The Wire, season one.

When I finally started watching The Wire in June or so, I didn’t intend to write about it here because I feel like no show of the last ten years has been written about, and written about so well, as this one. Enough of you have asked for my thoughts that I changed my mind, but I’m not sure I can offer you anything new on the subject.

I was a big fan of Homicide: Life on the Street, Wire creator David Simon’s previous show, also based on Baltimore on a nonfiction book Simon wrote, and a show that stood out for the depth of its characterization rather than its use of the crimes themselves as the primary generator of narrative threads. The show made Andre Braugher a minor star – it should have made him a major one, but the show was buried on Friday nights at 10 pm for much of its run and never found the audience it deserved – and did win four Emmy awards over its run, including one for Braugher, so at least it was noticed by the industry if not by the viewing public as a whole. It was also one of the first shows I can remember that used the ensemble cast as a true ensemble; Braugher was the best actor, and the best character, yet was never singled out in the writing as the show’s main star beyond his character’s story arcs. You watched for the group, not just for him.

That casting and writing mentality – that the ensemble is bigger than the sum of its actors – is the great separator, in my mind, between The Wire and just about any other show I’ve seen in any genre. The acting is strong, the dialogue is strong (still stylized, just not as much as your standard formulaic network crime drama), the plotting is intricate, but at the end of the day, it is the idea that the stage that unites all of these players is the true center of the show that makes The Wire such compelling viewing.

For the four or five of you who haven’t seen this series, season one follows an ad hoc task force in the Baltimore city police department as they identify and investigate a large drug-dealing operation in the city’s housing projects that is also responsible for up to a dozen murders. The show gives more or less equal time to the members of that drug cartel, all African-American, running their criminal operation in an efficient, business-like manner, led by Avon Barksdale and his consigliere Stringer Bell. The good guys can be bad, the bad guys have some elements of good, and there is no question where Mr. Simon’s sympathies lie on the twin subjects of the war on drugs and drug decriminalization – but it’s never preachy the way most network shows (I’m looking at you, Law & Order: SVU) are when they try to get topical. Season one of The Wire shows the impact of the war on drugs and lets those results speak for themselves.

You have to dig fairly deep into this show to find poorly drawn or stock characters – over the course of 13 rich episodes, the writers show us multiple sides of at least a dozen central characters, most amusingly Wee-Bey, and show significant development of at least half of those, including cops Pryz (screw-up nepotista to dedicated researcher) and Carver (clock-puncher to hardcore surveillance guy … but with a twist in the final episode of the season) to Barksdale lieutenant and nephew D’Angelo (grows a conscience) to addict/confidential informant Bubs. Yet even those stock characters have their value, such as personal favorite Proposition Joe (whom I quoted in last week’s chat) or Ed McMahon-in-uniform Jay Landsman.

And then there’s Omar Little, whom I think is the show’s most popular character – a violent, ruthless thief who also speaks unusually formally (never swearing), abides strictly by his own set of ethics, and is gay. He only appears in a handful of episodes in this season before absconding, but he’s the best example of the series’ stylized speech – you may never encounter someone who speaks like this, but it is so memorable and so clever that I can forgive the departure from reality.

For my money, though, the star of season one is Stringer Bell, played (to my shock) by an English actor, Idris Elba, now the star of Luther. Bell is a brilliantly conceived character, the brains behind the Barksdale operation, taking economics classes in the evenings, running front businesses as actual businesses, devising codes and changing protocols, and ordering murders when necessary. Elba infuses this character with tremendous gravity between his baritone voice and this one facial expression where he drops his chin without lowering his eyes, delivering a look that could pin a thought in midair and drop it to the ground without a fight. If he’s on the screen, I don’t want to miss a syllable.

Some scattered remaining thoughts from season one:

* Many of you have told me you consider this the best series in TV history, but I haven’t seen anywhere near enough television to offer that judgment. I actually don’t like most scripted TV series; the medium isn’t the problem, but the industry serves the mass audience a product that just doesn’t speak to me. The best TV series I’ve seen isn’t a series by our standards – that would be Foyle’s War, a British detective series that airs in roughly 90-minute self-contained episodes, with just a few per season. It’s more a series of short movies than an American-style TV series. It’s nothing like The Wire in setting, look, feel, time, or place, but it is everything like The Wire in intelligence, wit, and tension.

* So I mentioned the other day that Unforgiven was the only movie for which I can remember walking out of the theater before the film ended, and the scene that did it was when Eastwood’s character (EDIT: I got this wrong – see the comments) kicked the tar out of English Bob, after which we saw Bob’s companion urinate down his own leg. My wife wanted out at that point, and I can’t say I disagreed, even today: The use of someone pissing himself as comic relief is such unbelievably weak writing that I’d be ashamed to laugh at it, and as a demonstration of terror it’s rather over the top. Contrast that with Wallace’s final scene, when he realizes he’s trapped and that the person who ordered the hit isn’t around to countermand the order. He’s done, and he’s shocked, scared, betrayed, and when he loses bladder control, it’s mentioned in passing by Bodie as a way for the writers to heighten the emotion of the scene – not for cheap laughs. That wasn’t the part of the scene that made the strongest impression on me (that would be Poot having to tell Bodie to shut up and pull the trigger, then taking the gun and finishing the job himself, showing how much of Bodie’s tough-guy act was just that, an act), but it is a testament to the strength of the show’s writing.

* Speaking of Andre Braugher, if you haven’t seen his FX series Thief, for which he won his second Emmy for Best Actor in a Dramatic Series, the entire six-episode run is available for free on imdb.com. Braugher is the clear star here, but the plotting on The Wire reminds me more of this series than any other I’ve seen.