the idea of depicting the life of an inner city, in all its complexity. From its inception, five seasons were envisioned, each delving into a different aspect of city life (though not as compartmentalized as that sounds). "We were always planning to move further and further out, to build a whole city," Simon says. Academic courses can (and will) surely be designed around it - sociology, criminology, anthropology, urban planning, media arts, screenwriting (the dialogue!), literature - you name it, and TV dramas will forever struggle to measure up to its standards.

What makes it different from a novel, though, is its hyper-realism. Simon has said that he writes/directs for the people who appear in the show, not the "general reader" (the show is apparently very popular in poor black neighborhoods of West Baltimore, circulated on bootleg DVDs). Simon is my hero in this way; he has stayed true to the audience he cares about, but has succeeded in sucking in viewers far beyond that, like myself (viewership is appropriately modest, by HBO "hit" standards; the show has been vulnerable to cancellation at the end of each season, but will survive through the end). He is also a phenomenon and an inspiration of local-ness, in a world of increasing global "flattening" (Thomas Friedman, etc.): a former Baltimore Sun crime reporter, Simon has created and evolved "The Wire" without ever leaving Baltimore - physically, psychically, intellectually, morally. Everything that appears in the show, including many of the minor actors and extras, are Baltimore-based and Baltimore-grown - sometimes as composites of multiple issues or characters, but always based in actualities (his writing partner and co-creator, Ed Burns, is a former Baltimore homicide detective).

"The Wire" is, I'm a bit embarrassed to admit, a significant part of my life. I see my own city differently as a result, I trust it as a semi-comprehensive urban education. Following "The Wire" is like learning a new language and culture, it's immersive. It's also a kind of true music - the language of the streets, the drug trade, police culture - melodic and dissonant at once, perhaps even more "authentic" than rap or hip-hop, because it lacks the posturing, the glam, the beat-box stylization. It's people talking and hustling and living; and it really gets under your skin the way music does. It's also high literature in its deft weaving of irony, comedy, tragedy, plot convergences, and complexity of character - its insistence on a universal humanity, our motivations and survival mechanisms uncannily parallel, whether we are a cop or a drug dealer or a politician or a mother.

I am not easily drawn to violence-oriented media, but there is really nothing gratuitous in "The Wire" (save just a bit of nudity and sex that struck me as cheap eye candy; but hey, life is sex is life, and at the end of the day, "The Wire" is on HBO, not PBS). The thing is equally serious about its form as its content, and not a word or a character or a storyline is wasted.

At the risk of sounding overly didactic... my feeling is that the difference between art and mere entertainment (something can achieve both, surely) is that art changes you, your engagement with it evolves you in some way. So I'm trying to think about how "The Wire" has changed me. Its brilliance is that it is somehow both hopeful and despairing - not sequentially, i.e. a despairing story is told but then in the end there is hope (a conventional arc); but simultaneously. Artistically, Simon is like a Cubist, showing the forces in motion all at the same time, on a single plane, mirroring and refracting one another (the "business" of drug-dealing like the "business" of politics like the "business" of law enforcement like the "business" of media). The ways in which the ugliness of city life - its corrupt leaders and mercenary criminals, the repeating loop of corruption-breeding-crime and 'round she goes - is pretty hopeless, and Simon and Burns soften not the message. People with consciences usually lose; an impersonal system, i.e. institutions which have replaced/displaced any humanism that may have birthed the institutions in the first place, prevail. There is no one person or institution to blame, which is in itself a kind of hopelessness, because without demons and enemies, how to fix the problem?

So where's the hope? I suppose it's something like this: each character is driven by a powerful instinct to survive and, in their own (compromised) ways, flourish. How they go about it is of course questionable on all levels, but with negative forces bearing down on just about everyone, any moral judgment you might be tempted to make becomes dizzyingly complicated. It's that instinct to survive that persists across the board - black, white, poor, rich, old, young, powerful, powerless, gay, straight - and the show's writers and actors and directors do an amazing job of "teaching" the viewer to admire and root for that instinct. Horrible horrible things happen to these characters, and they do horrible horrible things to one another; and yet there is no one whose demise you really want to see (perhaps there are a few minor characters who are portrayed flatly, in order to advance plot; this we forgive). And so, I suppose "The Wire" is indeed teaching me, growing in me, a new impulse: to root for people, and to see people, divorced from the institutions which shape and confine and bear down. And to recognize that, while following your conscience may very well get you nowhere in terms of results, the instinct to fight the losing battle (a la Chris McCandless!) is one you can - you must - preserve. It's a spiritual message, really, worthy of Dr. King. And in that sense, watching "The Wire" is empowering in the face of a city life that feels paralyzing in its complexity and incomprehensibility.

Boy, it sounds kind of cheesy as I read over what I've written. I guess you have to have experienced the grit of the show to appreciate the incongruousness of the above analysis relative to what you're actually watching. Let me just say that when a certain heartless drug-dealer (who has betrayed his best friend/partner in one too many ways), for whom I have no natural or logical reason to care, gets his in an episode at the end of Season Three, I was physically wrecked by the time the credits rolled. I was completely outside myself - devastated, appalled, incredulous - looking around the room for...for... something to hit, and a shoulder to cry on, at the same time. Changed. Man, that's good TV. Will I weep for every drug dealer who gets his from now on? 'Course not. But I think I have slightly different eyes now...

And, to the degree that I continue to grapple with how one lives a life worth living as a participating citizen of the world's leading (though waning) capitalist power, "The Wire," which Simon has said is about how "raw, unencumbered capitalism" devalues human beings, is a pretty solid and unflinching education, a useful touchstone, in what that looks like in everyday urban life - for the powerful and powerless alike.