Are you one of those conservatives who eschews television to preserve your moral and cultural purity? Fine. But you missed a truly great and important television series that ended its five-year run this spring.
Actually, even if you were watching television you probably missed HBO’s The Wire, which failed to reach a wide audience and didn’t win any major awards. That’s likely a sign of how much the series demanded from its audience. Superficially a cop drama set in Baltimore, The Wire announces itself as something distinct from the run-of-the-mill by the opening scene of the first episode of the first season. Events unfold slowly. Characters develop gradually and anecdotally, as in good literature. The show itself is novelistic in scope, not episodic—The Wire requires an entire season to craft several detailed, nuanced storylines that are all somehow involved in the same dramatic plot. Not every TV viewer had the patience for The Wire’s comparatively slow, careful, and sophisticated structure.
The payoff for those who hung around for every episode, though, was enormous, which is why the show’s fans are uniquely loyal and vocal. Firstly, The Wire doesn’t insult its audiences with the stupidities of usual cop drama. You won’t find ardent crime fighters or diabolical crime fiends among the characters. All the urban institutions are here—the courts, the police departments, the newspapers—but no one is on a civic mission. Instead people are engaged in business as usual, which for them is simply getting by in life by means of whatever institutional structure with which they happen to have aligned themselves. Any idea of civic virtue quickly evaporates, as institutional hierarchies routinely abandon their official duties in bids for self-preservation. Was the star witness in a murder trial shot dead in the housing projects? Any officer who says so to the press or the judges sooner or later gets assigned a “shit detail” and loses his career. Did the drug gang arbitrarily murder a trial witness, even though they had beaten the charge? A gang soldier with a guilty conscience is a liability to the outfit’s multi-million dollar heroin trade, and can expect to be taken out of the game by the bullet of a less scrupulous counterpart. But there is humor and humanity here, too, and in spite of the show’s pessimism it doesn’t come off cranky, moralistic, or condescending. Everyone is tainted. Every character eventually tramples on honor and duty out of self-interest. There are no heroes and no villains. There are only individuals and institutions, and an open question about how well they are serving each other and where they might be headed.
The show’s primary creator, former Baltimore Sun reporter David Simon, meant for the series to be a groundbreaking meditation on our crummy social and political prospects. He and his collaborators succeeded beautifully. College Democrats and Republicans will keep smirking and giggling at their West Wing pizza parties. Meanwhile The Wire is the final word in television for anyone in the habit of more exciting and serious reflection on themes of civilizational decay.
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The best show you didn’t watch
Are you one of those conservatives who eschews television to preserve your moral and cultural purity? Fine. But you missed a truly great and important television series that ended its five-year … [Read More]
Posted by Evan McLaren on June 12, 2008
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