I’ve been excited for FX’s The Bridge, an adaptation of a joint Danish-Swedish television production about detectives from each country investigating the death of a murder victim found on a bridge that marks the border between their two nations. FX made a smart move in transferring the countries in question to Mexico and the United States, and in casting Demian Bichir, nominated for an Academy Award for his performance as an undocumented immigrant in A Better Life, to play the Mexican detective and Diane Kruger to play his American counterpart who, in keeping with the original interpretation of the character, is somewhere on the Autism spectrum:

I can understand why those of you who are feeling overdosed on violence against women as a means of generating drama might be wary of The Bridge. But I’m willing to give it a chance precisely because it’s addressing a real-world epidemic of violence, the murders of at least 370 women in Ciudad Juárez in Mexico, since the spate of killings seems to have begun in 1993. The crimes are ongoing, and the investigations of individual murders that have resulted in prosecutions and convictions have raised serious questions about police misconduct. And it’s possible that there are multiple perpetrators who are killing women who come to work in the clothing industry that’s grown rapidly in the wake of the North American Free Trade agreement, or that some of the homicides are related to drug trafficking.

It’s one thing to take on real crimes that have taken place and are continuing to take place, especially those that have had their moment in the public eye and then receded from view, and particularly ones that raise valuable questions about flaws in the criminal justice system. It’s another to bring new visions of atrocity into the world, which is one of the reasons I find the proliferation of increasingly baroque serial killer shows such a turn-off. I’m all for confronting the world we actually live in, or for images and storylines that remind us of realities we’ve tried to put solidly in the past. But I’m losing my desire to imagine what it could be like if there were many more of the most violent sorts of people living in it, for the aesthetic pleasure of consuming that violence. I don’t know that The Bridge will be immune from television’s fascination with the gruesome details of the crimes its main characters are investigating. But my hope is that the focus will be less on a luxurious exploration of the specific acts of violence done to women in Ciudad Juárez and more on the social conditions that make them vulnerable, and the structural problems that make it harder to bring their killers to justice. In other words, I hope that The Bridge and its very different detectives will be a vision of the way the world could be better, rather than a celebration of the means by which it could be much worse.

Welcome to the Veronica Mars television club! As I’ve written here before, I grew up as a devoted reader of Rob Thomas’s young adult novels, particularly the exemplary Rats Saw God and Slave Day, but not as a television watcher. By the time I had television and a cable subscription for the first time, Veronica Mars was off the air, and when I began remedying the gaps in my television education, I prioritized shows that were still running, like Mad Men, or whose creators were currently working on projects that I’d need to review, like The Wire and Deadwood. But now that the Kickstarter to fund a Veronica Mars movie has been so successful, and has opened up such interesting questions about funding models for cult hits and the role of fans as investors, I’m pleased to have a chance to catch up. As I mentioned when I announced this project, we’ll be doing two episodes on Mondays and Fridays. So let’s start with the pilot and the second episode of the first season. Be cool, Soda-Pop…

“This is my school,” Veronica explains at the beginning of the pilot. “If you go here, either your parents are millionaires, or your parents work for millionaires. Neptune, California. A town without a middle class.” It’s a phenomenal thesis statement for a show, even without the murder mystery and private eye schtick that follows, given the class homogeneity of most shows about teenagers, whether it’s the overwhelming wealth of the kids on Gossip Girl, the kooky security of the families on Suburgatory, or even the cookie-cutter comfort of The Neighbors. And there are other intriguing details that Veronica offers up. “The day the company went public, Jake Kane made a billion dollars,” she explains of her ex-boyfriend’s family. “Everyone who worked for him, down to the secretaries, became millionaires.” The sudden transformation of working people into the extremely wealthy is a major change for a community to go through, particularly one with such sharp inequality.

But through the first few episodes, that’s a bit more thesis than a paper that’s ready to turn in. Veronica’s dad may joke that they can eat steak like “the lower-middle class to which we aspire,” but Neptune is a town where even poor teenagers have cars or motorcycles. Veronica tells us that her mother left after her father lost his recall election because “The loss of status, the loss of income, was too much for her,” though the show doesn’t really have time to show us what their lives were like before and after the election, and it’s hard to imagine that the sheriff’s job actually lifted the family up into the upper-class, given that we’re told that a respectable middle class doesn’t exist. Rich kids may use a code* to set up their parties to avoid infiltration by people outsider their clique, but they end up drinking on a beach in Eli’s neighborhood rather than doing something that would be genuinely inaccessible to the teenagers they want to exclude. Rich people in Neptune may have captured the sheriff’s department, but through the first two episodes, given the ease with which Veronica and Wallace subvert the sheriff’s department, the show’s set up a fairly equal contest. It’s not clear what inequality actually means for life in Neptune yet.
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Yesterday Joy Moses, one of my colleagues here at the Center for American Progress, wrote about the importance of A Place At The Table, a documentary about food security, that premiered just as the sequester began, cutting hundreds of thousands of recipients from the Women Infants and Children food program. And so I was struck today when AV Club critic Scott Tobias used the movie as a hook to argue that we’re more tolerant of stylistic stagnation in documentaries than we are in feature films, in part because we’re more likely to privilege the information in them over the way they’re presented. He writes:

I’ve often argued that the “movieness” of movies is undervalued—that we accept the indifferent, workmanlike craft of deliberate mediocrities over flashier, more conspicuous failures. But the “movieness” of documentaries rarely becomes an issue, which only encourages the stereotype of the documentary as a hearty gruel of talking heads and archival footage, spooned out as artlessly as the school lunches A Place At The Table criticizes so vociferously.

The thinking that documentaries need merely to seek or present some kind of truth, regardless of how those truths are presented, strikes me as dated at a time when the elasticity of the format is constantly being tested. Why should documentaries be forgiven any more than fiction films for failing to use the medium expressively or dynamically? Why give a pass to bland info-dumps like A Place At The Table?

I was curious to read the piece, in part because since I got back from the Sundance film festival, I’ve been thinking a great deal about what makes an effective documentary. One thing I think Scott may not necessarily be acknowledging about A Place At The Table is that, to a certain extent, it is a deviation from the norm to turn the camera on poor people and to treat them as if they’re experts, even if only on their own experiences. And I think I’m significantly more tolerant than he is of using documentary film to make arguments, something he acknowledges that he’s leaving out “entire categories of documentary unaccounted for, like acts of investigative journalism (the Paradise Lost movies, for example) or essays both personal (like the films of Ross McElwee or Michael Moore) and editorial (like Charles Ferguson’s Inside Job or No End In Sight),” though I’m surprised that he’s comfortable with Kirby Dick’s powerful The Invisible War, a movie I think is as polemic and argumentative, and as designed to provoke action as much as A Place At The Table is. But I want to make a different argument: attention to the craft of filmmaking can strengthen documentary film’s ability to convey facts and to convince audiences. But it can also trade off with getting the facts across in a way that’s not just dishonest: it’s damaging.

I was struck most strongly by this problem watching Zhao Qi’s Fallen City at Sundance. The film is a beautifully-shot exploration of how a number of families are trying to rebuild their lives after the Sichuan earthquake in 2008, an 8.0 magnitude event that killed 68,000 people in the region. Its lingering shots of buildings that have literally sunk into the earth, often shot from the hills far above the city where the movie is set, images of ruined structures being taken back by trees and grass, and chronicles of the construction of a replacement city are both gorgeous as photography and give a strong psychological sense of what it must be like to have your entire world disappear in front of you. But for all the time the movie spends on these striking visuals, Zhao literally never once mentions a factor that is critically important to understanding why the devastation is so severe, and why his subjects are responding to the events the way they are: in the earthquake, schoolrooms collapsed at a rate disproportionate to other construction, killing rural children at a high rate, and leading many parents and activists to believe that corruption contributed to shortcuts in school construction.
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New Yorker television critic Emily Nussbaum and I got together for a Bloggingheads episode about Scandal and House of Cards, and towards the end of it, Emily made a critically important point that I hadn’t considered before: we’re really at the first moment, post-West Wing, when political shows are emerging as their own form of procedural that can operate in both comedy and drama.

Political shows are everywhere, in all media, and part of what’s striking about them is how varied they are in setting and form. Parks and Recreation, which follows a local city councilwoman and employees of a small-town public works agency, seems likely to get a sixth season, given NBC’s ratings woes. The network took another stab at political comedy with 1600 Penn, a family comedy that happens to be set in the White House. ABC’s Nashville featured a municipal mayoral race prominently in its first season, though it’s an open question whether that plot will remain a significant part of the show, and the network has ridden to ratings success with Scandal, which makes the president an object of sexual desire, and explores the desire of his family, staff, and lover to possess both him and the power that he embodies. CBS is bringing politics into the police procedural with Golden Boy, which tracks the rise of an ambitious young cop to the police commissioner’s office. Starz recently ended its dark political drama Boss, but HBO’s sitcom Veep, which takes a similarly biting perspective on people in power, but from a mocking rather than a grand angle, is returning for its second season this spring. And new media outlets have their own spins on political procedurals as well: Netflix made a big push around its glossy, expensive adaptation of the British miniseries House of Cards, while last year, Hulu debuted a low-budget story about the staff of a midwestern political campaign, Battleground.

Precisely because this is an emerging space, it means that the conventions and values of political procedurals are very much up for grabs. What will the stock cast of characters in political procedurals be? So far, the formula of the West Wing seems to have stuck, with shows focusing on a politician and the relationships of (mostly) his staff and surrogates to that figure. The tone varies: the candidate was more of a distant figure in Battleground than in other shows, and the president is alternately warm and fuzzy in 1600 Penn and an object of intense sexual passion in Scandal. In Veep, the Vice President is risible, in Parks and Recreation, Leslie Knope is kooky but irresistible, and in Boss, Tom Kane was an almost demonic force, as is Frank Underwood on House of Cards. Interestingly, most of these shows have spent more time on governance than on campaigns: campaigns make for a great season structure and allow for a certain number of shenanigans on the trail, but you can’t do them often. Governance stories are harder to pull off, but they can be a way to bring in more characters and set up more complex long arcs, as has been the case with Leslie’s five-years-long fight for Pawnee Commons.

But even though a lot of these shows are spending time on the work of government rather than the process of getting into it, it’s far from clear what their views on government are. In House of Cards, Frank Underwood has no particular attachment to any ideology or policy—the federal government is basically a chew toy for him in his pursuit of self-aggrandizement. Veep wants to satirize the meaninglessness of political ritual in Washington, but spends much more time treating its titular Vice President as an eager flake. In both Scandal and Nashville, the president and the mayor, respectively, are underqualified, pretty-boy stalking horses for other interests. Parks and Recreation is unique in that it’s able to both recognize both the ludicrousness of political ritual and still believe that government can do a lot to make people’s lives better.

As a critic, I often think I’m harder on shows that wade into politics than those that don’t even bother, in part because it’s what I know and what I prioritize, I want badly for those shows to get politics right, and it’s easier for me to spot errors of logic and procedure. I might have graded Golden Boy higher, for example, if it was just a standard police procedural rather than a story about how a rising police commissioner decided what his values as a cop were. But thinking about political shows as an emerging genre makes me want to fight even harder for them to be smart, and to ask good and interesting questions (which is not to say they have to be inherently progressive to work). It would be an awful shame if the conventions of a new style of procedural were getting set and they turned out to be as lazy and cliche as some of what’s on offer today.

During the first episode of CBS’s new police procedural Golden Boy, which premieres tonight at 10 PM, Walter Clark (Theo James) tells a reporter who is interviewing him about his rapid rise from street cop to police commissioner, “Inside me there are two dogs at war. One good and one evil. Now which one wins?” The reporter knows the answer immediately: “The one you feed the most.”

The language might sound a bit stiff. But it’s a great premise for a television show. Many major problems in law enforcement today are the results of gorging the evil dog, from the profits police departments can make from asset forfeiture, the kinds of quotas that were the subject of the third season of The Wire, and an arms race between police departments and criminals that have made it more likely cops will bring military-style force to bear on civilians. Golden Boy, which flashes back and forth between Clark’s arrival in the Homicide department seven years before his appointment as Commissioner and his early days performing his duties in that new post, sets itself up as the story of how Clark acquired the principals that guide him in his post. It could have been a fascinating—and dark—look at how someone acquires the sense of power that allows them to become former New York Police Commissioner Bernard Kerik, who is currently in jail for committing conspiracy, mail fraud, and lying to the Internal Revenue Service, or to see how The Wire‘s Ervin Burrell turned into the kind of craven career-hound he was.

But Golden Boy doesn’t have the guts to go there. Instead, the show is the story of Walter Clark’s journey from hotheadednes to sober spouter of aphorisms. Commissioner Clark is the kind of man who says of confidential informants “They’re an important part of the job and they die forgotten…It’s doubtful his associates know he was a snitch. It might bring trouble to the family,” failing to acknowledge the kind of pressure that police departments put on suspects to turn them into confidential informants, and once they’re doing that job, that the incentives can encourage such sources to bring in false information. He is, apparently, the police brass equivalent of television’s bevy of moderate Republicans, a guy who turns his back on the Mayor to meet with victims’ advocates because he’s appalled by the suggestion that he’d “Blow off a victim’s advocate for a guy I don’t like?” As a fantasy of police immunity from political pressure goes, this dream practically comes spangled in My Little Pony-style rainbows and sparkles, it’s so sweet optimistic. And the show seems to exist in a world where there’s no such thing as a bad police shooting like the ones we saw in the Los Angeles Police Department’s hunt for Christopher Dorner—Walter’s shooting of a suspect in the case that made him a hero was good, and as Commissioner, he tells a shaky female cop not only that “Preliminary investigations indicate it was a clean shooting in a difficult situation. In my view, that makes you a hero,” but that she should get all the PTSD treatment she needs before coming back to work.

This is an irritating enough framework. But Golden Boy, despite its innovative framing of police questions, falls into cliches in its execution. Initially, it looks like the show’s use of Chi McBride as Detective Don Owen, Walter’s older partner, is promising. When the two of them first go out on assignment, Walter leaving their office building through a haze of reporters eager to cover him as a tabloid-moving Hero Cop, Walter mistakes Don opening a car door as a courtesy. “Who am I, Morgan Freeman?” Owen asks him. “Open your own damn door.” And when Walter breaks into a suspect’s apartment to try to advance the case against him, Owen tells him that “All this information: useless. If this gets out, this guy is going to walk,” and points out that Walter’s endangered Owen’s prospects for a secure retirement, being careless with the man who is suposed to mentor him in an already-difficult situation. But he quickly devolves into aphorism, revealing himself to be Walter’s union delegate when he’s caught talking to a reporter, an event that apparently has no real effect on their relationship. Owen, it seems, is mostly there to admit minor personal flaws for the sake of drama and to steer Walter in the right direction.

Structurally, the show couldn’t have him reject his protege or really dislike him, but I wish it would at least engage with why someone like Owen couldn’t be police commissioner while Walter can. Is it race? Ambition? Does Walter’s willingness to bend the rules to bring in big collars and more media attention make him a more attractive candidate than someone who wants to do the job with integrity? Golden Boy would be a much more interesting show for posing these questions, and for offering up a different, but more discomfiting, end result.

This post discusses plot points from the October 28 episode of Homeland.

“How about a movie?” Finn Walden asks Dana Brody as they arrange their first date in this week’s episode of Homeland. “Once Upon a Time in America is playing in Dupont Circle…He’s an Italian director who specializes in wide-screen agony.” That’s pretty lofty taste for a high school student, even the son of the Vice President, but it’s no mistake that Henry Brommell, who wrote this episode, put a movie full of assumed identities and betrayals in Finn’s mouth. This is a craft episode of television, full of cultural allusions and subtle parallels, as Carrie breaks down Brody and builds him back up into a potential double agent.

I’ve loved the introduction of Peter Quinn (Rupert Friend, wisely underacting opposite Claire Danes) as a sardonic foil to Carrie who speaks in pop culture koans and is willing to employ violence that she isn’t. All the interrogation scenes in this episode are just beautifully written, but Peter’s confrontation with Brody started with a blunt and useful delineation of where power lies in the room—and of how this scene would be different from the exchanges we’re used to seeing on television. “I’m a United States Congressman. You can’t just kidnap me and shackle me in the fucking floor,” Brody insisted. “Actually, we can. Thanks to your colleagues we have fairly broad powers,” Peter reminded him. “I want a lawyer,” Brody insisted. “Well, life is full of disappointments,” Peter told him.

I think this episode of Homeland may end up being interpreted as pro-torture, given Peter’s calm use of much of the latitude awarded to him—it’s telling that the CIA has a medical team on hand to treat Brody’s hand immediately. But it’s telling that Peter’s stabbing of Brody’s hand, his spitting rage, are almost immediately revealed to be an act. “Every good cop needs a bad cop,” Peter tells Saul, and it’s true. It’s the emotional connection Carrie has with Brody that allows her to break down the central lie he repeats first to Peter and then to her, that he wasn’t wearing the vest. But for that to work, Brody had to be goaded to feel his connection with Carrie, and Carrie had to believe that her expertise was being underestimated and her emotional connection to Brody treated like it was evidence of her hysteria.

Carrie’s interrogation may seem emotional at first blush, but with the benefit of watching the episode a couple of times, it’s impressive how systemic it is. Carrie beings by evoking Brody’s guilt at the sin both of condemning her and not loving her quite enough. She gives him water, a kindness. She reminds him of their shared damage from the war. She delineates the difference between him and Abu Nazir. And she reminds him that he’s still worthy of love, and of doing the things that make someone worthy of the love of a daughter, or a lover, or a wife. “It was hearing Dana’s voice that changed your mind, wasn’t it?” Carrie asks him. “She asked you to come home, and you did. Why? Maybe because, maybe because you finally understood that killing yourself and ruining Dana’s life wouldn’t bring Issa back. Maybe because you knew then how much you loved your own child. Maybe you were just sick of death. That’s the Brody I’m talking to. That’s the Brody that knows the difference between warfare and terrorism. That’s the Brody I met up in that cabin.” If you doubt her intentionality, even for a moment, it’s so striking that she moves from the finale piece in her emotional portrait, “That’s the Brody I fell in love with,” to the question “What is Abu Nazir’s plan?” From that moment forward, Brody tells her the truth, about Roya, about the vest, about the fact that there is a coming plan. A blade through the hand produces resistance. But love is undeniable. The question that hangs over the episode is whether the latter could have done its work without the former.
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I wrote earlier this week about American Horror Story: Asylum, and how for me, the show is most effective when it brings out the monstrous in human behavior rather than when it trots out the whole, bloody bag of horror tricks. But as always, I enjoyed talking to my podcast partner Asawin Suebsaeng of Mother Jones, who’s much, much fonder of scary violence than I am, and hearing what he has to say about the show’s execution:

Also in this week’s edition: more on Alex Cross and discussions of Happy Endings and Don’t Trust The B—- In Apartment 23, which blessed event I am so ridiculously excited for.

“Can you stop talking about politics and be a cop, please?” Detective Alex Cross (Tyler Perry) snaps at his boss, high-ranking cop Richard Brookwell (John C. McGinley) near the end of Alex Cross, an adaptation of James Patterson’s novel Cross, about a brilliant, African-American detective. In the immediate context, Cross is asking his boss to be more aggressive in his efforts to protect Leon Mercier (Jean Reno), an industrialist who is heading up the Detroit Fund, a major effort to revitalize the failing city, from Picasso (Matthew Fox), a dedicated and unnervingly skilled assassin. But much of Alex Cross raises the question of what it means to be a pop cultural cop at a deeper level, and reaches some disturbing answers.

In movies and television, being a detective or beat cop has often meant that you can break rules, beat or threaten suspects, shoot people and almost always get away with it after a semblance of a review—and even if you don’t, you can retain the audience’s sympathies. In Alex Cross, it also means that you can beat your colleagues, steal evidence, drop a murderer off a roof rather than bring him to trial, and frame someone for a death penalty offense without regret or compunction. From a liberal perspective, it’s always made sense to be skeptical of glamorizations of this kind of power for reasons of both self-protection and principle. There’s no question that much of the popular appeal of tough cops lies in the fact that their violence and corruption is deployed against people who are coded as distasteful or decadent, be they people of color who are presented as gang-bangers or terrorists, or hippies who are harbingers of anarchy a la Dirty Harry. And while it’s easier to dismiss these violations of the order when these tactics are turned on people we’ve been taught to hate and fear by people movies and television tell us we can trust, if we bother to think clearly, it’s awful to imagine that brutality straying beyond what we’ve defined as acceptable targets—which should tell us how awful it no matter who is the subject of renegade police violence.

Alex Cross spends a great deal of time establishing its titular character as someone we can trust to deploy violence, and to transgress the rules that constrain him in his work as a police detective. He believes in rehabilitation and innocence, visiting a young prisoner who’s taken the rap for two murders committed by her uncle, who tells him “You can’t save everybody, Doctor Cross,” only to have him remind her that “I’m not trying to save everybody. I’m just trying to save you.” He is an intellectual, a man who plays chess in the prison yard by starlight, and who offers his daughter suggestions for how to improvise during her piano practice. He is a loving father, one who is delighted when he finds out his wife is unexpectedly pregnant, and plans to transfer to a desk job with the FBI so he’ll be able to earn a better living and stop risking his own safety on the streets. He is affectionate with his mother-in-law, Mama (Cicely Tyson), who appears to be channeling Ruby Dee’s performance as the mother of drug lord Frank Lucas in American Gangster, if with somewhat staticky reception. If nothing else, it’s a virtue that Alex Cross makes so transparent the process of cinematically signaling who is a legitimate employer of extreme violence and legal manipulation and who is a legitimate target of those abuses.

The targets, in this case, are a constellation of decadent white men, and two Asian women the movie treats with astonishingly callous disregard. The first of these men is Picasso, who enters the movie by putting himself on a card for a cage fight that’s being held in an abandoned church, and betting heavily on his own performance. If that weren’t enough of a signifier that Picasso has deviated from commonly-held sensibilities and morality, he’s swiftly revealed to be a sexual sadist. Picasso takes home an attractive Asian woman he met at the fight, but when they’re in bed, he asks her “Do you like it?” When she says yes, he tells her “Well, I can’t have that,” and proceeds to paralyze her and cut off her fingers one by one to torture information out of her. “There is no way it takes all ten fingers,” Cross’s partner and boyhood friend Tommy (Edward Burns) declares at the crime scene the next day. “The other nine were for fun,” Cross tells him. That they later make a macabre joke out of using her severed fingers to open her safe apparently isn’t meant to sully our respect or affection for Tommy and Alex, though we are, of course, supposed to be revolted at the man who committed the initial violence against her.
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End of Watch, Training Day writer David Ayer’s third directorial effort after Harsh Times and Street Kings, is being advertised as a violent, aggressive movie that pits cops against cartels. To a certain extent, it is that: forks are shoved in eyes, cops go toe to toe with gang-bangers, and gold-plated guns are confiscated from vehicles. But those elements of the movie exist mostly to sell a much more subtle and interesting picture, a story about an exceedingly close friendship between two cops that also helps shift police dramas away from the monochromatic relationship between black cops and white cops and between white cops and black communities.

The cops in question are Brian Taylor (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Mike Zavala (Michael Peña), who we meet shortly after they’re cleared in a shooting incident and return to their work patrolling the streets of South Central Los Angeles. Rather than being detectives or the leaders of special squads, Brian and Mike are beat cops, a designation that means most of what they have to do is mosey around in their police cruiser in between minor bouts of community management and small acts of heroism—Mike fights a cantankerous older gang banger who’s been harassing his mailman to get the man to stop and charges into a burning building to rescue two young children, with Brian right behind him. Their stops in various Los Angeles homes veer between humor and horror, from the fisticuffs to the discovery of illegal immigrants locked in a back room. But their conversations, frequently about women, are the best part of the movie.

Mike is married to Gabby, his high school girlfriend, who he credits with marching him off to the police academy in the first place. And while he jokes with Brian that what Brian really needs is to find someone who will cook and won’t sleep with his friends and occasionally makes fun of Brian for complaining about being single and sexually successful, Mike clearly loves his wife, telling Brian “I don’t want to be with anyone else.” Brian has more direction and education than his partner does: a former Marine, when we meet him, he’s taking an elective film class as part of his pre-law courses. And his discontent with his dating life stems from a desire for a real connection. “First date: dinner and a respectful kiss,” Brian tells Mike. “Second date: dinner and full carnal knowledge. Third date: dinner and awkward silences when I try to talk about anything of merit.” End of Watch may be a tough-guy movie, but it’s one that argues that strength and tenderness aren’t incompatible, and that really loving a woman is more fun and more honorable than suffering through the company of one you couldn’t possibly respect.
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This post is a discussion of the first three episodes of the third season of The Wire. Next week, we’ll discuss episodes four through six.

The moment from the beginning of the first season of The Wire that’s lodged most in political and historical memory is Bunny Colvin’s speech about the paper bag. It’s true that his insight that there’s never been a paper bag for drugs and the genesis of Hamsterdam drive the core action of this season. But while the bureaucracy’s inability to tolerate Colvin’s innovation is the major theme of the season, it’s also valuable to examine how bureaucratic actors can enable each other in doing harm. We may spend a lot of time watching street-level partnerships evolve, bend, and sometimes break in The Wire, but the partnership between Burrell and Rawls, and the work they do in the CompStat room this season, is just as important.

Unlike the street partnerships, there’s a clear power imbalance between the pair. Burrell has the power to promote, to play politics, but it also makes him vulnerable. “What makes you think they’ll promote the wrong man?” he asks Daniels, to whom he’s promised much and is late on delivery. “We do it all the time,” Daniels tells him coolly. Carcetti offers Burrell opportunities, telling him “We’re losing 10, 12,000 residents a year to the county…The Mayor’s acting like a ten percent bump in the murder rate is business as usual…If you were smart, you’d come to me when the Mayor shorts you.” But much of the first three episodes of the season involve Burrell trying to figure out whether to accept his offer, and when he does, how to play it effectively.

Rawls and Burrell work so well together because the former makes space for the latter. Rawls gets to be profane and aggressive, opening up wounds Burrell can slip into and deliver death blows. “I don’t care how you do it. Just fucking do it,” he declares in explaining CompStat’s plan to put a hard limit on the number of murders Baltimore will report for the year. When Bunny asks them “How do you make a body disappear?,” Burrell gets to be comparatively elegant, telling him: “If you want to continue wearing those oak clusters, you will shut up and step up. Any of you who can’t bring in the numbers we need will be replaced by someone we can.” When Marvin Taylor reports that even though “I deployed my resources per your instructions…They move, sir. Every day. They’re going to sell their drugs somewhere,” it’s Rawls who informs him “They all tell me you lack a fucking clue,” and Burrell who smoothly relieves him of his command. It’s Rawl’s who throws a crude temper tantrum at Colvin, telling him, “What I got instead is some half-assed ‘I wish we were doing better’ platitude that’s meant to fool maybe a six-year-old girl into thinking you’re doing your job. But she’s left the room. She’s asking the stripper if she can have your job because she sure as shit doesn’t want yours.” And it’s Burrell who transforms that crudeness into something more elevated. “If the felony rate doesn’t fall, you most certainly will,” he tells Colvin. “The Gods are fucking you, you find a way to fuck them back. It’s Baltimore, gentlemen. The Gods will not save you.”

Watching the two men is a fascinating reminder that bureaucracy doesn’t only produce complication, duplication, and incompetence. It can be a tool of cruelty, both within the ranks, and to the people the bureaucracy works on. Rawls’ cruelty can be effective, as we saw in his management of Jimmy McNulty’s reaction to the shooting of Kima Greggs in the first season of The Wire. But here, it’s being used to browbeat, to obfuscate, and to cement a culture of lying. The glimmers of hope from the bureaucracy in these episodes are small: the possibility that someone else’s loss in a Parks Department layoffs could mean an opportunity for Cutty, the reminder in death that a police “was called. He served. He is counted.” CompStat itself is a scandal. But the means by which it’s enforced are spirit-crushing on their own.