The Wire.
Christ, where do you start talking about
the Wire?!
I guess the logical place would be pre-history: some of you may remember a cop show from the 1990s called
Homicide: Life on the Street. It was a brilliant show, truly a cop show like no other: no shoot-outs, no car chases, just fascinating characters wracking their brains to try and solve one murder after another from within the Baltimore Police Department. The show was inspired by, and in the first couple of seasons directly based upon, book which was a brilliant piece of true-crime journalism, called
Homicide: a Year on the Killing Streets.
That book was written by a then-reporter from the Baltimore Sun named David Simon. He also became involved in the later seasons of the T.V. show. In 1998 Simon, along with Ed Burns, a cop he'd met while writing the book
Homicide, came out with another book,
the Corner, which detailed a year in the life of a family caught up in the drug trade in West Baltimore. That book, too, had a television adaptation: this time in the form of an H.B.O. miniseries.
Which brings us to
the Wire. After
the Corner, Simon (again with Burns) returned to H.B.O. - this time with the idea for a fully-fledged series. That series was, and is,
the Wire - and if
Homicide was a cop show like no other, then
the Wire almost defies categorisation. Yes, it's a cop show - but it's so much more. Like any great art, the surface pretence is merely a vantage point from which to examine in greater detail an entire world - in this case, the city of Baltimore, but by extension any large city with a chronic drug problem. It does this by what seems a simple device: by giving as much screen time, and even more importantly as much humanity, to the criminals depicted in the show, as to the police who are pursuing them. So as well as seeing the day-to-day struggles of the police to operate effectively within their sometimes highly compromised institution, so do we see the drug dealers trying to cope within their own version of the exact same thing.
But this is not the most impressive elelment of
the Wire. What makes
the Wire so unlike anything else on T.V. - not just any other cop show, but any other
show, full stop - is the fact that each season of thirteen or fourteen episodes covers a single, sprawling, police investigation. I don't mean like in some shows, where there are themes that run through an entire season while each episode has its own self-contained stories: I mean that
each episode is just a small part of the greater whole. (Australians might recall at this stage the A.B.C. cop show
Phoenix, which had the same idea.) There's no point watching one or two episodes of
the Wire: you have to commit to the whole season.
But it's worth it. It's so worth it. If the effort you have to put into watching the show is, say, three-fold over a normal cop show, then the rewards at the end of each season are ten-fold at least.
The Wire may as well be the reason why D.V.D.s were invented: this is a show that rewards repeat viewing. I've just finished watching the magnificent second season for the third or fourth time - and it gets better with each viewing.
The Wire is the ultimate in long-haul T.V.: the first season looked at a drug empire in the housing estates of East Baltimore, and the poice detail that was trying to catch the key players in that empire. The second season had the detail looking this time at smuggling on the docks - but it also continued the story of the drug-dealer characters from the first season. The third season - incredibly - resolved storylines from the first season,
two years earlier, while bringing up fascinating issues of drug law enforcement and policing strategies and how they might be changed for the better - and why they probably never will be. Yes,
the Wire is an unashamedly political show (in fact, season 3 introduced a fascinating new strata in city life: local politics), but it's all the more forceful because of that. Season 4, just started, is looking at the education system - but also, more broadly, the theme of "education" in general: from the cops, to the politicians, to the drug dealers (now a bunch of up-and-comers, some new faces and some not), and lastly but most importantly the children who are on the verge of getting caught up in the drug trade, but who might yet escape that fate. It's only four episodes in, and it's looking like being a cracker of a season.
But I'd recommend you watch the first three seasons first. Not just because they're all brilliant in their own right, but because the storyllines of each build upon each other to create the most complete and fascinating portrait of urban life yet seen on television. So, that's 37 hours of T.V. to watch in order to get up to speed. Does that sound like a chore? Well it's anything but. While the themes of
the Wire may sound grim and depressing on paper: urban decay, drug dealing and drug dependency, corruption, moral compromise - the delivery is anything but. Yes, bad things happen in
the Wire: people get killed when all they wanted to do was escape; cases hit the wall because they're not politically convenient; characters put their ambition first when the viewer desperately wants to see the big pay-off instead; but most of all,
the Wire is about life itself. And like the Blues, if you cut beneath the veneer of misery you'll hit a rich, deep vein of humour, love, and even warmth.
The Wire is too smart a show not to know (unlike, say,
the Shield) that life doesn't throw up the odd moment of light relief. "You're not just a regular asshole" one detective tells his colleague and good friend, a smile on his face, "you're a
special kind of asshole." It's just one example of
the Wire's consistently brilliant writing and acting - but you could paraphrase it and apply it to the show itself: not just a regular show, a
special kind of show.
