"The Wire" - Unplugged

I have, just now, finished watching the final episode of the final season of HBO’s “The Wire”. You know that feeling you get when you finish reading a novel? And I don’t mean a little three-hundred page thing you flew through over a weekend. I mean a big novel, something you invested a good deal of time and, ultimately, a huge of amount of emotion in. A better example might be a series of novels, one that follows the same characters for hundreds, maybe thousands, of pages. Can you conjure that feeling? You remember what it felt like when you hit that final paragraph, not wanting to read it too quickly, because you knew that it was, finally, the end of this amazing and very personal journey you’d been on, one that you could try to relate to other people but knew, already, that you’d never be able to – not properly, at least? How you felt a certain exhaustion, but a peaceful one, and you felt somehow older and wiser, like you’d managed to somehow live another lifetime within the confines of your own? How you mourned its ending, but were grateful that you’d had the experience for the short time it was with you?

Yeah. I liked “The Wire”.

I’ve written about this elsewhere (such on as my web page’s “My Shows” page, which was written before I’d gotten to the final season), how I had tried the pilot of this show when it first aired, but for some reason just wasn’t in the right place, mentally, to appreciate it. I’d heard a few good things about it later, here and there, but not much, as no one I knew was watching it. I must have really been off my game on that first viewing, because I somehow hadn’t realized that it was from creator David Simon, who wrote the book (“Homicide: A Year On The Killing Streets”) that had been turned into one of my favorite television shows ever, “Homicide”. Without that foreknowledge, and without, apparently, a very lengthy attention span that evening, I had chalked it up to a show that looked interesting, but seemed to move very slowly and didn’t really grab me. With so many other things going on, I had just never gone back to it.

In case you weren’t aware? I’m an ass.

A couple of things brought it back on my radar. First, a friend at work, who’s always trying to hip me to shows I haven’t seen (which, these days, is MOST shows out there) would occasionally talk about it. And then it started making some entertainment news, as the show was entering its fifth and final season. My interest is always piqued when I hear a show is coming up on its finale. That is, a show that KNOWS it’s ending, not one, like so many network shows, that suddenly finds itself cancelled and leaves its fans (of which there apparently weren’t enough) hanging for all eternity and writing fan fiction on the web to deal with their loss. The planned end of a TV series is a big thing. It’s when everything comes together and (unless the network/creators are feeling particularly evil) wraps up all the loose ends and closes the book on the show’s world. Those finales can be very satisfying if done right. Or, they can end up unable to deal with the pressure of creating a proper ending and completely blow it (cough cough SOPRANOS cough).

My curiosity got me doing a little reading about the show, mostly through Amazon reviews. And I started getting really intrigued by what I was reading. There seemed to be common themes in most of the reviews. People spoke of how it was a show without a main character, really, but one where many characters took the spotlight and all made a difference, big and small. They also seemed to not only be at a loss to properly describe the show, but all pointed out that trying to sum it up would do the show a disservice. And many of them talked about how it felt, more than anything they’d seen, like a novel presented on film. And being like a novel, it didn’t dumb itself down for its “readers”, it didn’t take shortcuts, and it wasn’t something for casual viewers. This was a show you had to pay careful attention to while you watched it. And all these observations sounded to me like the perfect recipe for just the kind of show that I prefer.

I was suddenly obsessed with the idea of seeing it, and seeing the whole thing. Normally I’d go out and buy the seasons on DVD and try them out, but, as I’ve also mentioned elsewhere, HBO’s pricing on their shows is ridiculous, not to mention their practice of often putting just two episodes on a disc to justify multiple discs in a set to, therefore, justify the higher price. I was not about to pay the outlandish prices they charge for 12-13 episode seasons. That’s when I got the Netflix idea. I’d never really thought about using Netflix to watch TV shows, probably because back when I was still using the service, there really weren’t a lot of shows on DVD – not like there are now, where every show is (finally) showing up in box sets for sale, right down to “Good Times” and “Sanford & Son”.

So I signed back up with Netflix, paid my money, and got all ready for my first disc – only to find that it wasn’t coming. Why? Because the first season discs were on a “short wait” status. What?! You’re telling me NETFLIX doesn’t have enough discs to get to everyone who wants them? The whole reason I signed up again was just to watch this show, and now I had to wait, right when I was completely jazzed to get started as soon as possible? Well, yes, I had to. Guess with the show ending, lots of people were trying to do what I was and crank through the previous seasons. It took a few days, but finally, my first couple of season one discs showed up in the mailbox, and I was ready to start working this show into my really, really tight TV-watching schedule – and I was ready to find out if everyone had been right about it.

Armed with the right frame of mind, this time, knowing in advance that it was a story that was going to take its time and knowing that there was a definite ending I was going to be able to get to (as opposed to my usual luck of getting into shows that get snatched away from me when the networks give up on them after half a season), I settled in and – more than just watching – really let the show flow over me. That’s what it felt like. I was immersed in it right away, and this time, its pace seemed just perfect for me. By the time I got to episode two, I think, there was no turning back. I was hooked. At a rhythm of one episode per night – or often half an episode a night, as I couldn’t finish a whole one during dinner and usually had something else that needed getting to – I powered through four seasons of this. The problem was, the fifth and final season was NOT on DVD, as it had just finished up on HBO. I checked the On Demand schedule on my cable, and it wasn’t there. I checked for reruns, and it looked like HBO had a cycle going where they were only showing one rerun per week, and they were in the middle of doing season four again. There was no way I was going to wait, and, this being the internet age, I didn’t have to. I got online and did a BitTorrent search, and managed to download all 10 episodes of the final season. I was planning to burn them to DVDs so I could watch them in the living room, but I realized that the extra-big video files looked just great at full-screen on my 21” flatscreen monitor. So I just watched them in the bedroom, and with a big run last night (Friday night) and a finish-up today, I find my “Wire” experience at an end.

And what a ride.

The problem here is that I really don’t want to tell you that much about the show. I get the feeling most people who will be reading this never got around to seeing it either, and I really don’t want to spoil a thing. I want you to experience it like I did, not knowing much more about it than that it’s about cops and drug dealers. I want you to discover for yourself, too, that it is about SO much more than cops and drug dealers.

Let me give you a little background. David Simon used to be a crime reporter for the Baltimore Sun. He was known for his in-depth reporting on the drug trade in Baltimore in the 80s and early 90s. In his reporting, and later in his books, he forged close relationships with police and drug dealers alike, not to mention all kinds of citizens he used as sources. He knows the Baltimore streets, from the very gutters on up. His books – the aforementioned “Homicide” and “The Corner – A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood” (co-written with Edward Burns) – both involved him spending a year living his subject. In the former, he spent a year with Baltimore homicide detectives. In the latter, he and Burns (a former Baltimore cop turned schoolteacher) spent a year hanging out in a West Baltimore neighborhood dead center in the city’s drug trade. Both were heralded and remarkable works, and both ended up produced into television adaptations (“The Corner” is now an HBO miniseries I must see).

While “Homicide” was groundbreaking stuff, it was still on NBC. It couldn’t portray the “real” of the subject matter, only translate it into acceptable network fare. And then came “The Wire”, created by both him and Burns, and on HBO, they were finally able to pull no punches, to really bring the dark realities of all that they’d seen to the screen. “The Wire”, to me, is everything “Homicide” had really wanted to be. So, in a strange way, I got one of my favorite shows back.

The main focus of “The Wire” is the drug trade and the efforts of police to try to do something about it. The name of the show comes from the main focus of the first season, with a group of police trying to take down a powerful drug kingpin (Avon Barksdale – you’ll start to hear that name in your sleep after the first season, you hear it so much) through surveillance and, mainly, the tapping of cell phones. The show immediately broke the norm by looking at both sides of the fight, and both sets of characters – the cops and the drug dealers. You get to know them all, and their lives, and all the facets of what each side goes through. And the detail is so authentic and so NOT dumbed down that I literally had to turn on the subtitles many times to figure out both the drug lingo and the cop talk. Which was GREAT. I loved that I had to work for it, that I wasn’t spoon-fed. It was so real that it often felt like a documentary. And does it ever pull you in. Once you get used to the pace, you’re hooked – you get so emotionally invested in this investigation. And instead of getting cookie-cutter bad guys, you’re even more into it because you get to know the dealers intimately. There are amazing and unforgettable characters on both sides.

And the show doesn’t just focus on the policework aspect. It hits every angle of the drug problem, from the bureaucracy to law to politics to business. Half the time the bad guy ends up being red tape, and half the struggle for the cops is trying to make their case while being hamstrung by the system. You get such a strong sense of why the problem never truly gets solved, and just how many, many obstacles are in the way.

Again, I won’t get into details, but every season focuses on a different aspect. You start with the Barksdale investigation. But each season that follows is something new (and yet, it’s all connected, one big ever-expanding story). You’ll go from street-level dealer stuff to waterfront union politics. You’ll get into the big business behind all the money, and the lawyers behind it all. You’ll get submerged in politics, particularly in season four. You’ll even get into the media aspect of it, where Simon draws on his past occupation and makes the Baltimore Sun itself a character in the final season, and shows how the news media both helps and hinders the problem (another place where you’ll feel totally submerged in a world you never expected you’d learn about, where you’ll learn all about the inner-workings of a major metropolitan newspaper). And it doesn’t stop there. Much of season four focuses on education and the school system, and on the core of the drug-life problem at its genesis, where you’ll follow a group of students and learn what its like to grow up on those streets.

And all these different pieces fit seamlessly together, showing every side of the drug epidemic, from cops to dealers to addicts to teachers to innocents caught in the middle. You feel how big it all really is, and why there are no simple fixes. It’s one big tapestry, one deep, sweeping look at one major U.S. city caught in the drug cycle, and the people it affects. It’s brilliant. It doesn’t give answers but asks all the questions that people are afraid to. It’s unflinching. It doesn’t glamorize the drugs or the violence, but never shies away from them, either. It’s often shocking, often hopeless, often heartbreaking, and yet gives moments of hope that shine dimly in the darkness. It’s about all the worst and best of humanity. It’s about greed, temptation, ambition, perseverance, the questions of selling one’s soul for the greater good. It also shows, in many aspects, how one simple choice can change so much, how everything we do affects everything around us. Ultimately, it’s about people – the people making those choices, and how they live with them.

And it’s the people that I’ll miss the most, characters that I’ve come to know so well during the five seasons. My favorite thing the show does is present you characters you make your mind up about quickly, and then realize, along the way, that you didn’t understand them at all. I’ve seen this in my own life so many times, and it’s made me think about the first impressions I had about people that are now a big part of my life, and how far from those initial valuations the truth has ended up being. All these characters have layers, and they go places you never would have expected during the run of the show. I’m going to miss McNulty, the closest thing the show had to a main character, a man of self-defined honor hidden behind a mask of self-destructive behavior and bad choices. I’ll miss Detective Lester Freamon, perhaps one of my favorite TV characters of all time, and his relentless pursuit of the truth. Damn, will I miss the Bunk, that big stogie-smoking pragmatic lush. I’ll miss Kima and Herc, Carver and Pyrzbylewski (perhaps the most quietly amazing character transformation in the show). I’ll miss, and respect, Lt. Daniels. I’ll miss the laughs from Landsman and despising Rawls and Burrell. I’ll never be able to forget Michael, Randy, Namond and Dukie. I’ll be haunted by both “D” and Wallace, and the remarkable performances their actors brought to them. I’ll be seeing Chris and Snoop coming up behind me in occasional nightmares, I’m sure, just as the slick and ice-cold Marlo will continue to give me chills when I think back on him. I’ll particularly never forget the indestructible Omar Little (“Omar’s comin’!”) and the completely badass, bowtie-wearing Brother Mouzone. I’ll remember them all, from Prop Joe to Stringer Bell, Tommy Carcetti to Norman, from Clay Davis (“Sheeeeeeeeiiit”) to Bunny Colvin to Frank Sobotka.to Bodie. And Bubbs. How could I ever forget Bubbs, the heart of the show, from start to finish, and the embodiment of the darkness and hope that is the Baltimore streets?

And, as a Homicide fan, I’ll also miss the chance I got to see some of my old gang again. Particularly the amazing Clark Davis, who played Meldrick Lewis on Homicide, who not only showed up here as an actor – during season five, playing Baltimore Sun desk editor Gus Haynes – but directed four episodes, including the pilot and the finale. But also Paul Gerety, who played Det. Gharty at the end of the Homicide run, and even an appearance by a guy – playing a homeless guy with religious mania – who played a murder suspect in the Homicide pilot ten years earlier (“I was drinkin’!”). But the best moment of Homicide love was in the final season, when Clark Davis is walking into a bar to meet with someone and passes Richard Belzer (Homicide’s Detective Munch), who’s talking to the bartender about the right way to run a bar, and mentions that he used to own one (as Munch did in Homicide – one he co-owned with Clark Davis’ character). Nice little Easter egg for us old-school Baltimore murder fans.

As I can afford, I will be buying this whole show, as it’s one I will own with pride, and one I know I’ll be going back to watch again, with a much greater appreciation for all its parts now that I can see the whole. I used the word “journey” earlier, and that aptly describes what I’ve been on as I’ve traveled through the West Baltimore street corners, the courtrooms, the jail cells, the squad rooms and the halls of power. Sadly, I’ve reached the end of that journey, but the journey has meant so much more than the destination. This is television the way it SHOULD be. The way it CAN be as we step further and further away from the network paradigm and edgier creative voices can finally be heard. I hope this is a harbinger of things to come in the future of episodic television. I really do. We deserve TV like this.

I most definitely advise you to take this journey yourself, and find out, as I did, what an amazing affect it will have on you. There’s always Netflix…if you don’t mind a little wait. Try “The Wire”. I think you’ll thank me for the advice.