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Sunday, Jul 12, 2009
Need a primer for quite possibly the best show on television?
Oct 1, 2004 | "It's a novel," David Simon likes to say about the show he created, HBO's "The Wire." Which is a good way of explaining the show's distinctively long plot arcs, dense webs of characters and grand scope -- but an intimidating message to new viewers who, tempted by the show's wild critical acclaim, are trying to tune in now, early into the program's third season. After all, you wouldn't start reading a novel on page 201, would you?
But getting a handle on the third season of "The Wire" doesn't necessarily require watching 25 hours of back story. Though I heartily recommend the Season 1 DVD set (out Oct. 12), I'm happy to present a guide to HBO's acclaimed, and extremely intricate, series.
I'll answer a few select questions about the show's aims and methods, to give new viewers an idea of what kind of show to expect. I'll briefly synopsize Seasons 1 and 2, and let you know where the series stands at the top of Season 3. And I'll present "The Wire's" rogues' gallery: bios of the major players in David Simon's Baltimore. You can read that straight through for a deeper understanding of the Season 1 and 2 synopses, or simply use it as a reference work, dipping into it when an unfamiliar face appears onscreen.
I don't even like cop shows. Why should I watch "The Wire"?
"The Wire" wears the trappings of a simple police show, but, as Simon notes in his commentary on the Season 1 DVD, the show is "really about the American city, and about how we live together. It's about how institutions have an effect on individuals, and how, regardless of what you are committed to, whether you're a cop, a longshoremen, a drug dealer, a politician, a judge, a lawyer, you are ultimately compromised and must contend with whatever institution you've committed to."
Big talk for a cop show. But "The Wire" backs Simon up in its choice of subject matter from season to season. Season 1 focused on Baltimore's mostly black West Side housing projects and the drug trade eating them from within. The Baltimore Police Department was shown to be just as compromising to its members as any other institution -- including a high-level drug organization. Season 2 shifted from the ghetto to the waterfront, focusing on corruption and desperation in the mostly white Baltimore's dockworkers' unions. And Season 3 seems to be focusing on the genteel-yet-mean world of Baltimore politics, showing once again how all involved are forced to play "the game."
True, the spine of each season is a Baltimore police investigation, one that leads inevitably to electronic surveillance -- "the wire." But those police -- good and bad police, drunks and womanizers, brutes and thinking men, careerists and self-destructors -- dig up the ways that legal and illegal Baltimore talk to each other every day, and their stories make powerful arguments about the war on drugs and the failure of the American dream.
Look, that's great and all, but is the show actually fun to watch?
Absolutely, and this is where Simon's declaration in his introduction to the book "The Wire: Truth Be Told" -- that character and plot in "The Wire" come second to "picking a fight" -- seems a little suspect. "The Wire" is not compulsively watchable because of its powerful arguments about the war on drugs and the failure of the American dream. It's compulsively watchable despite those arguments, and because it offers rich, deep characters; believable, funny scenes; and complex, innovative plots. Characters like Omar, the stick-up "homothug" who's dead-set on avenging the death of his lover, who's never pointed his gun at a "citizen" but won't hesitate to blow away a drug dealer, while whistling "The Farmer in the Dell." Scenes like the one in this Sunday's episode that captured the awkwardness when co-workers run into each other outside the office -- only in this case, the "co-workers" are two West Side drug dealers and two narcotics cops, all with dates on their arms, coming face-to-face in the lobby of a Baltimore movie theater. And plots like Season 2's, in which Frank Sobotka got his hands dirty in an attempt to save his dying union -- and realized what a small part of the world of crime his operation was, just as his union's place in the world of working Baltimore was shrinking to nothing. The unraveling of this union boss's plans as the cops closed in on one side, and the thugs closed in on the other, was painful to watch, but it also offered viewers the crackerjack thrill of tangled plots coming to full heads of steam at the same time.
Is the show really about wiretapping? The opening credits show a bunch of shots of, like, people sitting around wearing headphones. That seems boring.
The wiretap promised by the show's title and credits didn't even get set up until the seventh episode of the 13-episode first season. So no, the show isn't specifically about wiretaps, any more than it's specifically about drugs or housing projects or dockworkers. But wiretaps do serve as a useful metaphor for what the show hopes to do: As wiretaps provide the cops in "The Wire" a look into a secret world, so does "The Wire" offer us that same look into places most television viewers never see.
Do you need to know all about Baltimore to understand what's going on in "The Wire"?
Though native Marylanders will enjoy the references to Chesapeake Bay crabs, Natty Bo and obscure Orioles catchers, background knowledge of the history of Baltimore is not necessary to follow the day-to-day events of "The Wire." As Simon notes, the woes the series describes are happening in pretty much every city in America.
