I'm really looking forward to the final season of The Wire, the first episode airs thsi Sunday, here's an insightful preview article from Time:
A wire is something that connects. All The Wire's characters face the same forces in a bottom-line, low-margin society, whether they work for a city department, a corporation or a drug cartel. A pusher, a homicide cop, a teacher, a union steward: they're all, in the world of The Wire, middlemen getting squeezed for every drop of value by the systems they work for. "Every day, they matter less as individuals," says Simon.
The next lucky group that gets to matter less is journalists. In the final season, Simon goes inside the fictionalized offices of his former employer, the Baltimore Sun. (He credits the newspaper for being "gracious" enough to let him use the name.) The idea, says Simon, is to ask, while continuing to lay out the problems that manifest themselves in bodies and police cases, "What were [the journalists] doing when Rome was burning? What were they paying attention to?"
At the Sun, as with many other media organizations--and like The Wire's budget-strapped cops--they're paying attention mainly to the bottom line. Out-of-town owners are demanding higher profits, bureaus are closing, layoffs are draining the institutional memory, and the staff barely has the resources to chase fires, much less do investigative work. One top editor repeatedly asks his troops, in impeccable corporatese, to "do more with less."
What this means is doing less with less and cutting corners to make it look like more, sometimes with disastrous results. The lie of "more with less" is, in a way, the heart of the series. "The Wire's basically about the end of an empire," says Simon. "It's about, This is as much of America as we've paid for. No more, no less. We didn't pay for a New Orleans that's protected from floods the way, say, the Netherlands is. The police department gets what it pays for, the city government gets what it pays for, the school system gets what it pays for. And in the last season, the people who are supposed to be holding the entire thing to some form of public standard, they get what they pay for."
Ironically, The Wire might well not exist without the kind of long-form journalism it's hard to pay for today. As a Sun reporter, Simon spent a year on Baltimore's drug corners in 1988 for an assignment that turned into a book and then an NBC series, Homicide. His next project, with former cop and Wire partner Ed Burns, became the book and HBO miniseries The Corner. But then, frustrated at being unable to fit the complexities of street life and the drug war into the news columns, he took a buyout and went into fiction full-time.
On The Wire, Simon and a staff of top-shelf crime writers like Richard Price are free to make things up. But in a way, the show is a variation on old-fashioned populist reportage à la Studs Terkel. It elevates the lowlifes and mocks the highlifes. It's steeped in lived experience, with voices as distinctive and regional as a crab boil. Simon may be angry and intellectual--The Wire differs from most TV drama, he says, because it's based in Greek tragedy about fated individuals, not Shakespearean tragedy about heroic individuals--but his show doesn't play like a tract or a thesis. It's full of memorable characters, like Omar (Michael Kenneth Williams), the principled bandit who robs from drug dealers; Detective Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West), the boozy, dogged cop trying to work cases the city won't pay for; and Bubbles (Andre Royo), the recovering junkie fighting his addiction like Sisyphus pushing a boulder of dope up a mountain.
BONUS:The Wire's Suppressed Final Scene from Slate.
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