TV Review: The Wire
October 16, 2006
And now for a show that you’ve read plenty about, for it’s continuously praised by the media as arguably the finest drama on television, but a show, inexplicably, based on ratings, that you’re probably not watching, David Simon and Ed Burns’ far ranging city masterpiece “The Wire”, the only show on TV that dares to address the nation’s problems – be it political, poverty, or drug related – with boldface honesty and realism. Now in it’s fourth season, once again shifting its characters and plotline to conform to a new setting, yet still confined to a Baltimore teeming with corruption, violence, drug abuse, and stunningly high poverty, “The Wire” examines inner city life and big city politics unlike any other show in the history of TV, by featuring an ensemble cast of characters that, though not all connected, represent the basic fabric of society, a society run down by poor decisions, ineffectual leaders, and an overriding servitude to the power money plays in each rank of The Game.
That game for three years has been the chase of one elite Major Crimes Detective unit to record and nail West side drug kingpin Avon Barksdale (Wood Harris) and his high ranking business partner Stringer Bell (Idris Elba), but in last year’s conclusion Bell was gunned down and Avon was sent up on weapons charges, creating the need for yet another series altering shift in targets, this time to the new drug lord, the brash young tactician Marlow Stanfield (Jamie Hector), and his brutal, and brutally efficient hit men, who in the season’s most terrifying subplot, bury their many victims inside boarded up and run down project housing, as much a symbol of urban decay as the corpses inside them are it’s ultimate product. Marlow represents to the drug war what Tommy Carcetti (Aidan Gillen), the white city councilman running for mayor against a powerful black incumbent, represents in the season’s second major storyline (like a movie, or a novel, each season generally has three major focuses), a fresh, honest face in a stagnant and often harshly cruel business, where one minute your predecessor is king of the trash pile, and the next, through an informants tip, or a leaked news item, you’re the top dog with a big bulls eye on your suddenly important chest. Both characters are smart, aggressive, flawed, and revisionist individuals, at polar opposites of the social spectrum – like the entire series arc, the spectrum is ghetto vs. upper middle class – who in later years could come to be the most powerful men in a city filled with power-grabbing backstabbers and opportunists. Only on a show as far sweeping in it’s scope as “The Wire” could a seemingly smalltime politician (“a white man in a city that ain’t”), and a ruthless murderer and drug mastermind be so symbolically attached, yet so socially distant that the likelihood of either character coming into each other’s space is almost an impossibility.
The season’s third major storyline, and arguably the most important in understanding the kind of social realism and criticism Simon and his brilliant writers (including famed novelists Dennis Lehane, Richard Price, and George Pelecanos) are trying to achieve, concerns the city school system as contrasted with the politics of both the street and City Hall, following four 8th grade friends, each with his own diverse economical situation, as they transition from summer vacation back to middle school, a hellish factory of foul language, violence, intimidation, and insubordination. For Namond (Julito McCullum), the smooth son of an imprisoned Barksdale Lieutenant, Michael (Tristan Wilds), a mature kid who cares for his young brother while his parents waste away on heroin, Randy (Maestro Harrell), an orphaned boy with smart business skills, and Duquan (Jermaine Crawford), the poorest, and saddest kid in the 8th grade, the school year is a kind of refuge from the temptations growing up in the ghetto inevitably brings, but with advisors who necessarily have to run the school like a police state, strict dress codes and all, and teachers more concerned with sending properly adjusted numbers to the state education board to secure necessary funding, the system in this Baltimore isn’t exactly the ideal in educational and behavioral molding. If the street is rough, the classroom can be just as unforgiving, as Prez (Jim True-Frost), the disgraced ex-detective turn teacher, who this season has become the show’s naïve backbone, learns in graphic fashion on Day One when a troubled girl cuts up the face of her harshest bully, a scene shocking both for it’s violence as well as it’s suggestion that in inner city schools in poor neighborhoods this type of taunting and violence is not only commonplace, but impossible to curb. “No one wins,” says Prez to his wife while explaining a football match, a textbook ‘Wire’ social metaphor, “One side just loses more slowly.” Simon is setting us up here, giving us this painfully realistic look at the lives of street kids, kids we instantly like and want to root for – especially Michael as he avoids the advances of Marlow’s thugs pressuring him to join the gang – and we can only hope that all four make it out of the season intact, but we can never rule out the possibility, like the murders of previous characters like Bell and Frank Sobotka in season two, one of these four urban heroes will tragically fall to appease Simon’s ultimate message, that nothing is safe when violence, money, and drugs bleed into the lives of innocent children.
The school, the mayoral race, and the Marlow investigation are at the heart of season four of “The Wire”, but there are offshoot threads to each storyline involving characters from the past seasons that only makes the novelic storytelling approach all the more dense and fascinating. Characters come and go at different times on this show and you never know when you’ll see them again, like gangster Robin Hood Omar Little (Michael K. Williams), who this season has dug up a rivalry with Marlow that may spell his demise, or two of last season’s best characters, ex-police Major Bunny Colvin (Robert Wisdom), and ex-gangster Dennis “Cutty” Wise (Chad L. Coleman), both of who are now employed within the school system, Cutty as a truant officer and Bunny as the liaison to an academic study of street youth and what turns them bad. Each of these strong characters, fully realized African-American men on the only major drama on TV that so proudly and refreshingly employs such a large array of some of the best black actors in the business, has their own purpose in this society, but it’s often interchangeable and subject to scrutiny by a higher rung in the hierarchy; Cutty’s boxing gym for wayward street boys is funded by the leftover coffers of the Barksdale regime, Omar’s theft of Marlow’s poker game cash has left him a marked man, and Bunny’s grant to study teenage street kids was made possible to him only because a higher paying security job fell through because of problems with authority. Ultimately, what all of this means, all of the political and social critique, the street violence, drug trade depictions, police sting operations, business ventures – both legit and not – youth wrangling, backroom corruption, and public manipulation is that in a city as poor and diverse as Baltimore, where the school system and drug trade are so closely related that the only alternative for the countless dropouts is as a corner hopper for Marlow’s drug package, the system is failing, and like it or not, it’s the almighty dollar that is the unforgiving root of this messy, maladjusted decay.
“The Wire” airs on HBO Sunday night at 10, and the previous three seasons are available on DVD.
by Adam Suraf