A note on this series of posts: Some of you are watching The Wire for the first time. Some of you are scholars of the show. I’m doing my best to respond to the episodes as they’re presented me, both so these pieces will be accessible to anyone who is watching the show for the first time, and so I can concentrate really hard on seeing what I hadn’t seen before. That said, I hope this discussion will branch in many directions, so if you want to talk about foreshadowing, or watching the show after having seen it, talk away, just please label your posts as spoilery or for veterans. And I’ll be hanging out in comments, so if you’ve got questions, ask away.

As is the case in the famous opening scene of the series, in which McNulty struggles to understand the series of events that lead to Snot’s murder, much of the first three episodes of The Wire are devoted to translation between the argots and customs of a Baltimore rendered multicultural by bureaucracy and the drug trade. McNulty’s informant’s explanation that they had to give Snot admission to a game that was rigged against because, “Got to. It’s America, man,” explains why the men tolerated Snot, but not the rules of the dice game itself. No matter how much the characters learn by study or in conversation with each other, their excavations keep uncovering huge new structures to be mapped and navigated, much less understood.

We see Bubbles teaching Johnny that running a scam requires a little cash investment, lowering the price of heroin rather than eliminating it completely because: “We not burning no eleventh street chumps, here.” When they’ve obtained the drugs, the lessons aren’t over. “You got to pace that shit,” Bubbles tells his fragile protege, who rushes cons and hits. “I’m trying to give you a little game, man. You want to pretend like you know something.” When Johnny ends up in intensive care, Bubbles, an inveterate teacher, takes his skills to the detail, naming Barksdale crew members for Kima, and lecturing Leander Sydnor on the importance of losing his wedding ring and dancing on dead soldiers before he poses as an addict.

D’Angelo Barksdale and the crew he leads in the Pit are constantly bickering over the meaning of the world around them. Johnny’s attempt to scam them becomes the occasion for a debate about prestige and elevation. “Hamilton. He ain’t no president,” insists Wallace. “No ugly-ass white man get his face on no legal fucking tender less he president,” D’Angelo counters grumpily. It isn’t the first time they’ll disagree on how the world works. “The nigger who invented those things still working in the basement for regular wage,” D’Angelo will tell him as they discuss the wonders of chicken nuggets, insisting as he always does on the essential calcification of the social hierarchy. “He still have the idea, though,” Wallace says, seeing the gleam of satisfaction where D’Angelo only sees drudgery. D’Angelo’s lecture to the Pit crew about how chess works is a dual act of translation, an attempt to explain the game that also tells the audience why he’s so eager to convince the boys working under him that they should foreswear ambition. “It ain’t like that,” he explains to Bodie, who is convinced that if he gets to the other side of the board, he can win. “See, the king stay the king. Everything stay who he is…The pawns in the game, they get capped quick. They out of the game early.” He doesn’t get through: “Unless they some smart-ass pawns,” Bodie immediately insists.

Daniels is meeting with similar frustration in his attempt to educate Herc, Carver, and Pryzbylewski in the art of being decent police, something that appears worryingly inconsistent with being decent human beings. After they drunkenly (revealed in a pullback that reveals how many beer cans they’ve crushed and scattered on the ground) attempted to exert their authority in the Towers, sparking a riot and in the course of which Prez strikes a teenaged boy and blinds him, Daniels delivers a withering lecture to them about how to keep their jobs. He’s disgusted by the harm they’ve wrought, of course, the fact that they’ve put him in a position where he has to tell his wife “You don’t give your people up to IAD. You don’t do that.” But he’s also angry that they have no sense of how to protect themselves, an extension of knowing how the system works and is set up to protect even men as foolish and as violent as them.
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I floated this on Twitter on Tuesday night and got a good response, so in this lacuna of summer television, and because it’s The Wire’s 10th anniversary, we’re going to revisit that classic show. I’d like to see if we can make it work at three episodes a week, but if that proves to be too much, we’ll drop down to two. To give everyone some time to get discs or streaming options in place, let’s plan to start with the first three episodes of season one on Monday, June 18, where it’ll take the first-thing slot vacated by Game of Thrones.

This is just absolutely brutal and hilarious as a parody of not just Broadway, but of everything mainstream popular culture would have done to the raw material of The Wire had they gotten their hands on it:

More Stringer Bell with interpretive dance, please.

In a game of TV critic merry-go-round, Time’s James Poniewozik catches something interesting in an interview Huffington Post’s Maureen Ryan did with Parks & Recreation producer Mike Schur:

Another tidbit from the interview that struck me was Schur’s saying—prompted by a question from Ryan—that the show would love to be a kind of comedy version of The Wire. I don’t want to overplay that quote; he doesn’t seem to be inflating the show so much as saying that The Wire is a standard to aspire to, and maybe that Parks would like to create the same kind of broad civic world, within the context of a less realistic network comedy. And Parks, as Ryan says, has a much more optimistic outlook than The Wire.

But it’s interesting to see that in the light of our discussion yesterday of David Simon’s disappointment about The Wire’s reception since it’s gone off the air: that it seems to be remembered more as an entertainment than for its specific view of social institutions and the drug war. It’s pretty plain that The Wire did not change American drug and policing policy, but this is also a little reminder that there’s more than one way for a show to be influential. If a show like The Wire has made a little NBC sitcom slightly more thoughtful about how institutions and communities work—that’s not exactly changing the world, but it’s something to be happy about, anyway.

I agree that would be a legacy that’s both entertaining and constructive, especially if it means that more shows look for the realistic drama in existing institutions. Parks & Recreation is different from most shows in that it draws its comedy from lowering stakes rather than artificially jacking them up. The first major conflict the show dealt with was trying to fill in a hole. One of the biggest collective tragedies the characters have experienced was the death of a mini horse. The show doesn’t make fun of the characters for investing so much in relatively small things. Instead, it respects them, and the show’s signature mix of comedy and kindness comes from that framing. If part of Schur’s goal is to use the show to explore more of Pawnee’s bureaucracy and institutions, that’s also a good argument for Leslie winning the City Council race so we can see more of city government.

It’ll be an interesting question whether other shows start drawing the same realistic drama from existing institutional imperatives. That’s probably an easier thing for comedies to do than dramas, if only because the networks have conditioned us to expect such big stakes in the latter. If the President’s mistress isn’t knocked up a la Scandal, a small child isn’t in horrible danger, or the world isn’t at risk, shows seem to feel they’re not doing their duty. I’ll be curious to see what comes of the show that The Wire’s Ed Burns and Amber Tamblyn are supposed to be working on about a school: it’s not in the pilot cycle this year, so we’ll have to see what happens. But one of the consequences of The Wire having a lot of journalists and novelists writing episodes (in additional to the different perspective they brought) is that it’s not like the show spun off a huge number of TV writers who are now selling shows of their own. Its creative influence might be less clear to trace, but Schur can’t be the only one who’s looking to The Wire as an influence, and interpreting that influence in clever and surprising ways.

It’s been a big week for powerful dudes in the entertainment industry saying things they later regret, and David Simon is no exception. Yesterday, the New York Times published an interview with him in which Simon appears to be the hipsteryest hipster who ever hipstered, saying that if folks weren’t there from the beginning with The Wire, he’s annoyed by their interpretations: “I do have a certain amused contempt for the number of people who walk sideways into the thing and act like they were there all along…I’m indifferent to who thinks Omar is really cool now, or that this is the best scene or this is the best season. It was conceived of as a whole, and we did it as a whole. For people to be picking it apart now like it’s a deck of cards or like they were there the whole time or they understood it the whole time — it’s wearying.”

Fortunately, Simon seems to have recognized that contempt for your audience is not the best marketing strategy, because he called up Alan Sepinwall and attempted a clarification. This part of the interview strikes me as the most compelling:

You can watch it any way you want. I know I’m not allowed to speak for how people want to watch “The Wire.” But let me put it on its head and ask, am I allowed to say what I think has value in the piece for me, and for the other people who worked on the show? For us, telling us how cool Omar was four years after the entire thing is on the page — if that’s the point, then our ambitions were pretty stunted to begin with. I was asked a question about what I thought about the show’s longevity, and about the “Wire” mania that was going on in March when the brackets sprung up, and I answered to that. Other people’s mileage may vary and will vary, but if you’re asking me whether or not that stuff is meaningful, I think in some ways it diminishes “The Wire.” if you go online, you’ll find some people who made very smart critiques of that nonsense. I read those and went, “Yeah, man, those guys get it, and the fellows wasting time breaking this thing down to its components, what a shame.” I would have loved to see an idea or an argument that the show undertook come up in any of that bracketology, and it never does. Once you get done arguing over who’s the coolest, or what scene makes you laugh the hardest, there’s no room left to argue any of the things…

While I don’t think that breaking down Omar’s badassdom and discussing bureaucratic cultures are mutually exclusive enterprises, I’m actually somewhat sympathetic to this kind of frustration. Vulture’s drama derby, even if I found the way it treated gender to be kind of a problem, was one of the only brackets I’ve ever seen that was specifically set up to award intellectual ambition in television. What we want to watch, and the kind of reaction that’s buzzy and memeable don’t always go hand in hand. I think it’s somewhat overweening to suggest that The Wire can only be approached with the Utmost Seriousness, but I can also understand what it must feel like to see The Wire‘s declining ratings and some of the shallower reactions to its legacy and wonder whether it’s worth trying to build something that complex—or on a critical end, trying to plumb certain depths.

I quite liked Awake, NBC’s beautifully-shot and subtly-acted new show about a cop, Detective Michael Britten (a wonderful Jason Isaacs) confused about which of two worlds he’s living in is real and which is a dream. But one thing that struck me about the pilot is the way it handles Detective Isaiah ‘Bird’ Freeman (Steve Harris), Michael’s partner in the world where his son is still alive. Harris is good in the role. But as can be the case with black characters in cop shows or movies, he sounds like he’s in an entirely different show than the white characters he works with.

Part of it is that Freeman has some of the best, quippiest lines in the show. Much of the dialogue in Awake is muted, straightforward in keeping with the fact that this is a very strange situation that’s being treated as if it’s normal or sustainable by the person at its center. The fact that Michael and his therapists are trying to work through this situation logically and gently rather than making grand pronouncements about the utter weirdness of this lets us appreciate the power of Michael’s circumstances without constantly being bashed over the head about it. Freeman isn’t an actual exception to that rule, but he does spend a lot of time uttering koans like “This is why I’ve avoided success at all costs. You work your whole life to afford some nice stuff, so someone can come along and kill you for it,” or “Been a cop for 20 years. Only seen hunches on TV,” or “Remember when you used to think that solved and fixed meant the same thing?” It’s an oddly performative role.

And there was also a moment when Freeman and Britten were investigating a brutal murder when Awake‘s writers decided to just straight up have Freeman channel The Wire‘s Bunk Moreland. “You see this coffeemaker? $600. My ex-wife wanted one of these. I told her if she wanted a $600 coffee-maker she shouldn’t have married a police,” Freeman said, pronouncing police with an exaggerated “o.” “Eventually, we agreed on that.” I’m not saying it’s not a good line. But it’s a weird reminder that when it comes to black characters, folks seem to reach for archetypes first and to go through the process of developing original characters second.

This is pretty amazing: Idris Elba is going to be playing Nelson Mandela in a new biopic. Normally, I’d say we absolutely don’t need another Mandela biopic. But I think this project is intriguing because it’s meant to focus on Mandela’s on younger years, before he became an icon of non-violent resistance, when he was saying things like this:

Firstly, we believed that as a result of Government policy, violence by the African people had become inevitable, and that unless responsible leadership was given to canalize and control the feelings of our people, there would be outbreaks of terrorism which would produce an intensity of bitterness and hostility between the various races of this country which is not produced even by war. Secondly, we felt that without violence there would be no way open to the African people to succeed in their struggle against the principle of white supremacy. All lawful modes of expressing opposition to this principle had been closed by legislation, and we were placed in a position in which we had either to accept a permanent state of inferiority, or to defy the Government. We chose to defy the law. We first broke the law in a way which avoided any recourse to violence; when this form was legislated against, and then the Government resorted to a show of force to crush opposition to its policies, only then did we decide to answer violence with violence.

It’s easy to forget, and a lot of people do, that Mandela was imprisoned in the first place in part for his involvement in the formation of Umkhonto we Sizwe, which was the armed wing of the African National Congress. If you think about it, casting the guy who played Stringer Bell as a political activist who is trying to organize a unit that was capable of carrying out sabotage and guerilla warfare makes a lot of sense. I’d actually really love to see David Simon, or someone with his sense of organizations, write a big movie about South African anti-apartheid leadership and the apartheid regime.

Over the past couple of weeks, I’ve watched all four seasons of Sons of Anarchy. And while shotgunning the show’s episodes may not be for the faint of heart (so much grotesque violence!), it’s given me a lot to think about with the show. So every day this week, I’ll be considering another aspect of life in Charming, California. The previous posts in this series appear here and here.

While Sons of Anarchy is deeply immersed in a conversation about institutions, one of the things that distinguishes it from a show like The Wire is that it’s not equally interested in all of the interlocking institutions whose friction produces most of the show’s drama. The focus is always on the MC, and U.S. Attorneys, cops, and businessmen are only important when they wander into the frame that Kurt Sutter’s set up. That’s an interesting choice, and it means the show has, thus far, left a central question unaddressed: how do the citizens of Charming feel about the deal Police Chief Wayne Unser struck with SAMCRO? And about the presence of the MC in their midst in general?

We meet a fairly narrow band of Charming residents who have no formal involvement with the MC or their various rivals: in law enforcement, we’ve got Wayne Unser, David Hale, and Eli Roosevelt; in the business community, we’ve got Jacob Hale, Elliot Oswald, and Mrs. Roosevelt; and in the medical establishment, we have Margaret Murphy. In other words, we have no broad-based sense of how much the ordinary citizens of Charming interact with SAMCRO, or what they feel about their town’s entanglement with a deeply criminal enterprise. Do you bring you minivan to the MC’s shop if you’re a mom with engine trouble? Are you angry about crime on the fringes? Do you think the relationship is worth it to keep the drug trade away from your kids? And if it’ll create jobs and increase property values, would you support the development of Charming Heights?

The people whose perspectives we do have tend to to provide more personal insight than institutional narratives. We understand that Chief Unser is personally entangled with Gemma Teller Morrow, and that he benefits personally from his relationship with the Sons of Anarchy. But given the timing of the club’s founding and its formalized relationship with Charming law enforcement, it makes sense that Charming might have accepted SAMCRO’s protection as service cuts took a toll on California in the wake of the passage of Proposition 13, which severely limited California’s ability to raise additional tax revenue, in 1978. If Sutter does make a First Nine spinoff of Sons of Anarchy, it would be fascinating to explore how SAMCRO burrowed in to its position in Charming. It’s not just that decision that’s obscured: killing David Hale deprived the show of a legitimate counterweight to Unser’s understanding with the Sons and the opportunity to see a Charming native, who perhaps represents more mainstream citizens, work out a new relationship with SAMCRO. Eli Roosevelt’s arrival in Charming could have been an opportunity to see how the Sons responded to a law enforcement structure that wasn’t solely concerned with the crime rate in that one town. But Lincoln Potter’s arrival again derails the development of a new dynamic. I understand that having a single representative of a threat makes for more economical storytelling, but it does deny us the opportunity to see a show balanced between SAMCRO and the cops, and to fully explore the implications of that shifting relationship.
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I’m almost done with Season 4 of Sons of Anarchy, so keep your eyes peeled for a lot of blogging on the subject. But I noticed today that the show’s creator, Kurt Sutter, tweeted that “i’ve talked to [FX President John] landgraf about the 1st nine. he digs it, but thinks it might be best to put some time between SOA and a prequel. i agree.” I’d like to see that. I am, perhaps more than the average Sons of Anarchy viewer, in the questions of governance the show raises, whether we’re hearing about SAMCRO founder John Teller’s anarchist theorizing or seeing how the MC interacts with Charming’s law enforcement officials. But it would be neat to see how that synergy developed in the first place. Most of the big governance shows on television give us, in Rhett Butler’s parlance, empire building (Deadwood) or empire wrecking (The Wire). It’d be neat to see a single coherent story about a rise and fall.

One of the most depressing trends for me at Sundance was something that’s been building for a while: the fact that the talented actors who made The Wire so great can’t seem to get out of Baltimore.

First, there’s Isaiah Whitlock, Jr., who will be forever defined by state Sen. Clay Davis’ favorite obscenity:

He’s already had to imitate Omar in Cedar Rapids (one of the better, and more overlooked, small comedies of the last year):

And in Red Hook Summer, Whitlock gets forced to pretend to be Davis again in the movie’s most forced, artificial moment, one that interrupts a tremendously powerful plot line. It’s unfortunate that people want so much to be associated with The Wire or to make in-jokes about the show that they’re willing to sacrifice their own world-building and dramatic continuity to do it.

It’s less irritating, but still depressing, to see the actors who so thoroughly inhabited roles on The Wire getting stuck in those kinds of roles again. That kind of repetition is the hallmark of LUV, the depressing-on-many-levels movie about Vincent (Common), a man trying to start a small business after his release from prison, who gets pulled back into his old life as a killer for drug dealers, and pulls his nephew in along with him. The movie’s riddled with implausibilities and disturbing ideas, including the idea that an elementary-school kid would easily and automatically be comfortable wielding a gun, negotiating with high-level drug dealers, and running away to North Carolina. But it’s perhaps most disturbing for a movie that wants to transcend our stereotypes about black men using black actors in the same old roles over and over again.

First, there’s Michael K. Williams, who, after Omar’s death, has apparently been reincarnated in the person of a Baltimore homicide detective. Unfortunately, karma hasn’t seen fit to give him Jimmy McNulty’s panache or faculty with language. He spends a lot of time saying things like, “You’re young. You’ve got your whole life ahead of you. You can still do something with your life.” Then, there’s Anwan Glover, who’s been downgraded from the glories of Slim Charles to playing a drug kingpin named Enoch who appears mostly to hang out menacingly in an abandoned warehouse, to be duped into believing that Vincent didn’t actually kill one of his relatives when of course he did, and to buy a large cache of drugs off of Vincent’s nephew, who is acting as the front for the deal. It’s a totally stereotypical, flimsy role, though Glover does a nice job with it.

It’s one thing to be defined in public memory by the best role you’ve ever played. It’s quite another to be forced by your industry to inhabit it over and over again. Killing a tough, transcendent role ought to be proof that you should be allowed to do a wide range of other things, not that the public will only buy black men as aggrieved or menacing.