The Wire, Mon Amour By Amanda on February 20, 2008 5:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Can I just say this one thing: The Wire is the best show ever made in the history of television and even the second best needs to step back to a respectable distance behind. I love Dexter, The Simpsons of course has paid its dues, Deadwood is somewhere up there, I ache for the return of Battlestar Galactica. There are many other worthy candidates from earlier eras. But the top spot is taken, folks, now and forevermore: It's The Wire.
My compatriots can perhaps be forgiven for ignorance since whatever commercial channel has the rights buried the first couple of seasons so deep amongst the Guthy-Renkers as to require spelunking skills to find it. But find it you must.
Oh sure, but don't be put off by the fact it's a cop show. It's a cop show in the way Crime and Punishment is a cop novel. In fact, it is like a novel. Here's where it starts: journalist David Simon spends a year embedded with the Baltimore PD Homicide unit and writes a book "Homicide: A Year on the KIlling Streets" about it. That's one of my favourite books. NBC picks it up and Barry Levinson and Tom Fontana turn it into the ground-breaking TV show Homicide: Life on the Streets. But Simon doesn't have anything to do with that until coming on as a writer in one of the later seasons. But The Wire (and an earlier mini-series The Corner) is Simon's baby from beginning to end.
And it is about to end. I have seen the first seven episodes of the fifth and final season, and am about to press play on number 8. There are only 10 episodes. 8. 9 . 10. That's all that's left and I don't want it to end, I want it to always be there. I want to watch it in slow-mo, the way you hover over every word on a novel you can't imagine being finished.
The centre of the show is always the police and "the corner" (the street and drug world.) But each season an extra element has been added: 2 was dock workers, 3 was City Hall, 4 was City Hall and the schools, 5 is City Hall and the media. So really, and Simon has said this many times, it is not about cops and thugs, it's about a city,
really about the American city, and about how we live together. 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.
You can barely single out a character or a performance because the astounding quality, like the turtles, goes all the way down. I filter the news through The Daily Show and I filter the news through The Wire. I mean, when I'm watching CNN or the 7.30 Report, you have to put a bit of de-spin on the thing to see through it.
It goes without saying then it has been ignored in the ratings and by the awards people. You know. I liked The Sopranos just fine but if 1% of the gold statues rained down on that show trickled off to The Wire the world be be a much more just place today.
I could go one forever, but I really have to go watch episode eight a few times.
Oh and between the Dostoyevskian and Dickensian and Orwellian and Shakespearian drama, sometimes Lance Reddick takes off his shirt.
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