TV Club

Week 4: Is My Intuition Growing Stronger, or Is The Wire Just Getting More Obvious?

Dear David,

Yes, that glee-club line was great. You remind me of something—it was immediately clear to me that Marlo and Herc were put in the same room, Levy’s waiting room (speaking of Levy, where’s Abe Foxman when you need him?), for a reason. Don’t you think Herc is going to use his proximity to Levy to try to bring down Marlo? Is my superpower of intuition growing even greater, or is The Wire just becoming more obvious? Prop Joe’s demise, in retrospect, was foreshadowed a million different ways. His murder was still a powerful and elegiac moment, but we were clearly meant to see it coming.

Interesting point about Burrell, though I’m not sure the analogy sustains itself. Unlike the heroin distributor Prop Joe, Chief Burrell deserved his fate. And Cedric Daniels is not the bureaucratic equivalent of Marlo Stanfield. Still, you make a compelling point about heartlessness. The world of The Wire often reminds me of a keen observation of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who once wrote, in lamenting the moral condition of modern man, “Living in fear he thinks that the ambush is the normal dwelling place of all men.” Welcome to David Simon’s Baltimore.

That said, I thought last night’s tour of the homeless demimonde was a bit ripe. And McNulty’s shenanigans are becoming more and more unbelievable. It’s only a matter of time before the scheming reporter Templeton and the wackadoo McNulty marry their ambitions, don’t you think?  

Jeff