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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
Do the mostly white, middle-class writers and producers of "The Wire" have the right to tell these inner-city stories?
That's a touchy question, and one the show's staff faces head-on. In addition to Simon and a few others who have been with the show for a while, "The Wire's" writing staff includes a number of acclaimed crime writers -- Washington's George Pelecanos, New Jersey's Richard Price and Boston's Dennis Lehane. To a person, the writers of "The Wire" have spent their careers researching and writing about the lives of those entrenched in America's cities, black and white, scraping by and falling through the cracks, cops and robbers, citizens and soldiers. Simon gives thanks that his show is not a Hollywood vision of the inner city -- his staff are mostly city guys, tough guys, who know the turf pretty well -- but he recognizes that there's always going to be a disconnect. "We are professional writers and paid as such," he writes, "and it is one thing to echo the voices of longshoremen and addicts, detectives and dealers, quite another to claim those voices as your own."
So the answer? Maybe they don't have that right. But they're doing it anyway, and the stories that result are really, really good.
So what happened so far?
SEASON 1
Season 1 focused on an investigation into Avon Barksdale's drug empire in the housing projects of West Baltimore. It all begins when a homicide detective named Jimmy McNulty mouths off to a Baltimore judge about the inadequacy of the department's efforts against the violence inherent in the West Baltimore drug trade. The judge raises a stink, and soon McNulty, on his boss's bad side, finds himself stuck in a poorly supported investigative unit headed by Lt. Cedric Daniels, looking into the Barksdale ring.
While at first the unit, buried in the courthouse basement, seems staffed by drunks and also-rans, Daniels manages to weed out the bad cops, install a few good ones, and make real progress. Three narcotics cops, Herc, Carver and Kima, make great progress in identifying the street-level operators in the crew, thanks in large part to information provided by a street informant, Bubbles. And back in the basement, Prez and Freamon, two cops long since given up for useless, expertly decipher an array of payphone wiretaps and pager clones to learn more and more about the nuts and bolts of the Barksdale crew.
Meanwhile, McNulty has reached out to a lone wolf named Omar who makes his money robbing drug dealers, one of the show's great, almost mythic creations. Because his lover has been tortured and killed by Barksdale soldiers in retaliation for an especially bold heist, Omar wants revenge, and he gives McNulty information on the Barksdale inner circle. He also pays the head of the West Side drug cartel, Proposition Joe, for Avon Barksdale's pager number, and nearly succeeds in killing Avon.
Within the Barksdale crew, disbelief reigns that the police are on to the crew's modes of communication -- until a major stash house is hit, at which point Avon's second-in-command, Stringer Bell, declares all pagers and pay phones off-limits. He distributes new cellphones to everyone, including Avon's nephew, D'Angelo, the soft-hearted head of the trade in the low-rise projects. As the net closes in, Avon sends D'Angelo on a run to New York for a new stash, unaware that Daniels' unit has placed a camera in the wall of Avon's office.
Pressure from above to wrap up the case -- which, in the eyes of Daniels' superior, Ervin Burrell, has grown unwieldy, including probing campaign contributions to Baltimore politicians -- forces the unit to make arrests and file charges. A disgruntled D'Angelo, upset because young Wallace, who wasn't cut out for the life, has been killed on Stringer Bell's order, accepts a deal from McNulty and Asst. State Attorney Rhonda Pearlman, but then backs out under pressure from his family. Without Wallace, a prominent witness, and without D'Angelo, the case accomplishes much less than the unit hoped: D'Angelo gets saddled with most of the resulting jail time, while Avon gets off with a light sentence, and Stringer Bell gets off completely. Only one Barksdale lieutenant gets saddled with any murders -- because he cops to every single one, taking a hit for the organization. The season ends with Omar on a bus to Philly; Avon and D'Angelo, plus several others, in jail; Stringer running the drug business, same as ever; and McNulty busted down to a crap gig on a police boat.
