The Best of 2006: The Wire
Review by Fritz Esker
Since my best list for movies will have to wait until January, when I get a chance to see some of the higher profile releases, I thought I’d write a piece on season four of The Wire, which is better than any movie I’ve seen this year. I will avoid any major spoilers in this discussion, but it will be impossible to fully discuss the show without going into minor spoilers. Don’t worry, though, you can read this piece and still have plenty of surprises in store for you with The Wire.
The Wire premiered in 2002, but was overshadowed by HBO’s more high profile efforts like The Sopranos and Six Feet Under. In 2004, Entertainment Weekly quietly ranked season three of The Wire as the television show of the year. I have not started watching the show until this season, its fourth, and I am glad I did. Sadly, however, it still does not seem to be garnering the attention it deserves. In fact, the only two writers I read that talk about it on a semi-regular basis are Bill Simmons and Jason Whitlock, two sports columnists. This lack of recognition is a shame, because The Wire might be the best television show of all time. At absolute worst, it at least deserves to enter the discussion. Imagine a show that combines the compulsive watchability of shows like The Sopranos, 24, and Lost at their best with a daring, genuine social conscience and you have The Wire.
The Wire is a portrait of inner-city Baltimore, from the cops to the drug dealers to the children to the teachers to the politicians. Its rich complexity and numerous major characters make it near-impossible to encapsulate (but I’ll try anyway in a moment). Unfortunately, that complexity is probably what keeps it from gaining a wider audience. You cannot be a casual viewer of The Wire. The show, more than any other I’ve ever seen, is a like visual novel. You can’t just pick up a great book and read a few chapters here and there, skipping around, and expect to be able to follow along. So it is with The Wire.
While there are recurring characters in each season of The Wire, each individual season has its own arc, making each season almost like a stand-alone 12-hour mini-series. There are some recurring characters from season to season, but they often drift in and out of the spotlight, with new major characters emerging each season.
Okay, here’s my best effort at quickly giving you a gist of the plot of the fourth season of The Wire. The season’s biggest focus is on four inner-city children: Namond (Julito McCullum), the son of a feared drug dealer/murderer who is serving life without parole; Randy (Maestro Harrell), an eager-to-please budding entrepreneur living with a caring foster mother; Michael (Tristan Wilds), a smart, taciturn, independent young man who cares for his younger brother because their mother is a hopeless drug addict; and quiet, shy Dukie (Jermaine Crawford), who lives in with an entire family of addicts, who steal whatever food or clothing he brings home and are so irresponsible that their dwelling has no water, leaving Dukie to often go to school without the benefit of a bath or a shower.
The boys attend a decrepit middle school that struggles to get by. Roland “Prez” Pryzylewski (Jim True-Frost) is an ex-cop turned overmatched first-year teacher. Also at the school, a study is taking place, conducted by a university professor (Dan DeLuca). Namely, they want to determine if disruptive kids (like the swaggering, aggressive Namond) can thrive if placed in an environment separate from the other kids. The professor’s point man is “Bunny” Colvin (Robert Wisdom), another former cop.
All of this takes place in a neighborhood where drug kingpin Marlo Stanfield (Jamie Hector) has come up with an ingenious way of getting rid of those who cross him: having his chief enforcers (Gbenga Akinnagbe and Felicia Pearson) kill them, then place the bodies in abandoned buildings, boarding up the entrances as they leave. No bodies, no crimes. Detectives Freamon (Clarke Peters) and Moreland (New Orleans native Wendell Pierce) are on the trail, trying to find the bodies that they know are out there, but no one will come forward and tell them about.
The last major subplot involves white city councilman Tommy Carcetti (Aiden Gillen) and his attempts to win the mayoral election in overwhelmingly African-American Baltimore. It is a tribute to The Wire’s complexity that there are also a number of other highly compelling characters and subplots that I did not mention here.
After that lengthy effort to convey the essence of the show, you may ask, “What makes it so good?” For starters, it is a stinging indictment of the disaster that is No Child Left Behind, as well the manner in which politicians and bureaucrats aim to cover their own backsides above all else. Because the school needs a minimum score on the yearly test to continue to receive funding, the school ends up teaching the kids the test. So much value is placed on numbers, i.e. the test scores, that no actual learning is going on. The kids learn the answers to the test (if that) and nothing else. Test numbers may be passable, but the kids learn nothing of consequence. The show makes an analogy comparing that to the way police departments “juke stats,” i.e. bumping an attempted murder or rape down to assault to make the serious crime stats look better or arrest street-level dealers to point to increasing arrest numbers while failing to arrest the men at the root of the problem.
In such an environment where role models are scarce and authority figures are more concerned with numbers and keeping their own jobs, it becomes very easy to see why an otherwise decent, hardworking kid like Michael would find it appealing when Marlo’s chief enforcer gives him a sales pitch in an effort to get him to join their organization. The scene is chilling because we realize why joining the drug dealers would seem like a step up to Michael.
While the show never shies away from the horrific consequences of individual actions or institutional neglect, it does a masterful job of making the audience understand why people make some very harmful choices. Carcetti, the aspiring mayoral candidate, has some genuine desires to make life better for the citizens of Baltimore if he is elected. However, he views politics as a career and often chooses to make deals and compromises necessary to get into office and stay there, even if those compromises end up hurting the city in the long run. Most people make compromises of some sort in order to keep their jobs. The Wire, while not excusing these actions, makes the viewers see that politicians and police administrators are typically no different: they want to keep their jobs and they will often take the safest (for them) and blandest route to assure they don’t rock the boat.
A social conscience and good intentions are swell, but they mean virtually nothing if they’re not being backed by good storytelling and character development. The Wire never seems like a civics lesson. It always seems real. Since I was raised in the suburbs, I cannot comment on the show’s authenticity in regards to inner-city life. However, I was a teacher for two years (albeit in a better school than the one depicted here) and I can authoritatively say that the teaching scenes feel 100% authentic. I cringed constantly during an early episode depicting Prez’s first day in front of the class. Almost every one of the mistakes he makes, I made myself (and so do many first-year teachers). Similarly, a moment comes late in the season where a more experienced Prez silences a disruptive student with a quiet look. That, too, is something almost all teachers eventually develop the ability to do. In retrospect, the authenticity of these scenes should not come as a surprise, as Ed Burns (not the same guy who wrote The Brothers McMullen), one of the show’s head writers, worked as both a cop and a teacher.
The show (created by David Simon) does a masterful job of developing its central characters. At first glance, Michael seems like the best of the bunch (or at least the one with the most potential). However, it’s the same intelligence and loyalty that makes him seem like such a great kid that makes the drug dealers want to recruit him. Similarly, the independence and strength that served him so well in taking care of his younger brother are the same traits that make him shrug off the efforts of well-meaning adults like Prez and Cutty (Chad Coleman), an ex-con who runs a boxing gym for neighborhood kids, to reach out to him.
Namond, who initially seems like the least likable of the bunch, is equally fascinating. His domineering mother (Sandi McCree) and his imprisoned father (Hassan Johnson) are pressuring him to become a drug dealer the same way a suburban family might pressure its son to become a doctor or a lawyer. At the start, Namond seems like Michael’s opposite, despite their friendship. He seems like a swaggering bully. However, like all kids who exhibit bullying tendencies, Namond is far weaker than he lets on. Because of this weakness, he is actually much more susceptible to influence of a positive male role model (in his case, Colvin) in his life than Michael would be.
The eager-to-please Randy is similarly paradoxical. More than the other boys, he genuinely wants to like everyone and be everyone’s friend. While most of the other kids are the cruel to the outcast Dukie, Randy is unfailingly kind and loyal to his friend. However, Randy’s inherent desire to like everyone proves to be a horrific flaw as he ends up making some very bad choices because he trusts others too easily. Dukie is probably the least complex of the four major youth characters, but only an inhuman clod would fail to feel sympathy for the kindly, horribly mistreated child. Dukie’s burgeoning friendship with the well-meaning but in-over-his-head Prez is also touching.
Unlike many Hollywood movies and TV shows that deal with poverty, The Wire does not peddle in easy answers. Most people want to believe that if you just work hard and be a good person, then things will work out for you, but things do not work out that way in real life, especially when you’re born into an environment as harsh as the one depicted here. Most the characters in The Wire do not get happy endings. One of the season’s major themes is how life’s greatest heartbreaks often occur when you sincerely try to help someone and your efforts fail, in some cases even making the situation worse than when you started. A few storylines are open-ended, and will likely be continued during its fifth and final season (which Simon says will focus on the media and its effects on society). However, The Wire is not entirely bleak, like say, Million Dollar Baby or House of Sand and Fog. At least one of the major storylines has a hopeful ending. And, because of the sadness that pervades the rest of the show, that happy ending is all the more sweet.
The Wire is a wildly entertaining and tremendously important show with a lot to say about education, poverty, crime, and the messes we leave behind for future generations to clean up. I’m not exaggerating when I tell you this show could change the way you look at the world. At this point, I realize I’m almost attributing supernatural powers to the show, but I really believe it to be true. My only concern is that I’ve oversold it with this review. Often, when you try to hard to impress people about anything, they end up being decidedly unimpressed.
But trust me (and if you’ve ever trusted my recommendations on anything, trust me now), season 4 of The Wire is an absolute, no-doubt-about-it must-see. If you don’t have HBO, netflix it or rent it the second it comes out on video. You will not be disappointed.