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The Wire Final Season

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from: David Plotz
to: Jeffrey Goldberg

Week 2: Too Much Moralizing, Not Enough Omar

Posted Monday, Jan. 14, 2008, at 10:06 AM ET

Jeffrey Goldberg and David Plotz were online on March 6 to chat about The Wire. Read the transcript.

Dear Jeff,

At the risk of making this a Slate dialogue that is mostly about itself, let me just say a few more words about Simon's furious response to my post last week. And those words are: He was right. It was wrong for me to write about social conversations we had at a mutual friend's wedding and book party. He had every right to expect privacy when we talked and to be angry when I turned the conversations into journalistic fodder.

OK, back to the show. There was something off about the second episode, but I don't think it's the Sun subplot. The conniving ascent of the Cooke/Glass fabulist, egged on by the two evil editors, doesn't bother me the way it bothers you. I agree that it's obvious—I don't think the Sun editor needed both horns and a pitchfork—but it's not boring. In fact, my favorite part of the episode is the bull session in the Sun's loading dock. How could you not crack up at Gus' riff about the mother of four who died from an allergic reaction to blue crabs: "Ever notice how 'mother of four' is always catching hell? Murder. Hit and run. Burned up in row house fire. Swindled by bigamists." I'm giggling just typing it. "Swindled by bigamists"—give that writer an Emmy!

So, it's not the newsroom that's confounding me. No, I think the problem is that The Wire has gotten preachy. The show has always had a didactic streak, but a relatively subtle one. For all that Simon is seething with righteous anger, he never let that overwhelm the show. It was a backbeat. He let the story and the characters do the work, and didn't lay the lessons on thick. Like the great journalist that he is, he showed, he didn't tell. He and his colleagues understood that no "the game is rigged" speech could ever mean one-fiftieth as much as, say, the momentary shot of Dukie selling drugs at the end of Season 4.

But the first two episodes of this season repeatedly pause—stop dead—for heavy-handed moralizing. It didn't bother me in Episode 1—I figured they were just breaking us in—but now I'm getting worried. Just checking my notes from Episode 2, I see:

1. The hooker's overwrought speech about her addiction

2. Lester's majestic peroration about the importance of the Clay Davis case

3. Steve Earle's exhortation to Bubbs, urging him to stop bottling up his sorrow about Sherrod and live again

4. The face-off between Gus and the Sun's editor about their schools series—the editor pompous, Gus biting, both sermonizing

5. Michael's conscience-ridden argument with Chris and Snoop about killing a guy who may have insulted Marlo

6. Bunk, Lester, and Jimmy's chorus about the devaluation of black men's lives ("You can go a long way in this country killing black folk.")

In every one of these scenes, The Wire's characters are just a bit too grandiloquent, their dialogue a shade too portentous. Maybe because this is the final season, Simon and Ed Burns don't want to leave anything unsaid, but they're saying too much.

Two episodes and counting without Omar! On the upside, Avon Barksdale is back, and flashing that awesome West Baltimore "W" hand signal. We need one of those—a three-finger "S"—for Slate.

David

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from: David Plotz
to: Jeffrey Goldberg

Week 2: Too Much Moralizing, Not Enough Omar

Posted Monday, Jan. 14, 2008, at 10:06 AM ET

DISCUSS

E-MAIL

Emily Bazelon is a Slate senior editor. Andy Bowers is the editor of Slate V. Jeffrey Goldberg is a national correspondent for the Atlantic and the author of Prisoners: A Story of Friendship and Terror. Melinda Henneberger is a Slate contributor and the author of If They Only Listened to Us: What Women Voters Want Politicians To Hear. David Plotz is Slate's deputy editor. He is the author of The Genius Factory: The Curious History of the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank. You can e-mail him at . John Swansburg is a Slate associate editor. June Thomas is Slate's foreign editor. You can e-mail her at .

Entry 1: Photograph of Tristan Wilds by Paul Schiraldi © HBO. Entry 8: Photograph of Clark Johnson, Brandon Young, Michelle Paress, and Tom McCarthy by Paul Schiraldi © HBO. Entry 21: Photograph of Felicia "Snoop" Pearson, Jamie Hector, Method Man, and Robert F. Chew by Paul Schiraldi © HBO 2008. Entry 27: Photograph of Lance Reddick by Paul Schiraldi © 2008 HBO. Entry 42: Still of Wendell Pierce by Paul Schiraldi © 2008 HBO. Entry 52: Still of Tristan Wilds by Paul Schiraldi © 2008 HBO. Entry 57: Photograph of Sonja Sohn, Wendell Pierce, and Dominic West by Nicole Rivelli © 2008 HBO. Entry 61: Still of Lance Reddick by Paul Schiraldi © HBO 2008.

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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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