(FX Channel; seasons 1-3, Warner Home Video)
I'm not much of a television viewer these days. My wife, on the other hand, is in the habit of switching on the box in the evening. Although her tastes definitely lean towards light entertainment, they also include police procedurals, and so I've acquired a glancing familiarity with the genre. My wife herself doesn't so much watch these shows as let them wash over her while she goes about her nightly business. For me, however, television is just too intrusive to ignore in that way.
Over the past couple of years, I had heard a lot of buzz about the HBO series The Wire, but I resisted checking it out. I wasn't enthusiastic about attaching myself to an established series in medias res, for one thing. Too much catch-up required. And the investment involved in watching a complex, multi-episode series seemed daunting. But last Christmas, my son, who, after a couple of decades of uncomfortably close observation, has some inkling of my tastes, brought home the first three seasons of The Wire on DVD. Within an hour or two, I was hooked. We spent much of the holiday in front of the television. Plans to watch "just one episode" would quickly expand to hours of viewing.
Where The Wire differs—and where it starts to assume the complexity one is more inclined to associate with 19th-century fiction than with a cop show—is in its treatment of the law-breakers. In series one and three, the police are after drug dealers in the housing projects on Baltimore's west side; in series two, crooked union executives on the Baltimore docks. In both cases, but especially when dealing with the drug dealers, the writers bring a level of specificity, intricacy and human sympathy to the ostensible villains that is almost disconcertingly absorbing.
Not that there is anything sentimental in these portrayals. There is no facile softening of rough edges, no emollient philosophising, no liberal redemption. Violence is a necessary tool of the drug dealers' trade, and it is seen to be employed without compunction and frequently with distressing glee. The unmitigated brutality on display is often startling in its ugliness, without the quasi-pornographic glamour one finds in a series like 24.
But despite this, the drug dealing enterprise itself is rational, and the way it is conducted—even the violence with which it is conducted—is rational as well. It is not for nothing that one of the two drug lords is portrayed taking an advanced business course at a local community college (and getting an A on one of his papers). The product being sold may be contraband, but enlightened marketing praxis still prevails. In one scene, played perhaps a bit too broadly for comedy, but effective (and very funny) all the same, the dealer presides over a council of his underlings as if they are a board of directors, even insisting on following Robert's Rules of Order.
The relationships among the drug dealers are beautifully evoked. Not one character, nor one relationship, is generic. The two drug lords, for example, best friends since childhood, are menacing and yet eerily vulnerable, young men walking a precarious tight rope. When their individual ambitions—their business strategies—begin to diverge and conflict, the inevitable show-down, suspenseful and very slow in coming, is full of authentic sorrow, deeply felt regret, as well as rage.
HBO has been responsible for the best dramatic programming in the history of US television. Another HBO show, The Sopranos, which has just come to its much-lamented end, revolutionised the medium. And The Wire would clearly be unimaginable without the example of the Sopranos. That's how it works when there's a venue where great work is encouraged and rewarded: serious artists gather and compete, demonstrating to one another what's possible, goading each other on to greater heights. The Wire has raised the bar once again. It should not be missed.
First published in the summer 2007 issue of the "Threepenny Review"
