David’s going to laugh when he reads this post: he lent me season 1 of The Wire three days ago, and already I find myself compelled to write a post explaining why you too should rush out to secure the DVD (assuming, that is, that if you’re a Brit, you haven’t already been watching it on FX).
Here’s why it’s so superb. First and foremost, because although it’s a gritty cop show set amid mean streets in Baltimore, this is fundamentally a show about institutions and tribes. The show’s creator, David Simon, puts it like this:
It’s about how institutions have an effect on individuals, and how…whether you’re a cop, a longshoreman, a drug dealer, a politician, a judge [or] lawyer, you are ultimately compromised and must contend with whatever institution you’ve committed to.
In this, it succeeds fantastically. All of the characters’ actions are driven by institutional incentives and tribal loyalties that frequently make no rational sense, yet perfect human sense. I kept finding myself nodding, seeing patterns of behaviour in the show’s Baltimore Police Dept that were the very same issues you come across in large public sector organisations here in the UK. Moreover, Simon says, it has a different perspective to most crime shows in that
The best crime shows…were essentially about good and evil. Justice, revenge, betrayal, redemption. The Wire, by contrast, has ambitions elsewhere.…Specifically: We are bored with good and evil. We renounce the theme.
The result: morally ambiguous characters who are utterly believable. And then there’s the sophistication of the narrative structure. No cliff-hangers at the end of episodes. Long story arcs that run through whole series (compare and contrast with the awful disappointment that was the end of series 1 of Heroes, when it became clear that the script was being made up by a committee as they went along – wrapped up as it was in a hasty, slipshod shitheap of a final episode rather than any kind of crescendo of plot resolution).
So good is The Wire that the Los Angeles Times devoted a whole editorial to praising it, saying that “even in what is generally acknowledged to be something of a golden era for thoughtful and entertaining drama, The Wire stands out”. More lyrically, here’s the Guardian’s Charlie Brooker, talking on BBC4’s Screenwipe:
The best show of the last 20 years is an HBO show called The Wire. The Wire is quite simply a stunning piece of work … it physically pains me to use this phrase, because anyone who uses it sounds like a tosser, but it is physically multilayered; it is just fucking brilliant.
