Campaign 2008

More
recycled
columns

Letters to the Summer Tenants
The lament of a self-martyred landlord.
Jodie T. Allen
posted July 22, 2008
You Are How You Camped
What your enjoyment of sleep-away camp, or lack of same, says about your character.
Timothy Noah
posted July 14, 2008
God's Venture Capitalist
The strange quest of Sir John Templeton.
David Plotz
posted July 8, 2008
Death by Cheese and the Dreaded Ruptured Stomach
The past and future of competitive eating injuries.
Jason Fagone
posted July 3, 2008
How To Plan a Fireworks Show
Those big fireworks displays don't choreograph themselves.
Daniel Engber
posted July 2, 2008
Search for more recycled articles
Subscribe to the recycled RSS feed
View our complete recycled archive

recycled: Previously published Slate articles made new.

The Wire on FireAnalyzing the best show on television.

By Jacob Weisberg
Posted Friday, Jan. 4, 2008, at 6:39 PM ET

The first episode of the final season of HBO's critically acclaimed police drama The Wire airs this Sunday night. In a 2006 interview, Meghan O'Rourke asked creator and writer David Simon about the show's social politics and its future direction. Last season, Slate Editor Jacob Weisberg called it "the best show ever broadcast in America." Weisberg's original analysis is reprinted below.

The Wire, which has just begun its fourth season on HBO, is surely the best TV show ever broadcast in America. This claim isn't based on my having seen all the possible rivals for the title, but on the premise that no other program has ever done anything remotely like what this one does, namely to portray the social, political, and economic life of an American city with the scope, observational precision, and moral vision of great literature.

During its first year, it was possible to mistake The Wire for merely an unusually shrewd and vivid police drama. But the program has gotten richer and more ambitious with each season and now fits only into a category it defines by itself: the urban procedural. Its protagonist is the broken American city of Baltimore, depicted with obsessive verisimilitude and affectionate rage. Its fundamental concern is the isolation and degradation of the black underclass, a subject that has, with the exception of a blip after Hurricane Katrina, disappeared from the political radar screen. If the national conscience is ready for another sleepless night about the waste of lives in the ghetto, I expect that The Wire will be what keeps us awake.

It's a mark of the program's artistic courage that while drug dealing, murder, and detective work remain its bread and butter, it dares to focus Season 4 on an urban environment not ordinarily associated with prime time: an all-black middle school in West Baltimore. The show's creator, producer, and chief writer, David Simon, has had the self-assuredness to drop the Hollywood convention of the white hero. This season, Officer McNulty, the charming rascal cop played by Dominic West, is sent to the sidelines, relegated to patrol work by his repeated defiance of mindless bureaucracy. In McNulty's place at the center of the drama are the compelling characters of four adolescent African-American boys, played by little-known actors so preternaturally talented they don't seem to be acting at all.

Watching the show this season feels less like observing these four children navigate their cruel world than it does like adopting them in hour-long sessions. The story begins with the boys entering eighth grade. At 12 and 13, these kids still have a chance to escape the streets. The central drama is whether "the game" of drug dealing will exert its gravitational pull on them or whether they will somehow beat the odds pointing them toward jail and violent death. The vain, troublemaking Namond, played by Julito McCullum, has a mother who wants him to follow in the footsteps of his drug-dealing father, imprisoned for multiple murders. The sweet, enterprising Randy, played by Maestro Harrell, lives with a caring foster mother who cannot protect him from the cruelties of the drug dealers or the child welfare system. Tough, mature Michael, played by Tristan Wilds, enmeshes himself with killers in order to protect his younger brother from his addicted mother's abusive boyfriend. The most affecting of all, Dukie, played by Jermaine Crawford, comes to school hungry and dirty and lives in a home so broken we are mostly left to imagine what goes on inside. Having previewed all 13 episodes, I won't give away what happens to them, except to say that as usual, the program reverses your expectations while breaking your heart.

Several critics have commented on The Wire's "literary" quality. In particular, The Wire has echoes of the Victorian social panorama of Charles Dickens (who gets a mention this season, as an obscene anatomical reference). The drama repeatedly cuts from the top of Baltimore's social structure to its bottom, from political fund-raisers in the white suburbs to the subterranean squat of a homeless junkie. As with Dickens, the excitement builds as the densely woven plot unfolds in addicting installments. The deeper connection to Dickens' London is the program's animating fury at the way a society robs children of their childhood. In our civilized age, we do not send 12-year-olds to work in blacking factories as the Victorians did. Today's David Copperfield is instead warehoused at a dysfunctional school until he's ready to sling drugs on the corner, where his odds of survival are even slimmer.