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The Wire Final Season

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from: Jeffrey Goldberg
to: David Plotz

Week 3: Does the Baltimore Sun Not Have a Web Site?

Posted Monday, Jan. 21, 2008, at 10:35 AM ET

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

Dear David,

Since you won't take on the newspaper subplot, let me.

But before I do, let me attach myself to your comments re: the terrible difficulty of leaving the familiar. There is one other Sopranos analogy here, in this case, having to do with Adriana's disappearance. You'll recall a meeting at the offices of the FBI, when one of the agents suggests that Adriana might have not, in fact, been murdered but had instead taken off to China. This suggestion was met by looks of absolute incredulity from her colleagues. It was an absurd notion, the idea that Adriana had the will, knowledge, and wherewithal to escape North Jersey. I thought of this scene while watching Marlo at the bank. Here is the lion out of his den and, without any defenses, just a shmuck who can't speak French (which is also an apt description of me). It's a useful reminder of the completely circumscribed lives these characters lead, though I do prefer to take my Marlo straight up and affectless—I like my gangsters cold. What next? Scenes of Snoop playing with her American Girl collection?

Unlike you (presumably, since your tight-lippedness on the matter of the Baltimore Sun has me guessing just a bit), I found the newsroom scene moving, perhaps because I had just read about the latest coup at the formerly great L.A. Times; the "fellows" from Chicago—as David Simon calls them in his latest elegy to the lost world of the Sun papers—have taken to murdering their own now, firing a corporate-shill editor who wouldn't shill enough, apparently refusing to carry out more newsroom head-chopping during the labor-intensive presidential campaign.

That scene in the newsroom was near perfect because it had the power of truth, right down to the moment when the patrician executive editor, Whiting, forces his sweaty, ferretish managing editor, Klebanow (sounds like …), to deliver the actual bad news. How can your heart not break for 40- and 50-year-old reporters, with no discernible skills other than the ability to work the phones, who are cast adrift by a newspaper company that still makes barrels of money?

The problem, of course, is that these realistic scenes of newsroom life circa 2008 are undermined by deeply unrealistic scenes of newsroom life circa never. In other words, why does Roger Twigg, the discarded police reporter, have to be so encyclopedically perfect? Why does Scott, the unpleasant upstart, have to be so ostentatiously Glass-ian (or Blair-ian)? And why is there no reference whatsoever to the newspaper's Web site? Simon makes it clear in his Washington Post Outlook piece that he neither knows very much nor cares very much about the Web, but doesn't reality demand that we see the newsroom of the Sun feeding the beast? All this talk of finals and double dots is so archaic. Are you telling me that the cub reporter, Alma Gutierrez, would run all over the city looking for an early edition of the paper before checking to see how her story was played on the Web? I just looked—the Baltimore Sun actually does have a Web site.

All this raises a larger question: Just how good was the Sun in David Simon's day? Was the golden age really so golden? I'm not equipped to answer this question. Perhaps there's someone out there who can.

Best,
Jeff

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from: Jeffrey Goldberg
to: David Plotz

Week 3: Does the Baltimore Sun Not Have a Web Site?

Posted Monday, Jan. 21, 2008, at 10:35 AM ET
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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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