Actors (left to right) Clark Johnson, Brandon Young, Michelle Paress and Tom McCarthy appear in a newsroom scene from The Wire. (Paul Schiraldi/HBO/Associated Press)
It started out being about the Baltimore police, and ended up being about Baltimore, and, by inference, about the United States. One of the only subjects the superb HBO show The Wire hasn’t taken on in its nearly five seasons on the air is itself. But as the series moves towards its final episode (March 9), we find The Wire — like any person nearing his end — in an increasingly introspective mood.
Series creator David Simon is a former reporter for the Baltimore Sun, and much of The Wire’s final season has been devoted to exploring the waning influence of city newspapers. (The Sun’s real owners, who must have recognized what they were getting into, have allowed the show to use the name.) The most telling bit of self-reflection was a scene depicting a story meeting at the struggling paper. Writers and editors discuss a possible feature on Baltimore’s troubled public schools (a topic The Wire took on during its fourth, and best, season). The city editor argues that by examining the education system, and ignoring everything surrounding it, “it’s like you show people how a couple of shingles came loose, and meanwhile, a hurricane wrecked the rest of the house.”
Replies the paper’s editor-in-chief: “We need to limit the scope, not get bogged down in details. I don’t want some amorphous series detailing society’s ills.”
Of course, as viewers will recognize, that’s exactly what The Wire is.
The show, which debuted in 2002, has never gotten the sort of ratings enjoyed by HBO brethren like The Sopranos. The Wire is the exact opposite of most go-down-smooth prime-time dramas — including just about every other police procedural. Where other crime shows feature a murder a week, The Wire takes on one case a season — if that. And like the Baltimore streets and cop shops it centres on, it’s not particularly kind to rookies.
In the first episodes of Season 1, viewers are dumped into the Baltimore projects and left to fend for themselves as a motley group of cops — passionate detectives and do-nothing “humps” (five-o lingo for useless lifers) — run a wiretap on a network of drug dealers. There’s little or no exposition; much of the dialogue is delivered in a heavy, Southern-inflected accent (“do,” for example, becomes “dee-yew”). The criminal element has evocative names like Wee-Bey, Stinkum and Proposition Joe; one of the show’s most sympathetic inhabitants is a heroin-addicted police informant named Bubbles (Andre Royo).
Det. Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West) is The Wire's nominal central character. (TMN)
The police brass prefers quickly solved cases that will improve their “clearance” rates. For those few officers who want to take a serious bite out of crime, compromise — moral, legal and otherwise — is the only way to get anything done. The closest thing The Wire has to a central character is Det. Jimmy McNulty (played by British actor Dominic West), who wears a shit-eating grin and has an omnivorous appetite for women. (He may as well be named after the bottle of Jameson stashed in his jacket pocket.) Driven equally by honour and egotism, McNulty gets approval for the crucial wiretap by sweet-talking a judge and manipulating his superiors, who get their revenge at the end of Season 1 by demoting him.
The Wire is the kind of show best watched on DVD, both because it lends itself to weekend marathons (it’s really that good) and because, like a complex, epic novel, it rewards repeat examinations. Each season has taken on a different facet of Baltimore life, from the city’s shrinking number of dockworkers to the dysfunction at city hall to the inadequate school system to the dying newspaper business. Each strand intersects with, and is infected by, the drug trade. It’s all mingled with the often futile efforts of narcotic and homicide officers to maintain order and mete out justice, but also survive the police force long enough to move up the ranks and secure a good pension. The show suggests that these aims are usually mutually exclusive.
The Wire is the sort of show that shouldn’t succeed. It has had no big-name stars and a seemingly unwieldy mass of characters and plotlines. It cuts across class and race (although it spends most of its time with the poor, who are largely black). The show’s sprawling societal cross-section, and its propensity for showing Victorian levels of poverty and decrepitude, have inspired critics to call The Wire “Dickensian.” In the final season, the show has taken to mocking its own reputation — the editor of the Baltimore Sun asks that his paper show “the Dickensian lives of city children.” What he really wants is a graphic depiction of poverty that leads to newspaper awards.
One of The Wire’s through-lines is the idea of “the game.” At the outset of the series, it referred to the business of buying and selling drugs, and everything that goes with it. The lethal Omar (Michael Kenneth Williams), a combination gay gangster and Robin Hood who keeps himself in trench coats, do-rags, guns and young men by robbing drug dealers and distributing crack to the needy, claims he won’t hurt “anyone not in the game.”
Michael Kenneth Williams plays Robin Hood-style gangster Omar Little. (TMN)
As the series has worn on, the notion of the game has become more complex and devastating. The game is no longer just the drug trade, but a survival tactic in a financially and morally “broke-ass city.” The series’ most potent point is that everyone is in the game, from the clearance rate-obsessed police sergeants to standardized test-crazed educators to newspaper editors who favour neat narratives over messy reality. No one is terribly invested in improving Baltimore’s lot; they’re too busy looking out for No. 1. Simon and his crack team of writers suggest that the bureaucracy that runs Baltimore creates as much of a moral vacuum as the drug-infested corners. From dealers to street cops to the chief of police to the mayor, everyone is on the make and checking the angles. There are no true good guys.
The Wire’s final season has returned to where it first started, namely with the efforts of a single cop — McNulty — to force the police to fund a long, complicated investigation: a wire surveillance on the crew monopolizing the city’s drug trade. To finagle money, McNulty plants evidence to suggest that a string of unrelated homeless deaths is actually the work of a serial killer. The city goes nuts, the story goes national and Baltimore’s cash-strapped city hall starts throwing money at McNulty’s department.
For a series that prides itself on realism, it’s been a ludicrously unbelievable plotline — akin to National Geographic suddenly telling everyone that the world is, in fact, flat. McNulty gets attention for his faux murderer with the unwitting help of the story-hungry Baltimore Sun. While The Wire has been filled with nuanced characters, the Sun newsroom is stocked with stereotypes like Scott Templeton (Tom McCarthy), a callow, ambitious, Stephen Glass-type reporter who resorts to inventing sources.
Even so, Season 5 has had flashes of the series’ overall brillance, notably the compelling rise to power of young crime lord Marlo Stanfield (Jamie Hector). He’s ruthless enough to stage a kind of corners coup, killing off every other rival for West Baltimore’s gangster-in-chief. Hector’s minimalist characterization — blank-faced and chillingly unknowable — suggests a man with a void where his heart should be. Stanfield alone is enough to remind us that even a weakened Wire is still double the strength of its competitors.
The Wire’s final season, like the preceding four, has worked as a commentary on the show itself — the storyline has been invariably dark and unsparing, and no one who has followed the show has any reason to expect the finale to be happy. But then the show’s biggest draw — that is, besides sharp writing and stellar acting — has been its refreshing frankness. If there’s one thing The Wire has proved since the beginning, it’s that, in a screwed-up world, sometimes the only way to do good is to be bad.
Gillian Grace is a Toronto writer.
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