Saturday, May 17, 2008
HBO's morally complex, richly textured series "The Wire" is not just the best thing on TV -- it's a Homeric epic of modern America.
Jul 12, 2003 | The TV world is made up of three kinds of people: 1) saintly public servants who strive to keep dangerous criminals off the streets, save innocents from death row and perform heart-lung transplants on disabled children in burning buildings; 2) devil-may-care villains who want to harm, maim and deceive as many women, children and small animals as possible, all the while getting high on crack and smashing stuff up with baseball bats; and 3) wisecracking jackasses with pretty, wisecracking wives and adorable, wisecracking children and three-bedroom houses with roughly the same living-room layout.
The motives of each TV type are spelled out over and over again, in countless dramas and sitcoms up and down the dial. The saints want to make the world a better place (which is apparently a tough row to hoe, given how many of the saints also battle with alcoholism), the villains crave the kind of power afforded to those willing to ignore all rules, and the jackasses want to avoid getting canceled so that they never have to go back to doing stand-up in the Scrooge McDuck Lounge of a Disney-themed cruise ship.
And then there's "The Wire" (Sundays at 9:30 p.m. on HBO, with repeats throughout the week), a richly textured universe unto itself, populated by detectives, drug dealers, longshoremen, politicians and lawyers who have motives so diverse, surprising and complicated, each scene seems to reveal a new layer of depth and complexity. Watching this series is like navigating the streets of a genius-level SimCity -- it takes a while to grasp just how far from the TV-land basics creator David Simon is willing to wander.
For starters, the cops on "The Wire" don't investigate crimes out of the pureness of their hearts, working tirelessly to get to the truth. When Officer Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West) finds a body in the Baltimore harbor, he looks into it because he's bored with his new assignment and wants to stick it to his former bosses in Homicide. Police Major Stan Valchek (Al Brown) comes down hard on union leader and fellow Polish-American Frank Sobotka (Chris Bauer) because Sobotka made a bigger donation to his Catholic Church than Valchek could make.
Deputy Commissioner Ervin Burrell (Frankie R. Faison) assigns Lt. Cedric Daniels (Lance Reddick) a key role in investigating Sobotka even though he and Daniels despise each other -- because Valchek, who holds the key to Burrell's promotion, wants Daniels on the job. Detective Shakima Greggs (Sonja Sohn) takes a desk job because her girlfriend worries about her safety and wants to start raising children together -- or, as a colleague puts it, she's pussy-whipped within an inch of her life.
Confused yet? Well, that's only the beginning. "The Wire" has the steepest learning curve of any show I can think of, but that makes sense, given how the series slowly and deliberately weaves together such a dense system of cause-and-effect, involving cops, lawyers, politicians, union leaders and drug dealers in an intricate network of favors for favors. For all the show's density, though, there's humor, insight and inner conflict in almost every scene.
A lot of these qualities radiate from the richness of the show's characters. Given the scope of "The Wire," it would be easy enough for Simon to assign each character one motive and leave it at that. But motives, like moods, shift constantly, and few of the characters on this series struggle through their daily grind with a consistent, transcendent vision of why they do what they do. Instead, they simply stay the course, often discouraged, blind and bitter along the way -- which may be one reason why it's so impossible to fault any one of them, cops or criminals, for trying to get by however they can.
In other words, this is not television crafted to bring cheap satisfaction. Once you start to understand that the street thug may be more of an idealist than the cop pursuing him, or start to wonder whether the dockworker whose bribes have led to a horrifying pileup of deaths is an honorable guy or a juvenile idiot, things get increasingly uncomfortable. One dirty cop might be more despicable than a drug kingpin, but that doesn't mean this is an upside-down world like Dennis Hopper's "Colors" either.
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