Jeffrey Goldberg and David Plotz were online on March 6 to chat about The Wire. Read the transcript.
Remember that time you had an awesome college girlfriend and you hadn't seen her all summer and it was finally the first day back on campus? That's approximately how I feel about the return of The Wire for its fifth and final season.
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StumbleUponAs Slate Editor Jacob Weisberg observed a year ago, The Wire is not merely the best show on television now, but the best show that has ever been on television. And Season 4, which focused on the catastrophic lives of four Baltimore schoolboys, was The Wire's best season. So, Season 5 has a practically impossible task: It's following the best season ever of the best show ever—how could it not be a letdown? (Compare this to The Sopranos, The Wire's rival for show of the century. The Sopranos limped into its final run, coming off two bad years. Its last episodes—which really were incredible—seemed even better because they followed dud seasons. The Wire has no such luck.)
Here's a good sign: Season 5 begins with a tight close-up on the face of homicide detective Bunk Moreland, who's in the process of conning a particularly dim murder suspect into confessing, in part by rigging up a Xerox machine as a "lie detector." Bunk, the profane teddy bear, is one of my favorite Wire regulars (though that list is so long it's hardly worth keeping anymore: Bunk, Omar, Clay Davis, Stringer Bell, Prop Joe, Herc, Snoop, Namond, Dukie, Norman, Cutty …). Now that I think of it, Jeff, if you were a Wire character, you'd be Bunk—funny, ironic, lovable, and brilliant. Anyway, if this season is going to give us plenty of Bunk, it's going to be all right with me.
That said, I found the opening episode promising but a little too busy. It threw a huge number of balls in the air, almost too many to follow: a brewing battle between Marlo and Prop Joe; the collapse of the police department, McNulty's return to alcoholism, womanizing, and the homicide squad; Bubbles' sorry attempt at rehab; a shady real estate deal rigged by the city-council president; the investigation of Clay Davis; Carcetti's descent into pure political opportunism; Herc's new dirty tricks; Dukie's failure as a drug dealer. … And I am skipping a bunch, notably the Baltimore Sun, which is going to be a central character in Season 5 the way the schools were in Season 4 and the docks were in Season 2.
I'm a little worried about the Baltimore Sun plot. I've had two brief conversations with David Simon—he's a friend of a friend—and my wife has had two long ones. In all four of those exchanges, Simon demonstrated an obsession with the Sun that bordered on monomania. There Hanna and I were, slobbering to him about Omar, and Simon kept changing the subject to stories that his editors had screwed up 19 years ago. I'm praying that his fury at the Sun won't overwhelm his genius for storytelling. The signs in Episode 1 are good: The Sun characters—most notably city editor Gus Haynes—are vivid and humane, and there's only one heavy-handed scene (the one where the Sun's blowhard editor squashes a story idea). And it gets the newspaper uniform—the cheap looking ties and dingy striped dress shirts—exactly right.
Finally, let me pay homage to the miracle of Snoop: She utters only one sentence, and it's the best line in the episode. She's explaining to a reluctant partner of Marlo how she'll retaliate if he doesn't cooperate: "We will be brief with all you mother-----rs—I think you know."
Best,
David
on the Fray
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Remarks from the Fray:
I hope Goldberg and Plotz move on to discussing the idea that the press is complicit in allowing the inner-city (especially black inner-city) to decay by not paying attention to the problems that caused its sharp decline. Maybe newsroom characters feel cliched, but shouldn't we discuss how they enter into the "War on Drugs"?
--tsell89
(To reply, click here.)
So far as we've seen most of the newspapermen are indeed stock characters, but that's nothing to worry about. Except for a few leads each season, very few characters have conflicting motives. Think Clay Davis, Mayor Royce, Herc, Horse, Burrell, Rawles, Weebay, Chris Partlow, Snoop, the school administrators, even Marlo.
The strength of the show isn't in the complexity of the characters; it's in the multi-layered coherent vision, the way these somewhat two-dimensional characters all affect one another. Granted, that's a formula for pedagogy, but what saves the show (and not only saves it but really does make it the best show ever) is the one thing that fools everyone into thinking that Snoop, with her paucity of lines and sole motivation of kill-everyone-Marlo-tells-me-to, is a great character -- namely, style.
All the characters have great style, great lines. It's what makes the show fun as well as edifying. And from what I can tell, the newspapermen are going to have as much style as anyone. "Stay hungry. Good things come... when they come." C'mon.
--jamessal
(To reply, click here.)
I don't doubt that the busyness of the first episode had a lot to do with the retards at HBO deciding to cut the Wire from 13 episodes to 10 for its final season but I know Simon will make it work in spite of his bosses stupidity.
As far as Jeffrey's weak defense of the Sopranos, give it up man. The show lost its way after 3 seasons, so the claim that the Sopranos was on longer is not much of an excuse. Of course it is probably true that the Sopranos was a victim of its own massive popularity, while the Wire has been able to stay on course precisely because nobody was watching. Maybe if David Simon had gotten all the money and all the ball licking from critics that David Chase received he would have turned into a hack writer as well.
--sir biff
(To reply, click here.)
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