All the pieces matter: analysis, essays, and anything else on The Wire
Wood Harris and Idris Elba starred in Season 3, the epic season of The Wire.
I have posted a few items on The Wire here at the readjack.com blog, referencing it in my blog intro and covering it in a February 2008 essay. Now, as I have done with my Iran and Bulls coverage, I would like to pool all of my favorite Wire material into one spot. This one. So here we go.
–JACK
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From June 25, 2002 in Entertainment Weekly (EW.com)
‘Wire’ Power by Ken Tucker
"Just you, me, my partner...and Mr. Shit here."
EXCERPT: ”The Wire”’s fifth episode is, well, funkin’ amazing. McNulty’s unit has been trying to get the goods on kingpin Avon Barksdale (Wood Harris), a figure as elusive as a phantom. The cops crack the code that Barksdale’s scattered minions use on their pagers — a key to tying Barksdale to large-scale drug running. Many of the established story lines converge here. The best of them involve the moral struggles of Barksdale’s young nephew D’Angelo (Larry Gilliard Jr.) — a natural lieutenant in the enemy army, who’s deciding if he has the stomach for pushing death on the streets — and the office politics McNulty must endure to combat that army. The latter affords ”The Wire” an opportunity to dissect the multilayered bureaucracy, and episode directors such as Clark Johnson (Boycott) get beautifully detailed performances from ”Oz”’s Lance Reddick as McNulty’s promotion-minded superior, ”Homicide”’s Peter Gerety as a pushy judge, and Clarke Peters as a brilliant detective consigned to a desk job for a forgivable sin committed years ago. (The series may be about cops and criminals, but you’ll recognize ”The Wire”’s workday tensions in your own life.)
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From June 29, 2002 in salon.com
‘What drugs have not destroyed, the war on them has’ by Ian Rothkerch
Poot, Bodie, D, and Wallace in the Pit.
EXCERPT: HBO’s new series “The Wire” is as much a polemic against the drug war as it is an indictment against traditional cop-show conventions. Over the course of a season, “The Wire” follows the frustrated attempts of federal agents and Baltimore police to topple an elaborate drug organization run by an elusive crime lord named Avon Barksdale (Wood Harris) and his conscience-stricken nephew D’Angelo (Larry Gilliard Jr.). When first we meet D’Angelo, he’s on trial for murder — a rap he beats after one of the star witnesses is coerced into changing her story by Uncle Avon’s crew. In attendance for this bogus verdict is Detective James McNulty (played with charismatic intensity by Dominic West), a pit bull homicide cop who takes D’Angelo’s victory as an insult to his professional ego. McNulty is subsequently brought in by the presiding judge to do a postmortem on the case, revealing that this was only one in a slew of uncharged homicides attributed to the Barksdale clan.
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From September 13, 2004 in msnbc.com
On ‘The Wire,’ sometimes the bad guys win by Michael Ventre
Johnny and Bubbs
EXCERPT: With “The Wire,” the entire series is like a brazen gunfight on an inner-city street. Even if you think you are safe, you could still be hit with a stray bullet. Characters that you’ve invested time and emotions in suddenly are gone. Executive producer David Simon apparently has too much integrity, intelligence and respect for the harsh realities he and his crack team of associates deal with to hand out one-hour helpings of vanilla. Here’s hoping he keeps it up.
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From October 1, 2004 in salon.com
Everything you were afraid to ask about ‘The Wire’ by Dan Kois
Prez, Kima, Lester, and Jimmy monitor the wire in the MCU office.
EXCERPT: “It’s a novel,” David Simon likes to say about the show he created, HBO’s “The Wire.” Which is a good way of explaining the show’s distinctively long plot arcs, dense webs of characters and grand scope — but an intimidating message to new viewers who, tempted by the show’s wild critical acclaim, are trying to tune in now, early into the program’s third season. After all, you wouldn’t start reading a novel on page 201, would you?
But getting a handle on the third season of “The Wire” doesn’t necessarily require watching 25 hours of back story. Though I heartily recommend the Season 1 DVD set (out Oct. 12), I’m happy to present a guide to HBO’s acclaimed, and extremely intricate, series.
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From August 25, 2006 in Entertainment Weekly
Setting off a ‘Wire’ alarm by Stephen King
Chris and Snoop make their pitch to Michael.
EXCERPT: In David Simon’s version of Dante’s Inferno, Hell is played by Baltimore and all seven of the deadly sins are doing just fine, thanks. Midlevel drug dealers welcome fall by giving their corner boys money for new clothes — a little perk to keep them happy and moving those spider-bags and red-tops. The bigger crooks give to the politicians to make sure the influence keeps flowing. The only difference is the amount changing hands. And Lester Freamon, a detective Sherlock Holmes might hail as a peer, has an aha moment while looking at an abandoned row house — one of thousands in the city’s decaying core — on a chilly winter afternoon. ”This is a tomb,” he says.
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From September 1, 2006 in ESPN.com
Sports Guy seal of approval (item 17) by Bill Simmons
Wee-Bey, Stinkum, D'Angelo, Stringer, and Savino strike the GoodFellas pose.
EXCERPT: Before I started watching “The Wire,” my four favorite TV/movie detectives of all-time were Sonny Crockett (“Miami Vice”); Jack Cates (“48 Hrs.”); Johnny Kelly (“NYPD Blue”); and Nick Curran (Michael Douglas’ character in “Basic Instinct”), who couldn’t break away from Sharon Stone even though he knew that every time she climbed on top during sex, there was a 50 percent chance she might ram an ice pick into his chest. But Jimmy McNulty in “The Wire” (played by Dominic West) … he might end up beating them all before everything’s said and done. He might have even moved to No. 1 during the scene in Season 2 when they raid a brothel and he ends up in a threesome before the rest of the cops arrive. Not even Sonny Crockett would have done that.
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From September 7, 2006 in Variety
The Wire, Season 4 review by Brian Lowry
Judge Phelan reviews the work of the Barksdale detail with Deputy Ops Burrell.
EXCERPT: What Simon and his collaborators achieve is breathtaking — creating a dozen parallel plotlines that slowly converge as the season progresses, all rooted in a totally organic world. There is drug kingpin Marlo (Jamie Hector), consolidating his hold on the streets; Det. Lester Freamon (Clarke Peters), who continues to follow the drug money despite his higher-ups’ reluctance to stir the pot in an election year; and former cop Howard Colvin (the magnificent Robert Wisdom), who, after unilaterally decriminalizing drugs in season three, is recruited to research at-risk teens, intersecting with the aforementioned youths.
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From September 13, 2006 in Slate Magazine
Why ‘The Wire’ is the best show on television by Jacob Weisberg
Sobotka and Nick talk at Delores' bar.
EXCERPT: The Wire, which has just begun its fourth season on HBO, is surely the best TV show ever broadcast in America. This claim isn’t based on my having seen all the possible rivals for the title, but on the premise that no other program has ever done anything remotely like what this one does, namely to portray the social, political, and economic life of an American city with the scope, observational precision, and moral vision of great literature.
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From September 18 to December 11, 2006 in slate.com
Breaking down the Wire by Steve James and Alex Kotlowitz
In one of the crucial thematic scenes of the entire series, Omar and the Bunk chop it up on a bench.
EXCERPT (from the 10-16-06 Steve James post): For my money, The Wire’s visual and storytelling style is what you might call “classical.” The series runs against the tide of current television (and even film) drama by not indulging in spurious attempts to mimic the look and urgency of real documentaries with a lot of “shaky-cam”: jiggley hand-held shots, quick unmotivated zooms, extreme close-ups, and editing that seems intent on letting no shot play longer than two seconds. It’s an affliction shared by recent works like Friday Night Lights (the film and the series), the controversial Path to 9/11, much of the work of Oliver Stone, and virtually every awful network-TV miniseries involving natural and man-made disasters. (Though I don’t include such deft appropriations of doc style as Paul Greengrass’ Bloody Sunday and Lars von Trier’s Breaking the Waves.) Real documentary filmmakers would fire shooters who can’t hold a shot or focus, or sit still on a subject. Why? Because it prevents the viewer from connecting with the subject and story at hand. And as David says, The Wire is, above all, intent on pulling the viewer into the story and characters.
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From September 20, 2006 in ESPN.com
Mad libs world in Hollywood by Bill Simmons
Slim Charles and Prop Joe, seen here discussing Omar and Marlo and maybe Cheese, presumably.
EXCERPT: There’s nowhere to hide in “The Wire.” The characters are stuck in Baltimore, a washed-up city ravaged by drugs, poverty and political corruption. Our closest thing to heroes are renegade detective Jimmy McNulty (a likable, hard-drinking iconoclast who disappears for much of Season 2 and becomes completely irrelevant in Season 4) and a gun-wielding nomad named Omar (a scarfaced Robin Hood, only if Robin Hood was gay and stole from drug dealers). We spend three full seasons watching Baltimore police break the city’s biggest drug syndicate … only to watch an angrier, more ruthless group of rival dealers immediately pop up in its place. The current season centers around four poor teenagers (all of them threatening to succumb to the drug lifestyle) and Baltimore’s incompetent school system (which can’t even begin to hope to save them), with the show elucidating in painstaking detail why these kids can’t be salvaged: They have no role models and no chance to escape, and things will never change because the lead politicians and major police heads only care about themselves. There’s no overall plan to save the city, no passionate leader on the horizon, nothing. All of it would take too much effort. Like a dead fish, Baltimore rots from the head down.
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From March 22, 2007 on youtube
Jay-Z, A Week Ago, The Wire
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From Season 4’s run, in Entertainment Weekly (EW.com)
Season 4 episode recaps by Michael Endelman
JACK’S NOTE: For some reason, I am having difficulties locating all of these reviews. As I secure them, I will post them.
Team Carcetti discusses the perils of waking up white in a city that ain't.
EXCERPT (from Endelman’s recap of episode 4 ‘Refugees’): As for Marlo’s own bloody trail, Lester Freamon is inching a bit closer to figuring out that the murder rate isn’t down; the corpses just haven’t appeared. ”The boy is a young lion,” he muses while drinking one of many whiskeys with Bunk. ”The lion has to have its kill. Where’s he putting the bodies?” Don’t you just want to shout into the screen and tell him? Look in the row houses, dude! I’m gonna predict that that B-More’s own Sherlock Holmes will find them in the next episode; it seems like the right point in the season’s narrative arc for a major event like that. And when that happens, the now dead Major Crimes Unit will have to come back to life, despite the suffocating presence of Charlie Marimow. And though Bunk seems to miss his beloved Jimmy McNulty, the hefty detective is spending some time showing homicide’s newest member, Kima Greggs, the ins and outs of her new unit, while hazing her too. Bunk does impart some useful information, so we finally hear one explanation of the phrase ‘’soft eyes” (which was also the title of episode 3). The question, however, is whether Greggs will be able to develop soft eyes soon enough to solve the political-hot-potato case that’s just been dumped on her desk: the murder of the state’s witness that Carcetti used to skewer Royce in the debate. Burrell is trying to bury the case until after the election, but he dropped the case on the wrong rookie. I bet Greggs will get this murder tied up in time for a Carcetti upset.
12-04-06, ‘That’s Got His Own’
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From 2006 to the present in What’s Alan Watching
Episode by episode recaps of The Wire by Alan Sepinwall
Twigg and Gus in the Sun newsroom.
SEASON 3 (Currently set for Summer 2010)
Sepinwall Q&A with David Simon
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From September 22, 2006 in The House Next Door
The Wire and the Art of the Credit Sequence by Andrew Dignan
This image first appeared in 'The Wire' title sequence in Season 2.
EXCERPT: A dialogue is brokered through the alternating images of law enforcement and those seeking to undermine it; the cutting creates symmetry through juxtaposition. To wit: a pay phone call in which a dealer orders a re-up of drugs is followed by a shot of an officer listening in through an ear-piece. Though their heads are out of frame, the man using the pay phone is clearly facing screen left, while the man with the ear piece is facing screen right. Yet bisecting the frame in both shots is the titular wire, occupying roughly the same position within the frame. The cop needs the criminal and the criminal is only forced to employ cloak and dagger tactics because of the cop.
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From December 1, 2006 in slate.com
Behind The Wire: An Interview with David Simon
Namond, Michael, and Randy go after some pidgeons
EXCERPT
DAVID SIMON: There were no models for us in TV. I admire the storytelling of The Sopranos, though I don’t watch it consistently. And Deadwood; I don’t watch it, but I admire their storytelling. We certainly weren’t paying attention to network TV.
Instead, the impulse on my part is rooted in what I was supposed to be in life, which was a journalist. I’m not interested in conducting morality plays using TV drama—in stories of good versus evil. I’m not interested in exalting character as a means of maintaining TV franchise. Most of TV works this way: You try to get something up and running, and once you do, you just try to keep it going, because there’s a lot of money involved. That’s not in my head. What’s in my head is what I covered, what I saw as true or fraudulent, what made me smile, as a reporter. I’ve been mining that ever since. To be honest, at the end of The Wire, I’ll have said all I have to say about Baltimore. I don’t have another cop show in me. I don’t have another season about Baltimore. What I’m saying is that I have to go back to the well.
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From May 22, 2007 in justtv.wordpress.com
The Wire and the Serial Procedural: An Essay in Progress by Jason Mittell
"But you gonna let that boy go. Bet that."
EXCERPT: The Wire’s novelistic qualities are most directly linked to its storytelling structure and ambitions. As Simon attests in frequent interviews and commentary tracks, he is looking to tell a large sweeping story that has traditionally been the purview of the novel, at least within the realm of culturally legitimate formats. He highlights how each season offers its own structural integrity, much like a specific book within a larger epic novel, and each episode stands as a distinct chapter in that book. The model, modestly left unspoken, might be War and Peace, a vast narrative containing fifteen “books,” each subdivided into at least a dozen chapters and released serially over five years.
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From August 2007 in believermag.com
A conversation between author Nick Hornby and Wire-creator David Simon
Sydnor and Bubbs go undercover in the Pit.
EXCERPT
NICK HORNBY: Baltimore may have had more of an influence on me professionally than any other U.S. city, now that I come to think about it. Certainly with High Fidelity, one of the things I was trying to do was cross Barry Levinson with Anne Tyler. Levinson, Tyler, The Wire, John Waters… None of these seem even to share an aesthetic, and yet there is an incredibly distinctive body of work that’s come out of your city. I’ve never been there, although I’d like to visit. Can you explain how it might have produced this work?
DAVID SIMON: I’m somewhat at a loss to explain Baltimore’s storytelling appeal. The interesting thing is that all of us are slicing off different pieces of the same city. My demimonde is decidedly not the Baltimore of Barry Levinson or John Waters in terms of filmmaking, and none of us get close to the blue-blood districts of Anne Tyler’s Roland Park. Laura Lippman moves all around the city, but her latest stand-alone novels are actually strongly referenced to Baltimore County, which is the suburban subdivision that actually encircles Baltimore city. She’s been mining places like Towson and Padonia and Owings Mills, where a lot of the upper-middle-class wealth has migrated.
One thing that I do feel is that by getting out of the traditionally dominant locales of New York, Los Angeles, Washington, Chicago, writers stand a better chance of speaking to conditions that are reflective of a lot of less-than-unique or less-than-grandiose second-tier cities. New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Washington—these are unique places, by dint of their size, their wealth, and unique aspects of their culture (New York as financial, fashion, and theater capital, and as cultural icon, or Washington as the government city, or Los Angeles as the film capital of the country). Baltimore is a postindustrial city, wedged between D.C. and Philadelphia and struggling to find its future and reconcile its past. In that sense it’s like St. Louis and Cleveland and Philly and a lot of other rust-belt American places, and so stories from here have a chance of being about more than Baltimore per se. The storytelling here might be quite detailed in referencing local geography and culture, but it translates easily to elsewhere and therefore acquires additional relevance easily.
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From September 15, 2007 in salon.com
The Sopranos vs. The Wire by Rebecca Traister and Laura Miller
Cheese hangs with Marlo's crew.
EXCERPT (from Miller’s Wire half): What “The Wire” is about is the game. The “game” is what the show’s black characters call the drug business, but the smarter players know that the game’s boundaries are not so finite. Although the series is scrupulously realistic (its creator, David Simon, is a former Baltimore Sun crime reporter and his writing partner, Ed Burns, is an ex-homicide detective), there is one improbably romantic character: the maverick stick-up artist Omar Little — beholden to no one, afraid of nothing, resolute in his abstention from curse words and the injury of “taxpayers,” and, last but not least, gay. Leave it to Omar, the show’s only true outsider, to state the series’ premise while pulling off a bit of prime courtroom rhetoric in a scene from Season 2. Testifying against a soldier of the dreaded Barksdale gang, accused by the gang’s sanctimonious lawyer of leeching off the drug trade, Omar coolly tells the shyster: “Just like you … I got the shotgun; you got the briefcase. It’s all in the game.”
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From October 22, 2007 in The New Yorker
Stealing Life: The crusader behind “The Wire” by Margaret Talbot
Bunny Colvin and Namond share a moment as Mr. Study Our Study looks on.
EXCERPT: Each season of “The Wire” has focused, with sociological precision, on a different facet of Baltimore. The previous season featured a story line about the city’s anarchic schools, told partly through the character of Roland (Prez) Pryzbylewski, a young cop turned schoolteacher. Simon recalled, “On the first day, the kids were all cutting up and yelling. It was like the first day of school. You know how they kicked the shit out of Pryzbylewski emotionally on the show? The kids were doing the same to the assistant directors. One poor A.D. was, like, ‘Please! This is too fuckin’ meta.’ By the end of the year, we had a good crew of young actors, but in the beginning it was, as we say in Baltimore, like herding pigeons.” While Simon was telling this story, Jermaine Crawford, a fourteen-year-old who joined the cast last season, came over to hug him. The scene being filmed would mark the final appearance of Crawford, whose character, Dukie, comes from a family in which all the adults are addicted to drugs or alcohol.
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From June 1996…posted on youtube November 2007
Steve Earle performing “I Feel Alright” on MTV
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From January/February 2008 in The Atlantic
The Angriest Man In Television by Mark Bowden
Beadie patrols the docks.
EXCERPT: [Simon] has done something that many reporters only dream about. He has created his own Baltimore. With the help of his chief collaborator, Ed Burns, a former Baltimore cop and schoolteacher; a stable of novelists and playwrights with a feel for urban drama (including George Pelecanos, Richard Price, and Dennis Lehane); a huge cast of master actors; and a small army of film professionals shooting on location—in the city’s blighted row-house neighborhoods and housing projects, in City Hall, nightclubs, police headquarters, in the suburbs, the snazzy Inner Harbor, the working docks—he has, over four seasons, conjured the city onscreen with a verisimilitude that’s astonishing. Marylanders scrutinize the plot for its allusions to real people and real events. Parallels with recent local political history abound, and the details of life in housing projects and on street corners seem spookily authentic. (A New York City narcotics detective who loves the show told me a few years ago that street gangs in Brooklyn were watching it to learn tactics for avoiding cell-phone intercepts.)
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From January 1, 2008 in theamericanscene.com
The Bleakness of the Wire by Reihan Salam
When it came to their approach to police work in the show's early going, McNulty and the Bunk epitomized the reality of Jimmy's sarcastic statement to Pat Mahone: "...two horses, together in harness."
EXCERPT: …who doesn’t want to believe that the tragedies of the inner-city are intractable? David Simon thinks he’s constructed a critique of capitalism, but in fact he’s prepared an elaborate, moving brief for despair and (ultimately) indifference. If you’re outraged by The Wire, do you then … go and support the election of your own Tommy Carcetti? Or do you throw up your hands and rail against the depredations of the market economy? This could lend itself to some more radical challenge to the status quo, and of course we’re never shown the depredations of Chavez’s Venezuela where petrosocialism has fueled new inequalities and new repression. Or it could lend itself to paroxysms of white guilt.
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From January 2, 2008 in Variety
The Wire, Season 5 preview by Brian Lowry
In Season 5, however, that wasn't the case.
EXCERPT: “The bigger the lie, the more they believe,” detective “Bunk” Moreland, played by Wendell Pierce, says in the opening hour, providing a window into a season whose labyrinth of plots are too good to give up and too intricate to do justice.
In the process, the series juggles a mind-boggling assortment of characters (40 are listed in the credits provided by HBO), raises issues seldom explored elsewhere in either drama or news (such as the tepid reaction to African-American fatalities) and assiduously builds from an understated start in tone, depth and intensity.
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From January 7, 2008 in New York Entertainment
The ‘Wire’ backlash begins by Ben Mathis-Lilley
Zorzi and Templeton at a meeting
EXCERPT: One of the otherwise-engaging newsroom scenes in last night’s Wire premiere stuck in our craw: David Simon’s grammar lesson. Remember? The go-getting young reporter played by Michelle Paress gets chastised for writing that (paraphrasing) “the Fire Department evacuated 120 people” during a fire. “You evacuate a building. You don’t evacuate people,” Old Curmudgeon Editor grunts. Cut to Paress’s character looking in some sort of reference book, then admiringly muttering, “He’s right, you know,” to a fellow reporter. But is he really right?
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From January 9 to March 10 2008, at the Freakonomics blog
What Do Real Thugs Think About the Wire? by Sudhir Venkatesh
Carcetti and Normal share a laugh.
EXCERPT (from Part 1): Thug assessment #4–Carcetti is a fool. Numerous observers commented on the Baltimore Mayor’s lack of “juice” and experience when it came to working with the feds. The federal police, in their opinion, love to come in and disrupt local police investigations by invoking the federal racketeering (“RICO”) statutes as a means of breaking up drug-trafficking rings. “When feds bring in RICO, local guys feel like they got no [power],” Tony-T explained, offering some empathy to local police who get neutered during federal busts. “White boy [a.k.a. Carcetti], if he knew what he was doing, would keep them cops on Marlo just long enough to build a case — then he would trade it to the feds to get what he wanted.” Others chimed in, saying that the writers either didn’t understand this basic fact, or they wanted to portray Carcetti as ignorant.
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From February 16, 2008 in Esquire Magazine
A Newspaper Can’t Love You Back by David Simon
Vondas and the Greek talk "business. Always business," in their favorite booth.
EXCERPT: I was an angry kid, by and large, with a cynic’s wariness of authority that was in harness with a good newspaperman’s contempt of cant and hyperbole. I loved a snide turn of phrase. I edited my high school paper, pissed off the faculty advisor, who thought about firing me, won some awards. I edited my college rag, pissed off the media-board chairman, who thought about firing me, won some awards.
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From February 18, 2008
An examination of what The Wire considers as “real police work” by William Rodney Herring
String and Bey meet with D, Poot, and Bodie to discuss "them pay boxes."
EXCERPT: Policing is about surveilling. It’s about knowing every individual on your beat. It’s about having information about them. It’s about visibility. It’s about knowledge. And it’s about power. It is, in particular, about knowledge-power. In short, it is about discipline. (Is this not what makes the rowhouse murders so horrific in Season 4? That although we suspect murders are occurring, we can’t see evidence? That we don’t know the victims?) So it turns out that policing is not occupying because a disciplined society is a transparent society that doesn’t need occupation. And it doesn’t need occupation because visibility and information are produced everywhere and by everyone, at least for those properly positioned to see and know. But Foucault has taught us this, and this series merely illustrates with surprising accuracy his argument in Discipline and Punish.
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From February 29, 2008 in readjack.com
The Godfather of Television by Jack M Silverstein
Rawls shoots down Lt. Daniels' request to keep the Barksdale investigation slow and careful.
EXCERPT: Simply put, The Wire is the story of its characters’ humanity. That comes first. It has to. Without the humanity, who really cares if a hopper gets killed because he tried to leave the game, or if the bosses shut down a case because cracking gang violence is less of a career-maker than political fraud? It is the humanity that drives the show, the humanity that makes Dad and Mike hop out of their seats at the reappearance of Omar, the humanity that makes viewers sweat during a shoot-out because they’re worried about the well-being of people on both sides of the fight.
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From March 5, 2008 in Time Magazine
The Wire’s War on the Drug War by Ed Burns, Dennis Lehane, George Pelecanos, Richard Price, David Simon
"Adjourn your asses."
EXCERPT: What the drugs themselves have not destroyed, the warfare against them has. And what once began, perhaps, as a battle against dangerous substances long ago transformed itself into a venal war on our underclass. Since declaring war on drugs nearly 40 years ago, we’ve been demonizing our most desperate citizens, isolating and incarcerating them and otherwise denying them a role in the American collective. All to no purpose. The prison population doubles and doubles again; the drugs remain.
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From March 7, 2008 in New York Entertainment
Debating the legacy of ‘The Wire’: did Season Five tarnish the show that invented the Dickensian Aspect ratio by Dan Kois and Adam Sternbergh
"This is me yo. Right here."
EXCERPT
Kois: For me the oversimplifications of this season brought to my attention the oversimplifications of seasons past — ones I overlooked initially, because I don’t know the world of cops and drug dealers the way I know the world of the media Which ended up, yes, tarnishing the show for me somewhat.
Sternbergh: I would never argue that the show is, or was, flawless. But most of these flaws were a product of its outsize ambition. (Not to reference the dreaded Dickens, but you think there aren’t a few one-dimensional characters in his classics?) And it’s this ambition, and the astonishing attempt to which it was realized, that makes this the GREATEST SHOW EVER™!
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From March 10, 2008 in New York Entertainment
‘The Wire’ Finale’s Montage: A Shot-by-Shot Commentary
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From March 10, 2008 in Rolling Stone
Goodbye to ‘The Wire’ by Sean Woods
"Bad advice! You motherfuckers gave me bad advice!"
EXCERPT: As great as the last episode was, saying goodbye to the show sucked. Why stop? There’s so much more to say about Baltimore and any number of these characters. And when HBO announced that after The Wire we could stay tuned to the season finale of Russell Simmons presents Def Comedy Jam, a nation’s television sets went dark. I’m sure of it.
Still, it’s somehow fitting that the day after The Wire retires, the Governor of New York is busted in a prostitution ring by getting caught on a wiretap. Seriously, you can’t make this shit up.
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From March 11, 2008 in heavenandhere.wordpress.com
Stomach on your Nikes (Levy, Pearlman, and Jews on the Wire)
A newly released Cutty goes to work as a landscaper.
EXCERPT: Given the uneasy history between blacks and Jews in this country, I’m surprised Simon, a Jew himself, allowed the final season of his masterwork to hinge on a conversation between two powerful Jews. Granted, Levy was the ultimate token Jew on The Wire, as Pearlman was Jewish like Snoop was gay, but the implication was that everything ultimately gets hashed out behind closed doors by Jews. After Pearlman and Levy’s stand-off, I sent a text message to my brother marking the birth of a new generation of anti-Semites.
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From the Summer of 2008 in Dissent Magazine
Three essays
‘Is The Wire too cynical?’ by John Atlas and Peter Dreier
‘In Defense of The Wire’ by Anmol Chaddha, William Julius Wilson, and Sudhir A. Venkatesh
‘John Atlas and Peter Dreier Respond‘ by John Atlas and Peter Dreier
Michael helps Bug with his homework.
EXCERPT from Atlas and Dreier’s first story: The few heroes depicted in The Wire are individualist renegades and gadflies. These include cops like James McNulty (Dominic West) and Lester Freaman (Clarke Peters) and the stick-up artist Omar (Michael Kenneth Williams), as well as social worker Whalen (a Narcotics Anonymous sponsor played by the singer Steve Earle), the Deacon (an influential West side churchman played by Melvin Williams), and Dennis “Cutty” Wise (Chad L. Coleman), whose boxing program may stop a teenager from succumbing to a life of drugs. Unlike ACORN, BUILD, the Algebra Project, and Justice for Janitors, these do-gooders don’t seek to empower people as a collective force. They try to help individuals, one at a time, rather than try to reform the institutions that fail to address their needs.
The Detail prepares Sydnor for his trip undercover.
EXCERPT from Chaddha, Wilson, and Venkatesh follow up: According to Simon, the central and straightforward goal of The Wire was to show that the “system” is broken and that it fails individuals and families. With its sophisticated critique of the structure of urban inequality, the show drove this point home, although apparently with a “nihilism” that, for Atlas and Dreier, rendered the critique ineffective. However, the community organizers they describe would presumably agree that the “system” has profoundly failed their communities. We would argue that the message of the show and the work of the grassroots activists go hand in hand. The Wire exposes the systemic inequality that the activists and organizers are working tirelessly to challenge and reform. Indeed, The Wire suggests that, since attempts to reform these institutions from within are doomed to failure, the only way to challenge failed systems is through independent action unsanctioned by these very institutions.
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From August 13, 2008 in Entertainment Weekly (EW.com)
‘The Wire’: 15 Brilliant Moments
"Mother fucker." "Fuck me."
EXCERPT (from Moment 2):
Season 1, Episode 4-Watching Bunk, chomping on his cigar, and McNulty methodically work a crime scene was one of The Wire’s richest pleasures. In the victim’s kitchen, their whole dialogue is one variation or another on a most satisfying swear word. Actors Wendell Pierce and Dominic West, brilliant both of them, make it sound like Shakespeare. Suck on this, network crime procedurals.
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From October 27, 2008 on youtube
Wire cast members urge North Carolina voters to vote Obama
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From December 12, 2008 on House of Georges
Evening Essay: “The Wire” by bankmeister
"Me? I'm just the po-lice."
EXCERPT: Stubborn prick that I am, though — I can’t dive into something like that; I’ve got to have the handle, the entire litter as opposed to the alleged pick. So I got on the NetFlix, and I ordered it up, one disc at a time, cordially interspersed with one movie for the wife, then one for me in between. Earlier this week, I finished the entire program, and I can’t remember the last time I felt so thankful for a recommendation, so stunned by a production of any kind. And I say all that to say this: There is nothing current-events-related about this post. The Wire called it a wrap and ended their fifth and final season earlier this spring. But, like Jim Gaffigan says, it’s frustrating when you see a movie for the first time that everyone else has already seen ages ago, and you want more than anything to talk to someone about it. That’s the position I’m in right now, so I’m talkin’.
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From December 19, 2008 on youtube
‘The Wire Wrap Up’ by Mad Skillz
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On a show full of murderers, dope dealers, corrupt police and politicians, Wire fans find the hen-peckin' mama of Namond Brice as the least likeable of all.
From December 23, 2008 to the present on IMDb, started by user Everyday-Struggler
Results HERE at the readjack.com blog
EXCERPT: Worst liked characters on the show…DE’LONDA BRICE, Rawls, Marlo, Clay Davis, Herc, Johnny Weeks
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From January 26, 2009 in New Yorker Magazine
‘A Lonesome Death’ by David Simon
JACK’S NOTE: This story is not about The Wire, but it is written by David Simon, and seeing his stuff in print–getting another layer of what he is about as a writer and social commentator–is always interesting. Also, the Hattie Carroll story did take place in Baltimore. So thar ya go.
Sgt. Carver brings Michael Lee in for a session in the box with the Bunk. "Gift wrapped!"
EXCERPT: In February of 1963, twenty-four-year-old William Zantzinger, armed with a toy carnival cane and wrecked on whiskey, made a spectacle of himself at the Spinsters’ Ball at the Emerson Hotel in Baltimore. He was a drunken country mouse in the big city, at a time when the notion of racial equality had barely shown itself in the neighborhood of his father’s tobacco farm. When the hotel’s black waitstaff was slow to serve Zantzinger another drink, he yelled racial epithets at Hattie Carroll, a barmaid and a fifty-one-year-old mother of eleven, and he rapped her on the shoulder with his cane. She became upset, then collapsed and died of a stroke.
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From March 1, 2009 in the Washington Post
‘In Baltimore, No One Left to Press the Police’ by David Simon
David Simon seen here in the series finale in one of his two Wire cameos, the other coming in Season 2's Bad Dreams.
EXCERPT: In the halcyon days when American newspapers were feared rather than pitied, I had the pleasure of reporting on crime in the prodigiously criminal environs of Baltimore. The city was a wonderland of chaos, dirt and miscalculation, and loyal adversaries were many. Among them, I could count police commanders who felt it was their duty to demonstrate that crime never occurred in their precincts, desk sergeants who believed that they had a right to arrest and detain citizens without reporting it and, of course, homicide detectives and patrolmen who, when it suited them, argued convincingly that to provide the basic details of any incident might lead to the escape of some heinous felon. Everyone had very good reasons for why nearly every fact about a crime should go unreported.
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From March 12, 2009 in IrishLeftReview.org
Every Villian Has Their Reasons by Seanachie
JACK’S NOTE: A decent essay…doesn’t give you much you don’t already know…bricks on some character names and details…but provides some absolutely terrific links to other Wire-related stories.
"This is you."
EXCERPT: Though the political commentary in The Wire is usually implicit, the show can be read as a text that bridges the Bush and Obama eras. David Simon said that he was initially prompted to make a show whose scope far outreaches the crime series he had previously been involved in after witnessing the institutional corruption and failure of American corporations such as Enron and WorldCom, both of which happened in the months following 9/11, and which, one would imagine ought to have served as a warning sign for the much greater collapse seven years later.
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From May 29, 2009 in darkmatter.org
The Politics of Brisket: Jews and the Wire by Keith Kahn-Harris
Levy represents D'Angelo on his murder of Pooh Blanchard.
EXCERPT: What is intriguing is how far our brief insights into Levy’s home life are tied in with references to his Jewishness. His family life is bound up in Jewish ritual (Sabbath dinner) Jewish food (brisket) and Jewish belonging (mishpocha). Levy’s invitation to Herc to become mishpocha has unmistakably clannish, even conspiratorial overtones. He extends the warmth of his Jewish family to someone who has loyalty to him – loyalty forged through Herc’s betrayal of Carver. In turning his back on his loyalties to the police and to his former partner, Herc is received into Levy’s Jewish family circle. Even if Herc has previously betrayed Levy himself through giving Marlo’s cell number to Carver (something of which Levy is not aware) Herc’s pleasure in Levy’s invitation indicates his willingness to forge a new set of loyalties that, whilst anchored in the Jewish home, are built on the values of The Game. In other words, Levy succeeds in seducing Herc – one of The Wire’s dumbest and most suggestible characters – away from the rectitude represented by his former partner in the police (who over the five series has come to be redeemed from his earlier corruption). The embrace of Levy’s Jewish home is ultimately the reward for Herc’s betrayal. The home, a source of succour for other characters, is in the case of Levy a source of corruption.
Lots more Wire essays from darkmatter.org that I will profile as I read.
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From July 10, 2009 in kellylowenstein.wordpress.com
The Wire’s roots: David Simon’s Homicide by Jeff Kelly Lowenstein
Cheese and his dog.
EXCERPT: Many of the characters, scenes and institutions that Simon unrelentlingly portrays are broken in The Wire are essential elements in Homicide. Reading the book is almost like seeing an earlier version of one of Michelangelo’s statues half-carved out of marble: the future masterpiece is visible, but not yet fully formed.
The drug dealers and users are a major ingredient of The Wire that is not a significant part of Homicide. Simon spent the year with the detectives, and while he does an effective job of painting complex pictures of these public servants, his depcition of the criminals at that point was far thinner.
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"We got your picture McNulty. Don't you worry."
JACK’S COMMENTS: It seems this former fan site has been ‘picked up.’ Congrats to them! This is a great spot to go for current, post-show material and news on Wire alum. It also has tons of links to fun stuff like soundtrack listing, discussions on Wire actors with British accents, and, prior to Season 5, ponderings of the worthwhileness of a Snoop Dogg cameo.
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Rev/Views episode by episode recaps and writeups from rev-views.blogspot.com
Snoop, Marlo, and Chris iron out the wirnkles in their "kill all comers" plan with their lawyer Maurice Levy.
JACK’S COMMENTS: I have only just recently found this site, but the ep-by-ep reviews feature in-depth, scene-by-scene recaps, and they also provide character guides, so this is a terrific site for beginners–it kind of functions as another set of Wire Cliff Notes. The site runner has just finished her/his Season 2 writeups following coverage of Season 1, (an example of one episode writeup) and it says the site will be doing all 60 episodes, so thar ya go. Definitely recommended.
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From August 27, 2009 in justtv.wordpress.com
Reflections on teaching The Wire by Jason Mittell
Bunny Colvin teaches the kids in Hamsterdam Jr.
EXCERPT: First off, this was the most satisfying course I’ve ever taught. It truly felt like a shared community of learners exploring the program and its contexts, with nearly every student fully engaged and excited about what we were working on. In large part, I was blessed with great source material – the show clearly rewards close attention, and if anything, I felt myself holding my students back from wanting to just keep watching episode after episode. Even though we met for 7.5 hours a week (5 of which were spent watching episodes), I felt there was not enough time to discuss everything that was on people’s minds. Luckily, the class blog captured the overflow, making it the most vibrant online discussion I’ve ever run.
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From September 2, 2009 in tomkatsumi.wordpress.com
The Wire’s Omar Little Is the First (and Maybe Last) Gay Icon by Tom Katsumi
Omar, Brandon, and Bailey count up the score from the Barksdale stash house.
EXCERPT: Omar makes no attempt to hide his sexuality, but is not overt about it either – he feels no need to wear it as a badge but similarly shows no shame. It is a testament to the amazing writing on the show that Omar wasn’t flirting with the police or planting a kiss on the cheek of someone he was about to shoot in the head – he even has terrible fashion sense, demonstrated in a bizarre scene where McNulty takes him shopping. At the same time they resisted an ‘Omar coming to terms with his sexuality’ special; in the words of the recent Stonewall campaign “Some people are gay. Get over it”.
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From October 13, 2009 in timesonline.com
Transcript: David Simon on why he created The Wire by David Simon
Life on the street was a bit too gritty for NBC.
EXCERPT: As I learned on my earlier experience in network television, the NBC executives used to ask the same questions every time they read a first-draft Homicide script:
“Where are the victories?”
Or better still:
“Where are the life-affirming moments?”
Never mind that the show was called Homicide, as head writer and executive producer Tom Fontana liked to repeatedly point out, and never mind that it was being filmed in a city struggling with entrenched poverty, rampant addiction and generations of deindustrialization.
Brave soul that he is, when Fontana wanted to write three successive episodes in which a violent drug trafficker escaped all punishment, he was told he could do so only if the detectives shot and killed the villain at the end of a fourth episode.
Good one, evil nothing. Cut to commercial.
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From October 13, 2009 in crownofthewire.blogspot.com
Determining The Wire’s best character NCAA Bracket style
Determining a "best" character is a personal matter.
EXCERPT, from their introduction to the rules: “Best” character can mean whatever a panelist wants it to mean. A suggested framework is to evaluate the characters according to the following three categories:
1. Which character is “cooler,” more fun to hang out with, has a more awesome personality, etc.
2. Which character is better at his job.
3. Which character adds more value to the show.
The panelists still must decide how to weigh the different categories. For example, in a hypothetical matchup of Wee Bey vs. Chris, a panelist may find that Bey seems cooler and more fun to hang out with, Chris is more essential to Marlo than Bey to Avon, and they both are equally valuable to the show (of course, another panelist may disagree with each of these assessments). The panelist must then decide which is more valuable- Bey’s superior coolness or Chris’s superior assassin/consigliere skills.
August 23, 2009 at 5:53 pm
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September 2, 2009 at 6:16 am
Thanks for this collection – you might also be interested in my blog about Omar Little: http://tomkatsumi.wordpress.com/2009/09/02/the-wires-omar-little-is-the-first-and-maybe-last-gay-icon/
November 11, 2009 at 4:58 am
[...] on page 57, he says that there are 65 episodes of The Wire instead of just 60. (Level 4) Flubbing the number of episodes might not seem like a big deal, but [...]
December 11, 2009 at 6:12 pm
[...] I have done with my Bulls writing, my Iran work, and my love for The Wire, I decided it’s high time I pool together all of my 2005 White Sox material. Even if [...]