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Sunday, August 13, 2006
~The Wire~ and The Wealth of Nations
The premier of Season 4 of The Wire on HBO is under a month away. I just finished Season 3 on DVD - 12 episodes in three sittings. It's the best show about the real world on television.
This means I'm not comparing The Wire to Battlestar Galactica or even 24 -- my two other favorite shows on tv -- which would be like comparing not apples to oranges, but maybe apples to androids or apples to adrenalin.
But The Wire has surpassed The Sopranos in the range, subtlety, intensity, and eloquence of the bad guys portrayed. Perhaps The Godfather, as well.
The cop part of the show is excellent, but we've pretty much seen it before on Homicide: Life on the Street, the 1990s NBC tour de force. The alcoholic detective, the political police chiefs, the heroic lieutenant are all played to perfection on The Wire, but we've been in those gritty precincts of Baltimore before.
Where we've rarely if ever been is next to D'Angelo Barksdale (played by Larry Gilliard, Jr.), the drug-dealer street manager with a serenity and a heart, or Stringer Bell (played by Ibris Elba), the drug-dealing second-in-command with an intellect and Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations on his bookshelf. "Who the fuck was I chasing?" Detective McNulty asks himself when he comes upon this book in Stringer's apartment in the next-to-last episode of the third season.
Who indeed? Someone like no other criminal you've met before. In between ordering murders, Tony Soprano watches the History Channel, Michael Corleone goes to the opera, and Stringer Bell goes to night school and reads classics in economics. Who is the more unusual, dangerous, perversely admirable?
If you've got a few days or weeks, do yourself a favor and find out in the first three Wires.
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Monday, October 30, 2006
~The Wire~ without Stringer
The 4th season of The Wire has been very enjoyable so far, with a good Baltimore political campaign that resonates well with this time of year. (Hey, I find the politicos on The Wire more real than those who talk on Chris Matthews' Hardball.)
But I gotta say that I'm beginning to feel that this will not be one of The Wire's best seasons, and the reason is Stringer Bell's absence.
The greatest strength of the show - its truest genius - always resided in the subtlety, intensity, and surprising humanity of its drug dealing bad guys. But most of the originals are gone. First, they killed off D'Angelo Barksdale (on Stringer's order). Then Stringer got his just desert - just for him, unjust for us the viewers, and our continuing enthrallment in the show. And Avon Barksdale, out and in and out and now back in prison again, is nowhere to be seen this year.
Marlo Stanfield, the new, young, drug kingpin, is good - that is, he seems unremittingly evil. But that's also the problem. Because he apparently has almost no redeeming qualities, he's much less intriguing than D'Angelo and Stringer. Omar, anti-hero of the show for all four seasons who preys upon the drug dealers - he helped killed Stringer - does have some heroically conflicted qualities. But will they be enough to carry the show?
Stringer Bell, played to perfection by Idris Elba, was more than heroically conflicted, more than a villain with redeeming qualities. He attended night school, had The Wealth of Nations on his shelf, saw clearly that he had put his money in something other than drugs if he wanted to survive, but couldn't quite do that in time to save himself. His death put him in the realm of Michael Corleone, and thus was brilliantly appropriate for the story arc - but it left the future of the show in the lerch.
Maybe that's ok. Maybe The Wire, having achieved that height with Stringer, can continue and succeed on a slightly lower level, which would still leave it a great show, far better than 99% of everything else on television (but not better than Battlestar Galactica this year.) We'll see...
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Useful links:
The Wire's "Way Down in the Hole" - Enjoying the Disappointment blogging about the best song in tv history
The Wire Without Stringer 20-minute podcast, featuring Idris Elba's hip-hop soul song, "Johnny Was"
The Wire Season 4 in 20 with Driis Speaking On Stringer 20-minute podcast, featuring Idris Elba's rap, Driis Speaks On Stringer
The Wire DVDs: First Season, Second Season, Third Season
The Plot to Save Socrates
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more about The Plot to Save Socrates...
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