When I finally started watching The Wire
I was a big fan of Homicide: Life on the Street
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
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
* So I mentioned the other day that Unforgiven
* 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.