I’ve always avoided watching television series, particularly those billed as “dramatic”, since the writing is generally shallow, the directing formulaic, the editing frenetic, and the acting rarely more than passable. But I recently started renting the DVDs of HBO’s “The Wire” series to distract me during my winter treadmill hours, and I have to admit I’m impressed. I just finished the first two seasons, and I’m looking forward to getting on to the third.
David Simon’s dystopian view of contemporary Baltimore starts from a microscopic study of drug pushers in the projects and gradually telescopes out to encompass all sorts of social and political corruption. The show sets out to convince naive middle-class viewers (such as myself) that the corrupt economy of the street is but a pale reflection of the corruption infecting more “respectable” social institutions. But for all its pessimism about the state of the nation, its characters are never one-dimensional; even the worst (and some are very, very bad) are never portrayed as merely bad. Business is business, and the game is the game, at all levels of society; the players did not make the rules. Not that this lets them off the hook, though: they still make their choices, however circumscribed their situations may be. And a few – mainly the better cops – manage to come across as moral exemplars, if only by finding ways to minimize their compromises.
Here’s a Bill Moyers interview with David Simon, but don’t let their explicitly political banter mislead you into thinking that the show has a dogmatically liberal point of view; like all truly insightful fiction, its characters transcend socioeconomic generalizations. And, most importantly, don’t think that the show is humorless; tragedy and comedy are two sides of the same coin, and the writers of this show know that quite well-
If you’d like to see the second half of this interview, click here.
I’m glad you found the series. It’s one of my favorites and probably the best example of what HBO has done to create an essentially new form of drama, i.e. what is really a “long form” movie with as much depth and intricacy as you’d expect from the best quality movie, but pushed even further to break out of the 2 hour time limit and carefully develop characters and real relationships between them. The end result is more lifelike characters and stories where there is no black and white/good vs. evil. Sometimes that leaves us feeling disturbed when there is no tidy resolution, but then real life does that too and it’s healthy to remember that we don’t live in a TV drama that offers superficial solutions to complex problems.
I discovered The Wire in season 4, which is still my favorite. It follows one of the characters who decides to quit being a cop and try his had teaching at an inner city school. I guess being a teacher, that plot line grabbed me, especially as it wove thru the reality of what education can really be like and never slid into the classic Hollywood “teacher changes the world” plot line.
The story arc for each season is always fascinating and doesn’t usually reveal itself for a few episodes. There is also an overall series arc which is even more involved.
As Obama tackled and won the presidential election, I was continually reminded of one of the stories following a young, upstart candidate in the Baltimore mayoral election as he slowly works his way thru several seasons trying to make a genuine difference, but becoming entangled in all the hopeless corruption and limitations that have brought down his predecessors.
Since I started with Season 4, I wound up going back and watching the other seasons out of sequence as HBO re-ran them. I plan to someday go back and watch all 5 in order and really focus on the many story lines.
I can’t believe you’re able to digest that from a treadmill. Very impressive! I found if I didn’t sit down and really watch it without any distractions, I was hopelessly lost and would have to re-watch and episode to get back in sync.
The theme song, “Way Down in the Hole” is recorded each season by a different artist. It is originally a Tom Waits tune, and I believe his version is used on Season 2.
My favorite version of the tune is actually in Season 5 by Steve Earle, who I’m embarrassed to admit I’d never heard before the show. After researching him a bit, I discovered the rest of his music and that he actually plays one of the minor characters on the show – a recovering hard core drug addict – which he is in real life. I went to see him perform in Milwaukee not long after that and it is still one of my favorite concerts. His music is very hard to nail down as far style. Bluesy-country-pop maybe? Whatever he is, he’s a gifted song writer and performer, and having been married 7 times makes him quite knowledgeable on relationships as well.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Earle
I see someone has posted sound clips of each of the 5 seasons theme music. It’s interesting to compare each artist’s interpretation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wire#Music
Thanks for the link, John. Since I’m a sucker for real instruments (season 1′s track) and Waits’ voice (season 2′s), I have to vote for those over the others. And if push came to shove, I’d go with season 1, maybe because its where I first fell in love with the series.
Ah, now there’s a topic. What’s a “real” instrument? It’s like what’s a “legit” music (I term I’ve never really understood) LOL I agree for the most part. Wait’s original is hard not to like.