I can’t choose a favorite scene. My favorite part of Th Wire is the way Marlo’s character takes shape in Season 3. He starts out as someone who appears to be just another “Yo.” The show slowly reveals his leadership qualities and over the course of many episodes you begin to see how his crew is larger than a corner or even a block can hold. I also love the way he is more progressive than Avon. Avon only uses girls as sex objects but Marlo trusts Snoop the way Avon trusts Weebay. The show is filled with nuances that only reveal themselves on second and third viewings. It’s one for the ages.
My favorite thing David Simon said about The Wire is a statement he made about how it is distinct from almost all other American television. Even great sows like the Sopranos and SFU. It’s long but I think it’s worthy:
Another reason the show may feel different than a lot of television: our model is not quite so Shakespearean as other high-end HBO fare. The Sopranos and Deadwood—two shows that I do admire—offer a good deal of Macbeth or Richard III or Hamlet in their focus on the angst and machinations of the central characters (Tony Soprano, Al Swearengen). Much of our modern theater seems rooted in the Shakespearean discovery of the modern mind. We’re stealing instead from an earlier, less-traveled construct—the Greeks—lifting our thematic stance wholesale from Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides to create doomed and fated protagonists who confront a rigged game and their own mortality. The modern mind—particularly those of us in the West—finds such fatalism ancient and discomfiting, I think. We are a pretty self-actualized, self-worshipping crowd of postmoderns and the idea that for all of our wherewithal and discretionary income and leisure, we’re still fated by indifferent gods, feels to us antiquated and superstitious. We don’t accept our gods on such terms anymore; by and large, with the exception of the fundamentalists among us, we don’t even grant Yahweh himself that kind of unbridled, interventionist authority.
But instead of the old gods, The Wire is a Greek tragedy in which the postmodern institutions are the Olympian forces. It’s the police department, or the drug economy, or the political structures, or the school administration, or the macroeconomic forces that are throwing the lightning bolts and hitting people in the ass for no decent reason. In much of television, and in a good deal of our stage drama, individuals are often portrayed as rising above institutions to achieve catharsis. In this drama, the institutions always prove larger, and those characters with hubris enough to challenge the postmodern construct of American empire are invariably mocked, marginalized, or crushed. Greek tragedy for the new millennium, so to speak. Because so much of television is about providing catharsis and redemption and the triumph of character, a drama in which postmodern institutions trump individuality and morality and justice seems different in some ways, I think.
I’m surprised to see some being hampered by The Wire due to its “police procedural” set-up and its “complexity”. Give it a chance.
In all honesty, The Wire proves how in some respects, the medium of serialized television can accomplish more than a 2 hour film can. Characters are fleshed out and for the better, plots are more intricately and precisely told with better pacing, you never get the sense of too much or too little when it comes to the details of the story, etc.
All in all, The Wire is the best thing ever to grace a television screen. And please don’t bring up the hammy SFU or the “Goodfellas TV show” Sopranos. They aren’t worthy.
Favorite scene would have to be Bodie and McNulty’s final conversation in Season 5 (or 4? I forget…) After Bodie killed Wallace in Season 1, I bore a grudge against him up until this moment. But this conversation- the setting, the way Bodie begins to realize what must be done, the callback to the chess game way back in the second episode, all of it. It’s just so poignant.
Either that, or when Dukie and Michael separate. Equally as heartbreaking. Dukie mentions the incident with the piss balloons from the beginning of the season and Michael simply can’t remember what he’s talking about. It makes you realize just how far these kids have fallen in such a short amount of time.
For all the social and political issue that the show brings up, and handles well, it succeeds in my view because of how the show treats the characters. Too many artists find it easier to blame something on a faceless entity- “the government,” “corporations,” or a vague notion like “racism.” Simon puts a human face to the tragedy, and makes you realize that ultimately it is people doing this to each other.
Jazzaloha
“Umm, I think that’s the standard sitcom approach, not the standard TV approach. There are/have been tons of serials with continuing plot arcs, storylines, narratives, etc. for quite a long time.”
But I don’t think the other shows I’ve seen have really went as far as The Wire has. Even TV shows with continuing plot/storylines, character arc try to respect the rule of each episode being self-contained. The storylines and characters are longer and way more complex than any of seen in another TV series. Btw, this rule of episodes self-contained is a significant limitation when the producers have to stringently follow this rule.
Having said that, I should say that I have not watched The Sopranos or Deadwood. I have watched the first season of Six Feet Under, which I thought was good—but not better than The Wire. Those two series are really different, but I think The Wire was more successful in achieving its goals (the goals were more ambitious, at least based on what I saw from Six’s first season).
Bolo said, “What I meant before is that white characters in positions of power seem far more conscious about retaining those positions, and far more sensitive to power that seems to be slipping away.”
Hmm, I don’t know if I agree with that. In the Baltimore created by Simon, et al, my sense was that blacks had more political power—and characters like Rawls and Carchetti were sensitive to this. But black characters were very sensitive to retaining their positions, too.
I’m not saying that race is not a factor at all in the series, but the more traditional ways of looking at race and racism—specifically as a cause for social inequality and problems—didn’t seem to be a tack The Wire took.