Yes, HBO's 'Wire' is challenging. It's also a masterpiece.
Tim Goodman
Wednesday, September 6, 2006
Over the course of its first three seasons, "The Wire" on HBO has been one of the great achievements in television artistry, a novelistic approach to storytelling in a medium that rewards quick, decisive and clear storytelling. It has never flinched from ambition -- dissecting a troubled American city, Baltimore, as well as and certainly more truly than any history book could have. It has tackled the drug war in this country as it simultaneously explores race, poverty and "the death of the American working class," the failure of political systems to help the people they serve and the tyranny of lost hope. Few series in the history of television have explored the plight of inner-city African Americans and none -- not one -- has done it as well.
On the off chance that you need to be reminded, this is not "Desperate Housewives."
And yet, the curse of "The Wire" and the thing that makes its creator, David Simon, nearly apoplectic, is the notion that "The Wire" is difficult and dense and hard to follow if you haven't been there from the start. Simon, perhaps the best writer in all of television -- a label one should not toss around lightly -- has a point when he jokingly suggests that critics who love the series should temper the part about it being difficult to jump into. That scares away viewers. It makes people believe he's forcing them to eat their vegetables on a cable channel that offers brilliance in other packages, some of them a whole lot easier to swallow -- like "Entourage," for example.
And yet here are the hard truths about "The Wire," not all of them the kind of accolades that might sit well with a producer hoping for a big turnout come Sunday. First, it is, in fact, a difficult series. Viewers would benefit greatly from having seen the first three seasons, currently available on DVD or waiting like little orphans at Netflix. (That said, you can slide into Season 4 on Sunday with less effort than it took to hook yourself on Season 3, in part because "The Wire" is essentially starting from scratch, and new viewers could check out the immensely helpful HBO Web site to familiarize themselves with the characters, and also come to Jesus on the issue of great art taking a little more effort than, say, watching a sudsy hospital drama.)
Second, the argument over whether "The Wire" is the best show on television needs only two other participants -- also from HBO -- in the form of "The Sopranos" and "Deadwood." Rather than split hairs, let's just say that the breadth and ambition of "The Wire" are unrivaled and that taken cumulatively over the course of a season -- any season -- it's an astonishing display of writing, acting and storytelling that must be considered alongside the best literature and filmmaking in the modern era.
If you're not interested in "The Wire" after that, Godspeed to your unexamined life. That said, expecting the series to be simple, easy or unchallenging is a ridiculous notion. And we speak of it no more.
After the death of drug dealer and entrepreneur Stringer Bell and the incarceration of his partner and empire-ruling (and ruining) leader Avon Barksdale in Season 3, "The Wire" returns yet again to dilapidated Baltimore to explore what remains. And much of it does. The wiretapping of young gang leader Marlo (Jamie Hector) is up and running, producing encouraging results for Major Crimes detectives Freamon (Clarke Peters) and Greggs (Sonja Sohn). McNulty (Dominic West) seems happy walking a beat as a street cop, and the mayoral race between incumbent Mayor Royce (Glynn Turman) and the white challenger, Councilman Tommy Carcetti (Aidan Gillen), is heating up. The big hook this year is that former officer Roland "Prez" Pryzbylewski -- who accidentally killed a cop in Season 3 -- is now teaching in one of Baltimore's tougher grade schools.
The whole gist of Season 4, in fact, revolves around education. And not just in the wildly dysfunctional, borderline hopeless Baltimore public schools system, but as has been the way of "The Wire" -- a series that has managed to contrast the mundane failures of office work (police) with the mundane failures of being a drug dealer running a syndicate -- the show will explore all facets of education, from what volunteer boxing instructor Cutty (Chad L. Coleman) brings to young kids trying to stay off the street to what kids on the corner are learning about the drug trade from older dealers to what "Bunny" Colvin (Robert Wisdom), the repudiated major in the police department (who tried to set up a legalized drug experiment), can do to help a Maryland university study at-risk kids.
It is a bold, sweeping and dense look at what education means on all levels in a faltering urban structure. Not the kind of fare you're going to get on NBC at 9 p.m. Not easy to decipher, not easy to access. Rewarding? That's a wholly separate issue.
The beauty of Season 4 is in how Simon and his team of writers deftly and slowly reintroduce past major characters into their new roles. In a way, Simon has decentralized the cast structure that nominally had West as the lead and Bell (Idris Elba) and Barksdale (Wood Harris) as co-leads. Now the enormous cast serves as one lead (how they act when they bump into each other -- wonderful plot elements at every turn -- should delight longtime fans without overly confusing new viewers, which is a structural marvel all to itself).
Yes, McNulty is back. Bunk is back. Pretty much everybody is back. Hell, even Wee-Bey is back. Best of all -- "Omar back."
And yet, what was true of "The Wire" the past three seasons is true here. It starts slowly. It continues to move slowly, with intricate strands of story revealing themselves at a leisurely pace, like a good, well-crafted book. No, check that -- like a great novel. As in seasons past, it's not until the third episode, where directions announce themselves, that the myriad stories pile up with irresistible pull and depth. By the fourth and fifth episode, once again you're caught in a bracingly complex, enriching tale you don't want to end.
"The Wire" is an inherently sad story. Though Simon and his writers infuse it with street-smart humor and even a droning, Dilbert-like quality that strips workplaces and government institutions to their flawed core, the heart of "The Wire" is a dark one, as always. The tale that Simon has told for three seasons can best be summed up this way: "It doesn't work."
The war on drugs is flawed not only from a police procedural standpoint but also because the department is beholden to the mayor and the mayor to special interests. Even the most cleverly constructed, forward-thinking drug gangs are flawed because the greed, hopelessness, laziness and fearlessness of others always intervenes. Politics fails because so much of Baltimore is in the death grip of immediate need, of decadeslong failure that demands reparation. And now we see how the education system doesn't work, from a strapped school district that advocates "social promotion" so that teachers don't have to deal with bigger, stronger troublemakers, to the cruelty of poverty and how it strips away chance and, ultimately, to the much more damning, complicated notion of historical nonparticipation of poor families in the very idea of necessary education for betterment.
An after-school special this ain't.
There is a crushing sense of failure at all turns in "The Wire," but that has never, in three seasons, been as disheartening as it might sound. That's because Simon has ratcheted down the age range of where hope meets reality. And at that intersection, we meet a whole new batch of kids on "The Wire." Emphasis on kids. Simon catches them at a crossroads, their innocence still intact despite it all. Their vulnerability exposed. Season 4 follows the lives of a band of grade-school kids who will find out sooner than they should that their world begins and ends at the corner.
It's not Simon who should worry that people won't watch his show because it's difficult. It's viewers who should worry that they are missing the absolute best of what television has to offer merely because it requires effort.
E-mail Tim Goodman at tgoodman@sfchronicle.com. You can read his blog, the ******* Machine, at sfgate.com/ blogs/goodman.
For the record:Season 1 of The Sopranos > Season 1 of The WireSeasons 2-4 of The Wire >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> The last two Sopranos seasons.
After season 3 of the Wire I went back and watched all 7 or 8 seasons of Homicide, the Corner, read the Homicide book that Simon wrote (tv series is based on his book), and read the Wire book about the series.
but the Wire has given me a tremendous amount of faith in these writers' ability so I'm anxious to see this.There was an article I read on the Hawitha(sp?) Damn that was just fascinating. The wayyyy outnumberred soldiers stopping the Iraqis from blowing up that damn and flooding+all. Someone bought the rights to that story(can't recall who) and then.....well it's been years, WTF? I feel almost cheated here. Forgive me if I mis-state the numbers but it was in the ballpark of 25 Americans vs 500-1000 Iraqis.Eh well anyway I hope this one Fiddles posted comes thru and we really do see this miniseries
but the Wire has given me a tremendous amount of faith in these writers' ability so I'm anxious to see this.There was an article I read on the Hawitha(sp?) Damn that was just fascinating. The wayyyy outnumberred soldiers stopping the Iraqis from blowing up that damn and flooding+all. Someone bought the rights to that story(can't recall who) and then.....well it's been years, WTF? I feel almost cheated here. Forgive me if I mis-state the numbers but it was in the ballpark of 25 Americans vs 500-1000 Iraqis.Eh well anyway I hope this one Fiddles posted comes thru and we really do see this miniseries
