Get in the van
Five seasons of The Wire on DVD have been sitting on my shelf for many months. I put off watching the show because I knew exactly what would happen. See, there’s method acting and there’s method viewing. The former could be a career, but the latter eats up entire weeks of your life. (The exception: A friend of mine watched a whole season of the TV series 24 in 24 hours. He insisted that this was the only way to watch real-time series.)
You put on a disc with the intention of watching an episode or two, then resuming your regular workday routine. That’s not what happens. If the series is as good as its reputation, you will hear yourself saying, “Just one more episode, it’s only 55 minutes long.” Then you start reshuffling your schedule in your head: “That piece isn’t due till Thursday, I can do it tomorrow.” Soon you are reassessing your personal relationships: “Ah, they’ll forgive me for not showing up, I’ll make amends another time.” Suddenly the sun is rising, you’ve done none of your chores or assignments, and your eyes feel gummy. The day hasn’t even started and you’re already behind schedule.
That’s what happened when I watched The Sopranos and Deadwood. (For Rome I watched the weekly downloads.) There was no point watching them on cable — The Sopranos premiered on HBO Asia a few years late, and both series were heavily censored. The censorship was particularly cruel because these two shows redefined language for television: the rhythms of late 20th-century street lingo with its riffs and improv, and the strange grandeur of 19th-century Wild West-bastardized Shakespeare.
The Sopranos characters are mostly gangsters who are not in the habit of introspection; inarticulateness is their form of expression. To understand them you need to listen to what they cannot say. Deadwood’s characters speak a formal, archaic English that seems incongruous with their environment. Later, you realize that they are inventing themselves and their world, like characters in a Shakespeare play. Deadwood and The Sopranos are chapters in the history of capitalism, early and contemporary. Their language was their own peculiar poetry. HBO Asia censors hear only the profanity. Chop, chop, chop.
The Wire, created by David Simon (making it three Davids with Chase of The Sopranos and Milch of Deadwood), is an epic of capitalism, this time set in 21st-century Baltimore, Maryland. There must be upscale, fashionable areas of Baltimore; I’m at episode 20 and we haven’t gone there. Most of the action takes place in the housing projects where the drug syndicate operates, in the police headquarters downtown where cops in bad polyester suits try to cope with a flood of cases, and in a dingy, airless basement where a small, harried investigative unit is building a case against a drug lord named Avon Barksdale. Nobody wanted the unit to exist, and no one wanted to be in it. It exists because the show’s nominal hero Detective Jimmy McNulty has a big mouth and an overdeveloped sense of justice.
In the first episode, the state loses a murder case against D’Angelo Barksdale, the drug lord’s nephew and henchman. The Barksdale organization has neatly escaped many murder charges. McNulty expresses his frustration to a friendly judge who starts leaning on the police for their failure to bring in a successful prosecution. An inter-agency task force is formed, and the higher-ups take the opportunity to staff it with their most useless, inept deadweight.
From the start it looks doomed.
The first two episodes are heavy going, dense with back stories, character relationships, the byzantine workings of the police department, and the wheeling and dealing of politicians. (In contrast the drug syndicate is run like a corporation with its own CEO and COO.) There are dozens of regular characters, and all of them have vital roles to play. No one is here as a symbol (i.e. Honor), a platitude (“Crime does not pay”), a comforting figure for the audience to “relate to,” or something nice to look at. “Pretty” is not a word that will likely occur in descriptions of The Wire.
There are no glamorous characters, either. By “glamorous” I don’t mean “dressed for the Oscar red carpet,” but “someone you want to be.” Tony of The Sopranos and Al Swearengen of Deadwood were glamorous: you know they’re amoral, ruthless, and capable of the most terrible deeds, and despite or maybe because of these you wish you were they. They seem more alive than anyone else on screen, including the “good guys.”
Soprano and Swearengen have what a Shakespeare critic calls “apocalyptic exuberance.” (Halfway through the first season glamour appears in the form of Omar, the most feared man on the street. Omar is a killer who robs drug dealers, surely the least secure job description ever. He is a gay badass and a charming nihilist.)
Minor complaint: the song heard over the opening credits of The Wire is Tom Waits’ Way Down In The Hole, but it is not sung by Tom Waits. I’m guessing this was a common complaint because by the second season the version used is Tom’s original.
Basically we’re watching a bunch of unhappy cops muddling through a case nobody (except McNulty) really wants, finding their bearings, and getting their act together in the face of political and bureaucratic interference. On the other end there’s a bunch of drug dealers trying to manage a sustainable business and lead regular lives despite the constant threat of arrest or death. Sure, one side is exploiting human misery, but there’s no simple Good or Evil in The Wire, just people.
You can believe that when these characters are off-screen, they are leading real lives. After the slow start The Wire gets its hooks in you, and any attempt to shake them off just buries them deeper. Four days later you feel like you’ve been sitting in the surveillance van too long, listening to the wiretaps and burping coffee and doughnuts.
If you’ll excuse me I have 40 more hours to log.
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