http://www.guardian.co.uk/theguide/features/story/0,,2008424,00.html
Getting wired
Hailed as the best, most sprawling TV show ever made, The Wire takes an unflinching look at the bankruptcy of the drugs war. Ben Marshall talks to the creators with a novel approach
Saturday February 10, 2007
The Guardian
Head east or west away from Baltimore's still relatively prosperous centre and you are suddenly struck by a curious silence. Traffic, that pervasive presence of the American city, is all but absent here. So, too, are people; unless you count the groups of alternately giggling or sullen corner boys who sell heroin and cocaine 24/7. Whole streets have been forsaken; whole city blocks are completely derelict, 47,000 homes and counting. Amid one of the highest murder rates in the western world, people are running for - literally - their lives.
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The doors and windows of the vacant properties are boarded and the boards are often stencilled with a message so redolent of inadvertent irony you feel faintly queasy looking at it. In large neat block capitals the words read: "IF ANIMAL TRAPPED CALL 410 396-6286". Some of these crumbling shells shelter feral, frightened children abandoned by parents who have long since surrendered themselves to analgesic oblivion. And if it hadn't occurred to you before it certainly occurs to you now; Baltimore is bleeding to death. This is the subject of HBO's The Wire, a drama so rich in character and nuance, and so powerful in its anger and painful with its humour that it has been compared to the darkest classics of literature. It is no coincidence that some of America's most accomplished novelists (such as George Pelecanos, Dennis Lehane and Richard Price) have written for its first four seasons. Nor was it a surprise when the New York Times wrote: "If Charles Dickens were alive today, he would watch The Wire, unless, that is, he was already writing for it." The difference in The Wire however, is that there is no kindly old gentleman to set things right.
Over the course of its four series (a fifth and final is in pre-production right now) The Wire does what no other TV programme has ever attempted to do. It immerses us in the lives of drug dealers, cops, politicians, stick-up artists and junkies. It makes their plights and conflicts so palpably real we are compelled to undergo, if not a moral crisis, then certainly a moral re-examination. Its fourth season was considered so important that when it was screened last summer in the US, both the New York and LA Times devoted their editorial columns to it. It is a show of giddying, riveting, uncompromising complexity. And makes the fullest use of its 12 episode, 12 hour format.
Co-creator Ed Burns explains it this way. "We can do things no other show can do. It's wonderful, because you can plan something in episode nine that doesn't blossom until 35. I remember in the second season we had this woman in the background just scrubbing her steps. And you see her in the background, just scrubbing every episode, and the drug dealers are moving closer and closer, until the final episode - they're sitting on her steps and she has a little "for sale" sign in the window."
The first three seasons are largely devoted to the bringing down of the ruthlessly efficient Barksdale/Bell drug crew. Avon Barksdale is a mixture of explosive violence and cloying sentimentality, forever lecturing others on family values and loyalty even as he goes about his murderous business. His infinitely more dangerous lieutenant Stringer Bell is the embodiment of Machiavellian charm and bootstrap capitalism. By the end of season three these two men, who by now we cannot help but root for, have accumulated so much cash they have set about buying up swathes of property on Baltimore's lucrative waterfront, prompting one detective to observe: "So Stringer and Avon are worse than drugs dealers; they're property developers."
It is this careful development of character and plot that has seen The Wire rightly compared to great epic novels. Initially billed as a cop show (a label that Ed Burns's writing partner David Simon describes as a "necessary Trojan Horse"), it bears no resemblance to any cop show you might have seen. Unlike, say, the CSI franchise, where unequivocally good and good-looking men and women swan around swish offices, and viewers are accustomed to the crime lab delivering perpetrators neatly at the end of each episode, The Wire offers no such comforts. Here the cops are, for the most part, a bunch of aggressive, workshy drunks who inhabit a filthy basement so appallingly ill-equipped they barely have a computer between them. And the cops are of course pitted against the crooks, but since we spend as much time in the company of the latter as we do the former, our sympathies are forever being tested to breaking point.
"That's the problem with most cop shows," explains David Simon. "It's the black hat, white hat thing. I swear if I had to write a police procedural right now, I'd put a gun to my head. On shows where only the arrest matters, where it's about good and evil, punishing crime, the poor and the rich, the suspect exists to exalt the good guys, to make the Sipowiczes [the no-nonsense cop in NYPD Blue] and the Pembletons [the no-nonsense cop in Homicide - Life On The Streets] and the Joe Fridays [the no-nonsense cop in the protoypical Dragnet] that much more moral, that much more righteous, that much more intellectualised. It's to validate their point of view and the point of view of society. So, you end up with same stilted picture of the underclass. Either they're the salt of earth looking for a break, and not at all responsible, or they're dangerous and evil and need to be punished. That's a good precedent for creating an alienated America. Dramatically I have no interest in good versus evil. I am interested in institutions, and how they seek to preserve themselves even as they are crumbling."
So in season three of The Wire Simon and Burns draw direct parallels between street level corruption and incompetence, and the venal indifference of Baltimore's political establishment. We move from street busts and crunchy beatings, through squalid squats, to the marbled corridors of City Hall. Every petty dealer is running some sorry little scam. The cops, however good or bad they may be, are perpetually the victims of a quota system that effectively discourages the investigation of crimes, since an investigation has necessarily to acknowledge a crime has been committed in the first place. And the dealers themselves, Barksdale and Bell, inhabit a netherworld of blood, lies and spiralling paranoia. Meanwhile the politicians, both the cynically ambitious and the well meaning, attempt to spin an unspinnable scenario. If this rings any bells then it should do.
"Season three," explains David Simon, "opens with two towers being blown up. This initiates a dumb and protracted war. Now people will come to me and ask, 'Is there a metaphor here?' Well what the [censored] do you think? Baltimore is the star of the show, but it's not the subject. American power and American weakness is the subject. One of the subjects." The only pure, institutionally untainted character in The Wire is Omar, an openly gay, and selectively but astonishingly violent stick-up artist. Armed with a 12-gauge shotgun, he earns his money by blowing the balls off dealers and stealing their stash and cash. At one point he is seen wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the words "I am the American Dream."
"African American drug crews can be pretty homophobic," explains Burns, "so Omar could never really have belonged to any of those crews. He's out on his own."
"It's funny," says David Simon, "When we initially created that character people would come up to us on the street and say 'I like Omar, but why does he have to be gay?' Now everyone likes him, it's like his sexuality has become peripheral, which is very gratifying." With the likes of Omar, Bell and Barksdale, Burns and Simon have pulled off a trick few would dare attempt and even fewer could pull off with such lyrical aplomb. They have created characters that are at once loathsome and utterly fascinating. To then get us to empathise with these men is extraordinary. Equally, the cops - caught between the dealers and the vicissitudes of City Hall - are, even at their most honest and likable, grippingly dysfunctional. "
For this, and much more besides, The Wire is the most critically acclaimed TV programme in the history of the medium. The characters haunt you long, long after you have watched it. In season four Burns and Simon explore Baltimore's hopeless education system. The main protagonists are no longer the cops and dealers who inhabited the first three seasons, but rather the children trapped between impecunious schools and Baltimore's lucrative drug culture. "IF ANIMAL TRAPPED CALL 410 396-6286." People do occasionally call, of course. Trapped and starving dogs tend to annoy those few remaining neighbours who are either too poor, too stupid, too stubborn or too brave to move. They even annoy the child street dealers who sometimes entertain themselves by shooting the animals dead. But people don't call for the kids. The kids, it seems, are just one animal too much. *
· Series three of The Wire is out now on DVD. Series four starts on Tue, 10pm, FX
The Wire has more than 60 characters. Meet some of the main players ...
The street
Marlo Stanfield (Jamie Hector): Marlo is the new generation. He employs kids who are happy to use nail guns to get their point across and initiates a bloody and pointless war against the Barksdale/ Bell crew. As his opponent, Slim Charles, remarks: "If we fight on a lie, we fight on a lie."
Avon Barksdale (Wood Harris): Avon is the very volatile leader of the west Baltimore drugs crew. "I'm just a gangsta, I suppose."
Omar Little (Michael K Williams): Notoriously violent stick-up artist who manages to make enemies of everyone. The Wire's most feared and loved character. "It's all in the game."
Bubbles (Andre Royo): Inveterate thief, police informant and junkie, and thus perhaps the closest thing you get to a nice guy in The Wire.
Malik 'Poot' Carr (Tray Chaney): Poot is another low-level teenage dealer. Affable and sex-obsessed, Poot is also a highly effective killer. Bodie disapproves of his sexual promiscuity. "Your dick gonna look like a fried chicken wing."
Russell 'Stringer' Bell (Idris Elba): Stringer, Barksdale's partner, is also an economics student. String wants to legitimise the business. This invariably causes problems with Avon. "Nigga gone crazy."
Preston 'Bodie' Broadus (JD Williams): A teenage drug enforcer. There is no more enthusiastic advocate of corner life than Bodie. "Why the [censored] would anyone wanna leave Baltimore," he asks with genuine bewilderment.
The law
Detective William 'Bunk' Moreland (Wendell Pierce): Perhaps the only black man in Baltimore who knows Pogues songs off by heart. Bunk, in addition to being a calamitous drunk, is also "good police".
Detective Jimmy McMulty (Dominic West): Jimmy is the "insubordinate [censored]" who brings the whole Barksdale /Bell mess to the attention of his ungrateful superiors. As Bunk says to him: "You're not just any kind of [censored] - you're a special kind of [censored]."
Detective Jimmy Shakima 'Kima' Greggs (Sonja Sohn): Courageous black lesbian cop who also happens to be brilliant at meting out beatings to the local drug dealers. Often surprised by Jimmy McNulty: "Did you just call your wife a [censored]?"