Television review: The Wire

Listening in on the end of empire.

March 2010

A lot of ink, chemical and virtual, has been devoted to commentary on the HBO television drama series The Wire and rightly so because it is, without doubt, a unique and compelling production. For those of you who are not familiar with the show, the DVD boxed collection of all sixty episodes is available at good video rental outlets and I commend it to you. My wife and children are claiming neglect because I am now in my second consecutive viewing of the entire opus.

Crime fiction is a powerful magnet for readers and viewers alike. Bookshop shelves and television schedules are replete with crime genre titles, some good, some bad, a few exceptional. The runaway success of the local TV series Underbelly demonstrates a hearty appetite in mass audiences for stories about people who do things most of us would never dream of doing and, as a reward, have things most of us never will and, as a consequence, lose their lives in ways we would prefer not to. The most recent real-life (now dead) example being Sydney 'businessman' Michael McGurk. The Wire, however, is in a class of its own because, from its conception at the hands of co-writers David Simon and Ed Burns, it set out to interrogate the American Dream.

Unlike Underbelly, which is snookered by its docu-drama form and concomitant defamation law implications, The Wire chooses fiction. Fiction grounded in a reality lived in and written about by Simon, who was for twelve years a reporter at the Baltimore Sun and Burns, a twenty year veteran detective with the Baltimore Police Department. The series is set in Baltimore, Maryland and has been called a 'televisual novel' because of its complex plotlines, long character development arcs and the sophistication of the screenplay writing with credits from novelists Richard Price, Dennis Lehane and Laura Lippman, in addition to Simon and Burns. In a deft use of metaphor, the title suggests a connect between the use of surveillance technology in crime investigation and the show's 'bugging' of its subject. Simon has called the show editorial, 'angry op-ed', a reference to its forensic analysis of the decline of American institutions - police, schools, bureaucracy, political class, media - but it is, above all, television drama of dazzling quality, complex, nuanced, authentic, wry and, at times, very funny. (Det. Kima Greggs: "This guy's worse than a drug dealer. He's a developer.")

The Wire is the thinking person's entertainment which goes some way to explaining why it rated so poorly in the Nielsen viewer polls yet attracted widespread critical acclaim. In an interview with PBS David Simon outlines the political frame in which the show was constructed. "We are a country of democratic ideas and impulses," says Simon, "but it is strained through some very oligarchical structures." Simon and Burns write from a principled stand on the failure of the American Dream to deliver its promise. "This stuff is systemic," he says. "This is how an empire is eaten from within." The Wire views the drug trade as a microcosm of late capitalism, a prescient analysis given that the show launched in 2002, well before the Global Financial Crisis. Simon: "That people were trading crap and calling it gold. And that's what The Wire was about. It was about that which is - has no value, being emphasized as being meaningful. And that which is - has genuine meaning, being given low regard." Think junk mortgage derivatives vs national health care.

In one hilarious sequence the black drug lords introduce Roberts Rules of Order in the running of their secret meetings, resulting some pearler one liners ("Chair recognise yo ass.") and a reprimand to one overzealous soldier/businessman who decides to take minutes. "Motherfucker, you takin' notes on a criminal conspiracy? What wrong with you, man?"

So, here we have a work of fiction which not only excoriates a corrupt, dysfunctional financial and political system that masquerades as Master of the Universe, but does so with verve. Everything about The Wire sparkles. The writing, which delivers some of the best dialogue you will ever here and draws extensively on the street patois of the project housing estates; the acting by a cast of otherwise unknowns which includes a cameo of one of Baltimore's infamous (retired) drug dealers playing a minister of religion; the directing which allows actors to breathe into roles instead of jamming them into formulaic set pieces; the judicious use of source cues in the music; the risky but right choice to shoot entirely on location and, in doing so, to enlist the support of the City of Baltimore and the residents of some of its most troubles neighbourhoods. The Wire is community art writ large. It makes a grown man weep to see all that quality bundled into a television drama with something important to say.