Dead Wire
If there's a Guinness World Record for longest television death scene, surely the city of Baltimore has broken it by now. For 50-plus episodes of HBO's The Wire, it has been staggering around like a cowboy in an old-time Western, clutching its throat, buckling its knees, going, going, but still not quite gone. Its police department is a barely functioning mess. As are the local unions, City Hall, and the public school system. And, as we're learning this season, the local daily, the Baltimore Sun, ain't doing so hot either. So don't expect everything to suddenly go black, a la The Sopranos, in The Wire's fast-approaching final episode. This series is all about the slow fade.
While critics laud The Wire, viewers have been mostly indifferent. One reason is that one can't approach it with anything less than full attention. Its writers never pen a line of pure exposition. Its characters all speak in the various jargony lexicons of their respective trades (cop, criminal, teacher, dockworker, politico, journalist). Major plot developments come in half-muttered, slangy asides, or even just barely perceptible shrugs. And while it features dozens of deftly imagined characters, there's no single protagonist whose saga propels each episode forward; the city's institutions, rather than the cogs that animate them, are the show's true stars.
For all its narrative complexity, however, The Wire has essentially told the same story over and over. All the institutions that are supposed to make the metropolis a livable place are hopelessly dysfunctional, and all of those cogs cope with this dysfunction -- and help to perpetuate -- in the same way. They make stuff up.
Ironically, or maybe just inevitably, the realest show on television that does not involve celebrities is all about fiction-writing. Instead of doing the thing that might actually make Baltimore a better place to live, they spend most of their energies devising ways that merely convey the ideas of improvement and reform. Doing the surveillance necessary to build a case against the city's most powerful drug dealers is slow, tedious, labor-intensive business -- it's easier to run up arrest counts by busting low-level street-corner dealers whose territories get re-staffed as soon as the cops cuff them and drive them away. And in the schools, it's the same story -- if the kids don't pass the tests, the funding doesn't come, so the teachers simply drill answers into their charges instead of actually trying to help them truly understand the subjects they're studying.
What truly makes The Wire oppressive is that every character is actually aware of their inability to change things, to really make a difference. Even the drug dealers live grim, joyless lives animated only by gunfire and gallows humor, and if even a city's drug dealers are too stressed out and on the edge and emotionally drained to cut loose and party once in a while, well, that city is doomed. And after a while, it doesn't matter how well-written and well-acted all that grimness, dysfunction, and Sisyphean inertia may be -- watching it gets, well, a little Sisyphean. "Nothing ever changes" may be a great concept to build a feature film or even a novel on, but a 60-hour series? At the very least, it needs to extend a thin wire of hope to its viewers.
A frequent contributor to Las Vegas Weekly, Greg Beato has also written for SPIN, Blender, Reason, Time.com, and many other publications. Email Greg at [email protected]