"This America, Man"

Listen carefully

As The Sopranos blinked out to the strains of Journey's "Don't Stop Believin'" back in June, there were no shortage of critical hosannas for the show: typical was David Remnick's assertion in the The New Yorker that it was "the richest achievement in the history of television." This immediate rush to lionize David Chase's family (capital and lower-case 'F') saga as the television medium's zenith is understandable. After all, The Sopranos fits neatly into the continuum of great American masterpieces like The Great Gatsby, Death of a Salesman, or (perhaps unsurprisingly) The Godfather - all stories about the compromises and failures of individuals in pursuit of that illusory ideal, the American Dream. Tony Soprano's tale resonated with audiences because, at its heart, the show was about grappling with the existential pressures of family life in modern day America. Tony's in therapy; Tony has a domineering mother; Tony has money problems; Tony has marital problems; Tony has to put his daughter through college; Tony has to navigate the egos in his workplace. The series' often fantastical Mafia setting serves to raise the dramatic stakes of these otherwise quotidian dilemmas, yet they remain essentially recognizable and eminently relatable.

"The richest achievement in the history of television" though, it is not. That distinction belongs to a far less feted HBO drama: The Wire.

That The Wire is brilliant television is, by this writing, a third or fourth-hand observation: if you haven't heard that by now than you are reading the wrong papers. On its face, the series is primarily concerned with the Baltimore drug trade and how it shapes the communities and institutions it interacts with, and vice versa. With each season The Wire's universe expands outwards: season one established the rules of "the game" through the eyes of the drug crews and the cops working them; season two chronicled the decline of Baltimore's port and the unions reliant upon its trade; season three expanded to the politicians and the problems of governing a decaying city; season four tackled the public school system. Yet, though the show's focus may shift with each season, the bigger picture, as it were, always remains in view, a city in miniature.

That "bigger picture" - that which makes The Wire unique in the annals of American television - is the failure of the entire system. It is certainly among the first major works of art to convincingly define "the system" as something other than an abstract impediment to progress. The Wire's conception of "the system" is instead built around the tensions that develop between institutions that often have competing prerogatives, and the effect that those gravitational forces have in shaping those institutions and the individuals subject to them. The net result is a portrait of a post-industrial metropolis that is both absurdly dysfunctional and yet staggeringly realistic; according to series creator David Simon, a former crime reporter with the Baltimore Sun, this is precisely the intended effect:

“ ‘The Wire’ is dissent,” he says. “It is perhaps the only storytelling on television that overtly suggests that our political and economic and social constructs are no longer viable, that our leadership has failed us relentlessly, and that no, we are not going to be all right.”

I could spend far more time waxing about what makes The Wire superb: its rigorous authenticity, rich dialogue, intricately interwoven story lines, the brilliant actors (many of them non-professionals draw straight from the series' milieu), etc. However, all of this is done to far greater effect in the current issue of The New Yorker, wherein Margret Talbot profiles David Simon, a former crime reporter for the Baltimore Sun who first broke into television when his book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets was adapted into a series for NBC. The most fascinating tidbit that I will let drop here is that The Wire's fifth and final season, which wrapped shooting in August and is set to premier in January, is focused on the newsroom of the Baltimore Sun (the actual Sun permitted Simon to use the paper's name, provided no current staff appear on the show). According to Simon, the final season

will be about “perception versus reality”—in particular, what kind of reality newspapers can capture and what they can’t. Newspapers across the country are shrinking, laying off beat reporters who understood their turf. More important, Simon believes, newspapers are fundamentally not equipped to convey certain kinds of complex truths. Instead, they focus on scandals—stories that have a clean moral. “It’s like, Find the eight-hundred-dollar toilet seat, find the contractor who’s double-billing,” Simon said at one point. “That’s their bread and butter. Systemic societal failure that has multiple problems—newspapers are not designed to understand it.”

One final observation: If The Wire is about how economic, political, and social stresses can combine to break society down, then another HBO series, Deadwood, concerned itself with how those same factors are core ingredients for erecting a civilization. In fact, Deadwood, which was canceled after three magnificent seasons ("Some will win, some will lose," as Steve Perry would sing it), is kind of like The Wire in reverse. When the series began, the mining camp of Deadwood was a place literally beyond the law, called into being by the promise of quick riches, and held together by criminal strongmen - a place not altogether unlike The Wire's inner city ghetto. Yet where Baltimore's drug corners are a terminus, Deadwood is quickly built up from a temporary hovel into a bustling permanent settlement after a major gold deposit is discovered. In essence, Deadwood is a foundation myth, dedicated to exploring the unique manner in which brutality and greed can call forth order as well as sow chaos. Even as gold magnate George Hearst descends on the camp, threatening to erase it from the map as he consolidates his control of its mineral resources, the net effect is even more civilizing: the camp's denizens, once disordered and arrayed against one another in an anarchic realm, realize the only way to resist obliteration and protect their interests is to form an even tighter societal bond.

Deadwood is about forming connections; The Wire is about collapse. Both are uniquely American stories. As Boethius' said in The Consolation of Philosophy:

It's my belief that history is a wheel. 'Inconstancy is my very essence,' says the wheel. Rise up on my spokes if you like, but don't complain when you're cast back down into the depths. Good time pass away, but then so do the bad. Mutability is our tragedy, but it's also our hope. The worst of time, like the best, are always passing away.

Another way of putting it is the oft-cited first scene in The Wire's pilot episode, an exchange at a murder scene between Detective Jimmy McNulty and a friend of the deceased. The victim, memorably named Snot Boogie, liked to participate in neighborhood dice games, but would always try and steal the pot money before the game ended.

McNulty: I got to ask you, if every time Snot Boogie would grab the money and run away, why did you even let him in the game?
Friend: What?
McNulty: If Snot Boogie always stole the money why did you let him play?
Friend: Got to, this America, man.