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Let’s go home.

Posted by CrazyJoeDavola on March 11th, 2008 under Uncategorized

I trust that our erudite and tasteful readership has by now absorbed the magnificence of Sunday’s finale of The Wire.

“-30-” was the perfect cap to as close to a perfect television series as we’re likely to ever get. No other program has managed such a sprawl of characters, plot lines and themes as deftly as The Wire. Essentially limiting itself geographically to a few square miles of Baltimore, David Simon and his cohorts cast a sprawling net over some of our society’s worst problems: Crushing bureaucracy, endemic racism, suffocating poverty, corrosive corruption, the apparently unbreakable hold of narcotics and alcohol, and, well, basically the fallen state of mankind.


Happy happy, joy joy

So, yeah, the stories that unfolded throughout The Wire tended to be on the dark side. Even so, there were (just barely) enough glimpses of redemption that the show didn’t utterly crush the soul. Also helping out: Thick, meaty slabs of some of the best gallows humor you could ever hope to find, often involving Jimmy McNulty and his faithful visit to a whorehouse as part of official police business, or catching reporter Templeton lying about the homeless murders that Jimmy has concocted out of thin air (and dead homeless people. Like I said: Tends dark).

Of course, the finale managed to come up with the series’ funniest, darkest joke: new police commissioner Stan Valchek.


Putting the “punch” in “punchline”

The show never got great ratings. There are numerous reasons for the audience to stay away – a forgivable aversion to the harsh subject matters and explosive violence, a less forgivable unease with stories about poor black people, concern at having to follow exceedingly dense plots, or something as simple an inability to comprehend thick “Balmerese” cant.

But for those who could afford the time and attention, it was the most rewarding of experiences. Over five years, you learned that everyone mattered, from the lowliest corner kid (Kenard) to the most (self)important politician (Carcetti). Who knew, for example, that the person most likely to end up face down in the gutter in Season 1 would become The Wire’s true vision of redemption and grace?


Yep. Bawling here.

Plot points mattered. Who could have foreseen the simple act of losing a surveillance camera by lunk-headed Herc would lead to such unremitting misery for the school kids in Season 4? Or how a stained-glass gift to a local Catholic church would have such wide-ranging consequences in Season 2? It was essential to pay attention to even the most apparently trivial of occurrences.

Language mattered. It could be complex, as in the way professional classes – lawyers, businessmen, cops, teachers, politicians – blanket themselves with vocabulary and grammar made impenetrable so as to seal themselves off from the rest of the populace. Or it could be something comically – more often tragically – simple, in the way an offhanded comment could lead to someone’s inexorable ruin. Or the way the writers’ and actors’ genius often came through in the use of often profane words or phrases – “Sheeeeeeeeeit”, “Indeed”, “What the fuck did I do?”, “The Dickensian aspect”.

In the words of Lester Freamon, “All the pieces matter.”

If there was one overriding theme to The Wire, it was the supremacy and tyranny of The System. People work through The System (Rawls, Prop Joe), or they work around The System (Omar, Cutty), but The System is always there. You can sometimes game the system to your advantage (Colvin, McNulty, Stringer), for a while, but unless you’re at the top (and sometimes not even then, right Gov. Spitzer?), it will eventually grind you down to fine dust. The System always wins, people always lose. Unless you’re a lawyer.


He wins. Everyone else loses.

This, of course, is no stupendous revelation; many others have made the same core observation. But Simon and his cohorts have to be commended for showing it in such a consistently impassioned yet clear-eyed manner. They were precise in showing the crushing problems facing our society, but made no pretense as to having answers. In the mode of the best artists, they never preached. Hectored, ranted, griped, mourned – all yes. But never preached.

(Actually, when it came to the Sun plot of Season 5, they did preach – and pretty much every critic out there notes that this was the one thread that rang false. I agree – the critical view of the current newspaper business was way too on the nose for such a normally subtle show, and to my eyes, it overemphasized some troubling current journalistic trends while ignoring others.)

This is what you show to people who say television is an inferior art form. For those who haven’t had the pleasure of experiencing the show, I unreservedly recommend getting the DVDs. Watch three or four episodes at a time. Turn on the subtitles (as you should with, say, the British version of The Office). Let the episodes sit with you for a while before moving to the new ones, like you would a few chapters of a great novel.

It’s well worth your time.

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13 Responses

  1. srr50 said:

    March 11th, 2008 at 2:09 pm

    Sometimes the system rewards bad people with good outcomes, and sometimes good people with bad outcomes. That’s the system, and this show was true to that edict all the way to the end.

  2. Facebook User said:

    March 11th, 2008 at 2:09 pm

    Thanks, Joe. I thought about writing something about the close of this institution. What a great show. The years it and Deadwood and The Sopranos were all on were an embarrassment of riches.

    My favorite moment of the finale was at McNulty’s wake when Jay told McNulty that he felft McNulty was the best. That he was ‘natural murder police’ or whatever the phrase was and should he be laid out, he’d want Jimmy to catch the case. Great moment.

  3. dick said:

    March 11th, 2008 at 2:14 pm

    I am going to miss this show as it has been one of my favorites for years now but that finale somehow left me satisfied. I was prepared to be dissapointed as all series finales tend to do but this one was really good and did a great job of tying together a show that I thought would be impossible to tie together in the end.

  4. Woody Bombay said:

    March 11th, 2008 at 2:15 pm

    The last season was the weakest, and the whole McNulty’s phony serial killer thread was very annoying (with the exception of McNulty and Templeton both competing with phony killer info), but Simon tied it all up pretty nicely in the last two episodes.

    I only really cry when a pet dog dies, or I’m a little drunk listening to the end of Springsteen’s “Jungleland,” or Roy Hobbs hits that last home run down two strikes (got-damn soundtrack), but my living room got a little misty when Bubbles sat down to dinner at his sister’s table.

  5. SizzleChest said:

    March 11th, 2008 at 3:43 pm

    Bubbles. That’s all you need to know.

  6. ChrisApplewhite said:

    March 11th, 2008 at 3:43 pm

    “I thought about writing something about the close of this institution”

    So did I. I couldn’t do it justice. 58, 59 and 60 were the three best episodes of the entire run, I think, topping the second to last episode from season 3.

  7. Scipio Tex said:

    March 11th, 2008 at 5:11 pm

    Excellent write up, CJD. You nailed it.

    I’ll also second your recommendation of the original Office. I grew to love the American version, but there’s just something about David Brent. The squirm factor is palpable.

    So let’s just say it: given it’s short history, HBO creates the best television ever made. Is that even debatable, actually?

    The Wire, Deadwood, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Big Love, The Sopranos, Rome, Flight of the Conchords, Extras, Six Feet Under.

    Even the candy floss – Sex In The City & Entourage – is amusing.

    The misses – John From Cincinnati, Carnivale – are so few that they make Ty Cobb look like a flailer.

    The John Adams biopic looks to be outstanding.

  8. srr50 said:

    March 11th, 2008 at 6:12 pm

    HBO is pushing the envelope again with their series “In Treatment.”

    Five different half hour episodes weekly, covering a nine week period.

  9. ChrisApplewhite said:

    March 12th, 2008 at 12:05 am

    I liked John From Cincinnati. That is, I liked it until they basically admitted they didn’t know where they were going with it. It took a lot of the poignancy out of the show.

  10. mws said:

    March 12th, 2008 at 6:48 am

    This was by far the weakest season. About a month prior to it starting there was a fairly long article about David Simon and “The Wire” in the New Yorker. One could glean just from that article what Simon’s modus operandi was for the season.

    After years of creating great television with Homicide and now the Wire, he basically let his baser instincts grab ahold of him and he used this season to release some long held rage towards the paper he felt had done him wrong.

    He was a beat writer for the Sun and when he left, it was with a lot of resentment. Newspapers in the 90’s weren’t the newspapers of the 60’s or 50’s or even back at the turn of the century. Because papers have had to change to deal with various forms of media, the business models change, but the curmudgeons and social malcontents that make up your local paper newsroom never did change.

    But to get to the point, Simon has this perception of how a newspaper should be run, it wasn’t run that way, and he took a season of the best show on TV to force feed his views and settle old debts with publishers and editors, which wouldn’t be a terrible thing if the story was good. But it wasn’t.

    What a waste of acting talent this season was. Especially coming off of season 4, which was amazing.

    But this was definitely a let down. It ended as well as it could, given the circumstances Simon put everyone in, but it really could have been special. And it wasn’t.

  11. dick said:

    March 12th, 2008 at 10:56 am

    It wasn’t that bad, maybe a little more rushed than normal but it was still a very solid season. Someone made a good point in saying that the newspaper guys should have been introduced before this season, at least Gus. This caused the “rushed” feel of this season.

  12. Scipio Tex said:

    March 12th, 2008 at 11:34 am

    I liked the newspaper angle.

    I also very much appreciated the frank perspective that newspaper folks looking for a break manufacture material all of the time if they feel it supports the underlying journalism.

  13. McLovin said:

    March 13th, 2008 at 4:21 pm

    Clark Johnson as City Desk Editor Augustus Haynes and Wendell Pierce as Bunk Moreland.

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