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The Wire on FireAnalyzing the best show on television.

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

(Continued from page 1)

The other major theme this season is politics. A white candidate for mayor (Tommy Carcetti, played by Aiden Gillen) cynically tries to win the election by encouraging an African-American colleague on the City Council to run and split the black vote. But the ambitious Carcetti is also an idealist frustrated by the waste of lives all around him. This plot line, along with another about the venal police brass trying to manipulate crime statistics, captures the realities of government and the compound motives of politicians in a telling and subtle way. This year, The Wire's political science is as brilliant as its sociology. It leaves The West Wing, and everything else television has tried to do on this subject, in the dust.

Before this season, The Wire won much love from critics but not much in the way of ratings. That may be less because the program leaves viewers drained and disturbed at the end of an episode than because of how hard it is to catch on to at first, thanks to the complexity of its multiple storylines and the number of characters. There is also the challenge of following the localized black dialect that the program tries to represent as faithfully as it does its other details. In the Baltimore ghetto, yo is both a salutation and the third-person singular pronoun; "feel me," means "listen to what I'm telling you"; and the ubiquitous use of bitch has mostly replaced the N-word. The cops have their own language as well, in which a capable officer is "good police," bystanders caught in the crossfire are "taxpayers," and young boys up to no good are called "hoppers." The dialogue becomes easy enough to follow after a couple of episodes, but first-time viewers should switch on the closed-captioning feature for the first hour or two so as not to miss anything.

While The Wire feels startlingly lifelike, it is not in fact a naturalistic depiction of ghetto life. That kind of realism better describes an earlier miniseries of Simon's, The Corner, which was based on the book of the same title that he and Ed Burns wrote, set in the same Baltimore ghetto. The six-part HBO version of The Corner is nearly unwatchable, because—however true to life—the extended depiction of shrieking crack whores and broken-down junkies 10 cents short of the price of a "loosie" is too much to take. But for Simon, The Corner seems to have been a crucial life study for The Wire, a program that attains the dimensions of tragedy without being depressing.

The Wire does this by painting with brighter colors on a wider canvas and by leavening its pain with humor. The brilliant writing and bravura cast also make viewers root for dozens of rich characters, including several completely despicable ones. Everyone's favorite survivors from earlier seasons are two truly Shakespearean figures who get a lot of play this year: the vagabond snitch Bubbles played by Andre Royo, and Omar, the gay stickup artist played by Michael K. Williams, a cold-blooded killer whose personal code involves not serving any masters other than himself and never cursing.

What ultimately makes The Wire uplifting amid the heartbreak it conveys is its embodiment of a spirit that Barack Obama calls "the audacity of hope." It is filled with characters who should quit but don't, not only the boys themselves but teachers, cops, ex-cops, and ex-cons who lose their hearts to them. This refusal to give up in the face of defeat is the reality of ghetto life as well. Feel me: It's what The Wire is all about.

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Jacob Weisberg is editor-in-chief of the Slate Group and author of The Bush Tragedy.
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