Seeing as how I spent most of the last post snidely complaining about something terrible that I watched, I thought that this time I would instead write about something that was pretty great.
I recently finished watching The Wire. Yes, I know I'm about 10 years behind the time- but I was about 13 when the show first aired, back in the dark and distant days where HBO was something the average British person hadn't heard of, and if you were lucky you could download the latest Red Hot Chili Peppers song from Limewire in a mere single hour. What I'm trying to say is that watching/downloading the latest American TV shows was just not possible, so it was pretty much The Bill or nothing. However, I'd always been interested in watching it after seeing it crop up on various Best TV Shows of the 00's lists and being lavished with praise by critics, so whilst my Mrs was on a three-week vacation to the States, I decided to occupy my evenings (and occasionally mornings and afternoons) with watching all five season of The Wire.
A brief synopsis of the show, if you haven't yet seen it (hey, there are still some of us!). The show begins by following detective Jimmy McNulty, a homicide detective in Baltimore, Maryland. He's assigned to a special investigative unit who use undercover surveillance (including the titular wire) to bring down local drugs kingpin Avon Barksdale. That's where the show begins, but as it progresses the story expands to look at other parts of the city and the organisations within them. Loosely, they are:
Season One- drug dealing and street gangs
Season Two- the Port and unions
Season Three- police bureaucracy and local government
Season Four- young people and the school system
Season Five- homelessness and the press
First off, top-notch show. I mean, it's undeniably fantastic: the writing, acting, direction, are all excellent. But then, many other shows have these elements sorted, so what makes The Wire so unique? There are several reasons, including the relative complexity of the show, the moral ambiguity of the characters, the realism and tangibility of the city, and many more.
***spoilers, ahoy!***
First up, The Wire has a level of depth and complexity rarely seen in TV dramas. It's a serial show, and each subsequent episode builds on the story prior. Things start small, seen through the eyes of Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West- always nice seeing some Brits popping up on U.S. TV), but events quickly spread out from there to include a large cast of characters; McNulty's department, the surveillance unit he joins, his family. As mentioned above, the focus expands progressively throughout the course of the show, to the extent where McNulty himself is only a minor presence in season four. Over the course of the fifty episodes, you meet a host of different characters whose lives interact in many different ways; they might be in conflict, alliance, a mixture of both, or related only tangentially. But nevertheless, they all link together the central narrative.
Besides the overall scope of the show, one of the features I liked most about The Wire was that the storyline of the police ran in parallel with that of other 'families' of characters (such as the Barksdale gang in season one, or Frank Sabotka in season two). This was another reason why I felt The Wire was such a strong drama; the sense of moral ambiguity. There is no moral black and white, which I found enormously refreshing. Because you see the story from all sides, it's almost impossible to say where your sympathies lie. Of course, as the viewer you tend to sympathise with McNulty and the other cops, but it's not as simple as it first appears. You can see he usually tries to do the right thing and act in the best interests of society, and you warm at first to his disregard for authority figures who want to manipulate crime stats and cut corners. But he's often not a likeable person (being an alcoholic and serial adulterer), and his pursuit of doing what he thinks is right culminates in season five when he effectively 'invents' a serial killer to secure money and resources for his colleagues. Is this right? Obviously not, but we can sympathise with his motivations and understand where he's coming from.
Similarly, as you follow the drug gangs and other arcs in tandem with the police story, you see that some of the less morally upright characters are actually more relatable than some of the 'good guys'. Take Omar for example; he makes his money by shaking down drug dealers and staging robberies, but yet to me he ended up as one of my favourite characters because he was straightforward in his motivations and free of deception: when he went to court to testify against Bird, he told the jury what he was about without any subterfuge or artifice. You understand his campaign of vengeance against Stringer Bell and the Barksdale family (and later against Marlo Stanfield's crew).
In many ways, this was what appealed most to me about the show; there were very few 'good' or 'bad' characters; almost all of them had some element of both, and the show did a solid job of explaining how or why. Some characters did bad things because they were drawn to the glamour of violence (Bodie and Poot), some wanted money (String), and some just wanted to be respected (Ziggy Subotka). In each case, you could empathise at least a little with where the characters came from and why they did what they felt they had to.
***
Anyway, this post is already pretty lengthy so I'm going to shut up now. Part Two coming shortly!
No comments:
Post a Comment