HBO’s The Wire: A Novel For TV

HBO’s The Wire has a nice fea­tured arti­cle in the New Yorker.  Sea­son five has fin­ished wrap­ping and the show is set to pre­mière Jan­u­ary 2008. I love this show and think it is the best TV series on tele­vi­sion today. As David Simon has described it: it’s a novel for TV. I own the first three sea­sons and have watched them repeat­edly. Like any good novel, you pick up details or nuances that you might have missed the first time. Despite how good this show is, The Wire has had a hard time main­tain­ing an audi­ence and you have to ask your­self why that is. One of the most com­mon com­plaints you hear is that view­ers can’t seem to fol­low it. When I started watch­ing the first  episode from the first sea­son, I was hooked. Unfortunately, each sea­son does not stand alone well. Like a novel, you must have prior knowl­edge of the pre­vi­ous sea­son to fol­low the series. Another com­mon com­plaint is that many view­ers don’t under­stand the street jar­gon or can’t iden­tify with the characters. A valid com­plaint regard­ing the street jar­gon but my TV has sub­ti­tles and I con­fess to not under­stand­ing a lit­tle of the dia­logue between a cou­ple of char­ac­ters myself.  What I love about the show is that it is unflinch­ing in the real­ity of police cor­rup­tion  pol­i­tics (must be think­ing of The Shield as that show is full of police corruption) and the drug trade in the urban black com­mu­nity.  The show shares the per­spec­tive of life on the street from the view of the crim­i­nals and the law.

The show is char­ac­ter dri­ven and cen­ters around homi­cide detec­tive Jimmy McNulty, whose neme­sis on the street is Stringer Bell.  An col­lege edu­cated black man who grew up on the street, Stringer Bell runs the drug trade like a busi­ness. Stringer Bell’s char­ac­ter destroys the myth or stereo­type of your typ­i­cal drug dealer. And the writ­ing on show? Awe­some. David Simon and his crew are metic­u­lous in the research and mak­ing sure that they get it right. The writ­ers on the show are just as diverse as its cast mem­bers. Crime nov­el­ists Den­nis Lehane and George Pele­canos both write for The Wire. You just don’t get this type of qual­ity show everyday.

With all this great­ness, The Wire has never won an Emmy nor has David Simon ever been acknowl­edged as the genius that he is for cre­at­ing a show that is dif­fi­cult to com­pare to any other cop show on television. I’m grate­ful to HBO for keep­ing this show on the air despite the fact that it didn’t have the audi­ence to war­rant even a sec­ond sea­son. I look for­ward to the fifth  and final sea­son of The Wire with great antic­i­pa­tion and joy for what I know will be a kick ass final sea­son. As with every­thing, all good things must come to an end.

I started this topic only to point out the New Yorker arti­cle and just couldn’t help gush­ing about this show.  So for that, I do apol­o­gize. I hope many of you read the arti­cle and head over to your favorite video store to rent the first sea­son and let me know if you enjoyed it as much as I do. Peace.

Tech­no­rati Tags: HBO, The Wire, David Simon, TV show, Cops