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.

I’m going on vacation next week, but we’ll start up again with the first three episodes of Season Three of The Wire on September 11. There’s also a spoiler for this week’s episode of Breaking Bad in this post.

After watching this week’s Breaking Bad, I’ve been thinking about moments that are not precisely suicidal, but when characters approach death or the possibility of it, even if they don’t acknowledge that’s precisely what they’re doing. There’s a lot of that in Mike’s trip down to the river in Breaking Bad, in Frank Sobotka’s rendezvous with Vondas and The Greek, in Nicky’s attempt to murder his old self with his shooting of George Glekas, in Omar’s plan to kill a man and reckoning with the responsibility of using that power according to his code. In the Steve Earle song that closes the third season, the singer promises to “bring you precious contraband / And ancient tales from distant lands,” but for all that the lyric is a way of encapsulating that this is about the shipping business, and for all that this is another season that ends with the limitations of federal prosecution and local resources, the local’s reelection of Frank is both a political manuever and a reckoning with that larger question: it’s a form of suicide.

Ziggy’s act of murder is the clearest act of self-destruction in these violent final three episodes. “We had a deal motherfucker. A deal. You listen to me. It was my fucking ass out there on the line,” he tells George, who has cut the percentage he’s paying the younger man for stolen cars. “You don’t play me like that. You don’t.” But he does, of course, and because Ziggy can’t kill the part of himself that gets played, that gets talked into fighting Maui and that buys a duck and then can’t keep it alive, he kills George instead. “I got tired,” he tells his father in jail. “I got tired of being a punchline to every joke.” Murder may not have freed Ziggy of that tendency, but it’s given him a permanent role and a uniform, an orange jumpsuit instead of a leather coat, his hands behind his back instead of flailing at windmills.

For Brother Mouzone, killing itself is his identity. Cheese makes the mistake of assuming it’s Islam, asking “You slingin’ bean pies up in hear or something?” But Mouzone clarifies quickly that it’s the instruments of his trade, the plastic bullet he shoots Cheese with first, “what’s seated in the chamber now,” the “nine at close range” that Omar shoots him with, leaving a relatively clean wound. He may talk about the dangers of “a nigger with a library card,” and complain about his magazines, but these things are not what Mouzone is. And he and Omar recognize each other in the moment that Omar shoots Mouzone on the basis of bad information from the Barksdale crew. Omar’s insistence that “See, that boy was beautiful. Wasn’t no need for y’all to do him the way you did,” may be sentimental, but his decision to call 911 is in keeping with those articulated ethics. Death and violence are powerful tools. They shouldn’t be wasted or misused, and if they are, the mistakes, if at all possible, should be corrected.

Frank and Nicky are men who think they understand force and violence up against men who truly do. Nicky may have the car and a roll of cash, but he’s child in certain fundamental ways, living in his parents’ basement, retreating to the playground and a childhood friend and a bottle when Ziggy ruins his life. When he threatens to kill the Greeks after Frank’s death, it’s a child’s threat, wheeling arms and shouting, rather than actual plan of attack. He reaches manhood when he has the sense to fear Vondas and the Greek, to take them down from a police station rather than under a bridge. It’s a good thing. Sergei may be in jail, still complaining about being nicknamed Boris, but he’s a man who explains matter-of-factly that a shepard broke the rules he needed to traffic women successful, the product died, and he needed to be killed to close the circle. Sergei may not be a killer in the way that Omar and Brother Mouzone are killers, but he walks the same line they do. It’s Johnny Cash singing that line about love at the beginning of the first of these three episodes. But in the world of The Wire, death is what needs to be finessed, even more than life and all its possibilities.

This post contains spoilers through episode 9 of the second season of The Wire.

The Wire tends to explore worlds that operate by separate sets of rules and principals, and the show focuses on the police in part because law enforcement is one of the primary points of contact between those disparate universes overlapping within the same city limits. But I always enjoy it when The Wire turns to the subject of communication and code-switching within those communities themselves, or between residents of one of those universes and the people who cater to both. Omar’s confrontation with Levy in the courtroom during Bird’s murder is so shocking and funny precisely because it calls into question Levy’s ability to work with the Barksdale crew without becoming a citizen of their society. And episodes seven through nine of the second season of The Wire are full of these kinds of communications errors and code-switches, delineating the city’s complexity.

When Bodie goes into the florist’s to pick out an arrangement for D’Angelo’s funeral, the core joke is the separate set of designs the man ends up keeping out in the back of the shop to cater to his criminal cliental without disconcerting the citizens who patronize his shop—”That gat and grip thing over there sells a lot,” the man tells Bodie. But the even more telling moment comes before he guides Bodie into the back room when he asks his young customer “Something in particular?” “Funeral,” Bodie tells him, and when the man says sorry, Bodie misses that he’s uttering condolences. “Nah, a funeral, you know,” he clarifies, puzzled that the man wouldn’t know what he means. “No, I mean, I’m sorry for your loss,” the florist clarifies. As D’Angelo found out at dinner with Donette, it’s the little gaps in your knowledge and familiarity with social cues that end up betraying you the worst.

Nicky Sobotka, beginning his successful career as a drug dealer, is in the opposite position, exposing other people’s efforts at code-switching and their ignorance. “I don’t know how to tell you this without hurting you deeply, but you happen to be white,” he tells Frog, who wants in on what he’s dealing as the city faces a somewhat watered-down supply. “I also happen to be white. Not hang on the corner don’t give a fuck white. But Locust Point, IBS 47 white. I don’t work without a contract.” With Ziggy, he’s kinder. After Nick buys a new truck on a no-interest loan, Ziggy wants to know “Money’s cheap. What does that mean?” “It means I got a good deal, you peckerwood,” Nicky joshes him. But even the little slight burns. Ziggy’s aware that he faces some serious deficits in reading people, but he keeps falling for bad jokes anyway, whether it’s for Maui’s rather sophisticated prank on him, or for his coworkers suggestion that he could avenge himself on the bigger man with a punch. He’s literally and figuratively a little man windmilling wildly at a big world and his continued failure to land a punch seems to be stoking a fatal fire.

Then there’s McNulty, who has charm to burn even when he’s drunk to the point of passing out, but finds that it doesn’t work on the target he actually cares about, his soon-to-be-ex-wife Elana. “I can care about you. And I can want us to be friends. And if you give me enough time, Jimmy, maybe I will even want you to be happy. But how am I supposed to trust you?” she asks him as they share a peaceful evening in the back yard while their sons camp in a tent. When he and Beadie share a beer after work, McNulty discerns that she’s single, but once they’re in her home, he investigates her domestic happiness like a crime scene and then withdraws, whether because he thinks he doesn’t deserve her, or because he sees his potential to wreck it. The fear isn’t unreasonable—McNulty may have turned down a shot at the same bar where the previous night he drank himself senseless, grabbed a woman he didn’t know, and left to crash his car and then sleep with a random diner waitress whose response to “Can I get scrapple with that?” is “You can get anything you want.”—but that does not make him a reformed man.

I tend to find the idea of anti-heroes as sexual catnip frustrating, whether it’s Vic Mackey’s fling with the women’s shelter head or this, and it’s frustrating here that The Wire makes the waitress fall all over the bloody, drunken mess of our hero just so the show can complete his degradation by making him have a fling he’s ashamed of, the blood from his hands all over her sheets in the morning in a kind of inverse loss of virginity. But then, it does make Kima even more right than usual that it “Takes a whore to catch a whore.” And it makes the “What the fuck did I do?” that follows even more hollow than usual.

David Simon has never had much patience for the vultures in any economic system he’s examined (with the possible exception of Omar, the roguish robber of drug dealers in The Wire), and he’s positively appalled by the idea that Mitt Romney’s declaration that he’s never paid less than thirteen percent of his income in taxes constitutes an appropriate defense of Romney’s approach to his finances and his fiscal obligations to his government and fellow citizens:

Am I supposed to congratulate this man? Thank him for his good citizenship? Compliment him for being clever enough to arm himself with enough tax lawyers so that he could legally minimize his obligations?

Thirteen percent. The last time I paid taxes at that rate, I believe I might still have been in college. If not, it was my first couple years as a newspaper reporter. Since then, the paychecks have been just fine, thanks, and I don’t see any reason not to pay at the rate appropriate to my earnings, given that I’m writing the check to the same government that provided the economic environment that allowed for such incomes.

Simon may be impatient with Obama, particularly on issues of the drug war and mass incarceration, but if he decides that the present commander in chief is preferable to a guy whose attitudes indicate that, as Simon puts it, “This republic is just about over, isn’t it?” I imagine the Obama administration wouldn’t say no if Simon wanted to shoot some ads for the campaign. Treme comes back in September, and Simon might have some free time once it’s in the can. Just a thought.

This post discusses episodes four through six of the second season of The Wire. For next week, we’ll watch episodes seven through nine.

D’Angelo Barksdale’s explanation of chess, and by extension, the drug game, is one of The Wire‘s most famous scenes, and justifiably so. It’s a quick and striking way to explain both the Barksdale crew’s business and the what deprivation does and doesn’t mean to the junior employees of it. But that sequence is hardly the only time The Wire uses this device. These three episodes of The Wire all rely on deficiencies in an array of characters’ cultural literacy to illustrate the gaps in between their present state and their aspirations.

First, there’s Nicky, trying to keep Ziggy under control and scratch together the money to rent, or even buy a home for his girlfriend Aimee and their daughter Ashley, who steals and sells a product whose value he can name, but that he doesn’t entirely understand. “I know it’s digital. So what?” he asks Ziggy, who holds on to one of the cameras after they fence them, and is trying to explain to Nicky that the camera doesn’t require film. “If you put a picture on there you don’t have to go to no photomart to get it turned around or nothing?” Even when he’s only working a few days a month, Nicky is busy enough, and poverty is grinding hard enough on him, that he doesn’t have time to research his aspirations.

Ziggy, by contrast, aspires, but picks targets that don’t afford him the respect he desires. When he lays down $2,000 for a leather jacket that will be damaged working the docks, Nicky sees him for a fool, seeing the jacket as on par with the bills Ziggy lights on fire in the bar. “For a goddamn jacket?” he asks his cousin. “You’re out your fucking mind, Zig.” Later, Cheese mocks not the value of the jacket but its style—it’s an exercise in flash so excessive that it’s a joke. The jacket doesn’t look good on Ziggy, and wouldn’t look good on anyone, but he has no idea how silly he looks, or how pathetic he is when he claims he would have shot Cheese and the other men who collected from him.

Then, there’s Stringer, picking up concepts in class that are useful to him, but untranslatable to the men and boys who work under him. It’s almost laughable when he asks them, “Y’all heard of WorldComm?” Of course they haven’t. Community College may not be the only thing that’s distancing Stringer from Avon—there’s prison, their differing perspectives on how to deal with D’Angelo—but it’s certainly giving him ideas and tools. The latter may not be enough to transition him into a new business and a new class, but his possession of them distance Stringer from his compatriots.
Read more

I like Tanner Colby’s piece in Slate suggesting a HBO show about the failures of integration in the 1970s, focusing on housing policy. I think he’s probably overestimating the extent to which such a show would find an audience—for all the influence it exerts over popular culture, the ratings for The Wire were not good, and the show was always in danger of cancellation, and that was with a cops-and-robbers framework. But I think he’s right that we could use more shows about the seventies and early eighties, and about black communities. Here are five ideas for people and battles that could make for fantastic shows about these decades, and that would be amazing showcases for talented black actors:

1. Harold Washington: The first black mayor of Chicago, Washington was also an early gay rights advocate during his time in the Illinois Senate. He championed the Human Rights Act of 1980, which would have extended protections including those based on sexual orientation—and would have had the effect of blowing up Chicago’s patronage jobs system. Washington’s fights with the Democratic machine in Chicago during his first term in office were so bitter that the city was dubbed “Beirut on the Lake.” Boss has made all sorts of stuff up to tell story about the Daleys. A show about Washington could plunder history for everything it needs.

2. The Boston Busing Crisis: Forget the Dillon Panthers and the East Dillon Lions. A show set at South Boston High School and Roxbury High, the first schools integrated under Judge W. Arthur Garrity Jr.’s school desegregation would be an amazing—and terrifying way to tell the story of the Boston busing crisis. In between students who walked out, parents who protested, teachers who tried to keep schools going, the cancellation of the football season, the stabbing of black lawyer Theodore Landsmark by white Joseph Rakes with the American flag and other acts of racial violence, there’s more than enough to sustain seasons of drama, and to bring school shows, currently out of vogue, back to television.

3. Marion Barry: Marion Barry may be a national joke thanks to his arrest in a 1990 sting, and his continual reelection to the DC City Council a mystery to some observers. But the story of his tenure in the eighties, and of Washington’s struggle for home rule, is a rich and tragic one, and it’s still ongoing. Much like The Wire, each season could be set in a different department, from the police, which were devastated by layoffs, to his efforts to rebuild public housing, to the recalculations that revealed the real extent of Washington’s debt. Barry may seem like a ridiculous figure to a lot of people, but he was once an important one, and it’s worth explaining what, other than the cocaine, contributed to it going wrong. And it would be incredible to see Kasi Lemmons, who made one of the best Washington movies in Talk to Me, about talk show host Petey Greene, direct a pilot for this.

4. Operation Move-In: I know, we have enough television shows set in New York City. But one about Operation Move-In, which saw poor families taking over vacant buildings owned by Columbia University, the People’s Court Housing Crimes trials, and the fight to keep some form of rent stabilization would be a fascinating look at a New York not remotely portrayed in either the glittering Manhattan lofts or the gentrifying Brooklyn housing stock that’s so popular on television.

5. Overtown: For all my transit nerds, the story of how interstate highway construction devastated one of the country’s richest historically black neighborhoods in Miami, and an early site of civil rights protests, is amazing, and over a period of decades goes from failure to revitalization thanks to the return of mass transportation. Overtown is a minor character in Magic City, but it could stand on its own as a setting.

This concludes our discussion of the first season of The Wire. For Monday, let’s watch episodes 1-3 of Season 2.

For all The Wire gains its credibility from its naturalism, its first season follows a formally precise arc. It begins with Kima and D’Angelo delivering a set of lessons, and ends with Bodie, Poot, and Herc passing those lessons on to a new generation of cops and hoppers. The show goes from McNulty marveling at the pristine federal resources that are being diverted from the war on drugs to the war on terror to federal authorities who would rather pursue a political corruption case than pursue the people who contribute to the misery of Baltimore’s least empowered. This is a story about how little time good people have to pass on their knowledge, and what lessons the people under them actually absorb. And it’s a reminder of the mesmerizing power of ugliness, and the occasions when we’re surprised by joy.

“Down here we make big cases…and all that mess you call police work in the districts…that won’t fly here,” lectures Herc, the most unlikely of educators, and the least-cerebral member of the task force, lectures new cops back in his old command at the end of the season. “This is what makes cases, gentleman. Remember that.” He’s absorbed that strategy and cleverness can be useful, but hardly the whole approach that leads Kima, still confined to her hospital bed, to tell Bunk “Sometimes, things just gotta play out,” when he asks her to sign a photo array she doesn’t have confidence in.

And when he finds out that Carver and other men have been skipped over him to be promoted to Sergeant, Herc complains “It’s gotta be all the brutality complaints, which means it’s never going to matter how I do on no fucking tests.” He hasn’t seen what Daniels has—that it’s Carver’s decision to play politics and report to Burrell that won him his promotion, not Herc’s failings. “This” may be how cases are made, but it’s how careers are made, too. And those two objectives aren’t necessarily compatible. But perhaps it’s one he’ll absorb with Daniels, who, when Burrell demands officers back from the task force, demurs, telling him “I have no opinion. Take your pick.” Revealing your preferences, as McNulty learns to his sorrow, may cost you much more in the long term than it wins you in the present. But unlike Herc and Carver, Prez, who has one of the quietest storylines this season in the snatches of excitement he finds from learning his fascination with puzzles may give him value in the department in a way his impulsive, violent performance on the street never did, may have absorbed the most from his time in the detail. “I’d be careful with that,” Daniels tells him, saying in a gesture what he can’t say directly. “I understand the trigger pull used to be light.”

The finale sees Poot passing on D’Angelo’s lessons to new members of the Pit crew who haven’t yet been taught to break up the parts of a drug transaction. “The way you doin’ it, someone snapping pictures got the whole deal,” Poot lectures. “We gotta tighten up around here, yo.” But D’Angelo was snapped up before he fully developed his McNulty-fueled vision for a version of the drug game without violence, much less before he tried to implement his hazy ideas. And his lieutenants learned how not to get caught, but not how to re-conceptualize their business in any more fundamental way. In Wallace’s final days, D’Angelo’s compassion towards him was bewildering to Bodie and Poot, who expected D’Angelo to bust Wallace back down to running and require him to work his way back up. Wallace didn’t have a chance to think” about going back to Edmonson like we talked about,” before Stringer offered Bodie a chance to both advance in the organization and to re-integrate the worldview D’Angelo’s upset by killing Wallace.
Read more

Next week, we’ll finish the first season of The Wire. As always, if you want to discuss beyond the episodes we’re covering here, please label your comments for newbies.

There are a lot of things that take place in episodes ten and eleven of The Wire: the beginning of Bubbles’ attempts to get clean, Wallace’s inability to escape the pit completely, and Omar’s Proposition Joe-brokered parlay with Stringer Bell. But all of these threads pale in comparison to Kima’s shooting, the finest long setpiece The Wire put together in its first season, and one of the most impressive things it does in the entire run of the show.

The Wire is obsessed with hands—they take the place of faces in the credits sequences, dominate the opening of the pilot, and give characters like Bubbles their characteristic physical tics (in his case, straightening the buttons on his shirts). And it’s what characters do with their hands that tells us how deeply they are feeling about Kima’s shooting in the light of duty. After Daniels and McNulty remove Kima from the car, Carver crouches on the ground, his hands on his head—we can’t hear if he’s keening or screaming or crying, but it’s clear he needs to physically hold himself together. Landsman’s hands are up in the air as he tries to communicate to Rawls what he needs after the scene is swarmed by representatives of other departments. At the hospital, Daniels’ hand covers his mouth as his eyes flicker open and closed, an act of control that prevents him from speaking in any way that might be over control. And after Bubbles is beaten in interrogation by detectives who believe he must have had something to do with Kima’s shooting, which no one has bothered to tell him about, he covers his eyes as he demands to “I want to talk to Detective Greggs…To McNutty, then. This shit ain’t right.” He’s been abused and humiliated by these men, and is about to be dealt a worse blow by McNulty, who will ask him to go back to the places he used to cop in Kima’s service, but he will not let his tormenters see his reaction. Bubbles can deny them that, at least.

So much of this eleventh episode of The Wire is also about a failure—or a refusal—to see. Bubbles is only one victim of mistaken identity. The police commissioner walks up to the white detective working Kima’s shooting, and assuming he’s Daniels, who is standing right there, “Lieutenant, I know just how you feel. This is the toughest job a police commissioner has to do. I’ll never get used to it.” When Carver goes to Kima and Cheryl’s house to deliver the bad news to his partner’s partner, Cheryl assumes he’s a random visitor or perhaps a workman: she misses that he’s come to see her because she doesn’t read Carver as a cop. Once they’re at the hospital, in attempting to explain that Kima’s family is another woman, Carver stumbles for the words to make Burrell understand. “Officer Griggs has a girl?” Burrell asks, confused. It’s Daniels who steps in with a convenient evasion, telling him that Kima has “A roommate. The family’s in Richmond. Driving up first thing today.” Cheryl, forgotten in the immediate aftermath of the shooting, overlooked in the waiting room, is rendered emotionally invisible by the need to keep Burrell comfortable.
Read more

The always-excellent Maureen Ryan talked to Homeland executive producer Alex Gansa about the second season of the show, which stars Claire Danes as bipolar CIA agent Carrie Mathison and Damian Lewis as former prisoner of war who had been turned and returned to the United States as a sleeper agent. He told her what the lay of the land is at the beginning of the second season, which begins in September, after Carrie made a desperate bid to stop Brody from committing an act of terrorism, something he actually stopped himself short from doing after receiving a phone call from his daughter:

Well you have to understand the Brody has been completely exonerated in the eyes of the intelligence community and actually even Carrie. I mean Carrie had this sort of epiphany before the ECT about [Abu Nazir's dead son] Issa, but before that, I think she is fairly sanguine about the fact that she was wrong, which is what sent her into the ECT, into the mental institution. She said, “Look, I was wrong. I made a mistake. I intruded on this person’s life. I accused him of things that were not true.”

She had no idea about the vest. She has no idea that Dana made a call to Brody and talked him off a ledge. All she knows is that the bomb never went off, which in her mind and in the CIA’s mind and in her period of intense instability psychologically leads her to believe that she was wrong. Which is why she gets into the car with her sister at the end of the finale and says, “I can’t live like this anymore. I need help. I have to go get some help.”

I wrote about this earlier today with The Wire, but one of the things I find fascinating about both that show and Homeland is that they illustrate the limits of assuming that people behave predictably, and thus, the limits of law enforcement and intelligence gathering. The Wire is much more broadly focused, but one of the significant themes of the show is the cops’ uneasy relationship with Omar, someone who intervenes powerfully in the game, but whose motivations don’t map neatly on to the accepted dynamics of it. Brody, similarly, is someone whose motivations can’t be cleanly sifted from a mass of facts and intelligence. Even when Carrie figures out that he’d bonded with Issa and been turned after Issa’s death, he makes decisions that are opaque to her. It’s because Carrie’s brain is wired differently than David Estes’ or Saul’s, her superiors in the agency, that she’s able to read Brody at all. But even his mind isn’t clearly and easily fathomable to her. You can only do so much to analyze and predict the urges of the human heart.

This post contains spoilers for episodes 1 through 6 of the first season of The Wire. Feel free to discuss events that happen beyond these episodes in comments, but if you do so, label your comments as such for new readers.

The Wire, in retrospect, derives much of its critical reputation from its deep roots in David Simon’s reporting on Baltimore’s ills, which is often code for it as a grim show. When the show gets additional credit, it’s often for being bitterly funny. But in watching these three episodes in the first season, I was struck by their illumination of a critical theme: what level of justice and fairness these characters still expect from a profoundly broken system.

That thought lodged in my mind for the first time watching Bodie, having been snatched up into the juvenile detention system after knocking down Detective Mahone, walks out of Boys’ Village and tries to hitch a ride home. There’s something oddly touching about his disappointment when no one stops for the African-American boy who shows evidence of an obvious beating. Bodie’s at genial war with Detectives Herc and Carver, he has a sense of being treated unfairly by law enforcement, but he still holds out hope for some sector of society. It’s clear, when Herc and Carver crash in to his grandmother’s home, that there’s some sort of family resemblance. “Would you like to sit down?” she asks a clearly ashamed Herc. “Preston came to me when my daughter died. He was only four years old. But even then, I could tell he was angry. His mother lived out there. After a while, he couldn’t see nothing else.”

That she’s not entirely right is the basis for the transformation of Bodie’s feud with the two detectives into a wary joviality. Herc apologizes to Mrs. Preston, telling her, “I’m sorry, m’am. And I’m sorry for the way he came through here. If Preston comes past, give him this, and tell him we need to talk. I’m sorry.” Later, he’ll lose at pool to her grandson, who teases him, “That might be your whole salary, but I clock that shit in minutes.” Herc’s gesture of reconciliation to Bodie’s grandmother doesn’t bear precisely the results he expects: Bodie has Herc’s card on him when Herc and Carver pick him up. But it seems to have brokered at least a temporary truce between Bodie and the cops he’s vexed so greatly (perhaps because of how similar they all are). “Fuck you and your tight-ass advice,” Bodie tells him when their fragile peace is interrupted by the need to return to Bodie to detention. “But, that sandwich was good.”

Bodie’s boss is having graver doubts than his deputy is. D’Angelo begins these three episodes bragging about committing a murder on behalf of his uncle, Avon, who needed a troublesome girlfriend silenced. “I ain’t seen a female that fine since,” he muses. But the camerawork gives the lie to his braggadocio, making him float in front of an eerily shifting view of the Pit behind D’Angelo as he tries to establish his credibility. Trying to reconcile these acts with D’Angelo’s sensitivity is an inherently nauseating task.
Read more