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The Wire Final Season

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from: Jeffrey Goldberg
to: David Plotz

Week 4: Cheese Must Die!

Posted Monday, Jan. 28, 2008, at 10:29 AM ET

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

Dear David,

Cheese must die! I feel very strongly about this, which is why I placed an exclamation point at the end of the previous sentence. Also, Marlo and Chris, but to repair a tear in the moral universe, Cheese must die, not only for betraying his uncle, Proposition Joe Stewart, but for participating in what we assume was the torture-murder of the man who invented the Swanson Hungry Man TV dinner. You know, it's a damn shame that Method Man, a stalwart of the remarkable Wu-Tang Clan, was cast as the most unspeakable bastard on The Wire. I'll never listen to Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) the same way. Not that I've listened to it in 10 years, but you get the point. What next? The RZA as a stoolie? (For the moment, he has my old job at The New Yorker.)

Sorry, back to the coldest execution scene this side of Abe Vigoda. Actually, colder, because, really, did you care that much about Tessio? Clemenza, yes, of course, but Tessio? I liked Abe Vigoda (still alive! www.abevigoda.com) better in Fish, anyway.

That was an extraordinarily powerful scene, the martyrdom of Prop Joe. "Close your eyes. It won't hurt none," Marlo said, and my blood froze. It's true that Tom Hagen's "Can't do it, Sally" marked one of the most unforgettable moments in The Godfather, but Marlo seemed to actually embody the Angel of Death. Prop Joe's murder also has a metaphorical power missing from Tessio's demise. What we just saw, I think, was a David Simon op-ed on the miseries of capitalism. The rising young executive learns what he can from his elders and then kills them. In corporate America, the murder victim is left alive, as opposed to what happens in the New Day Co-Op (there's an organization that just ceased to exist—I'll bet my lungs on that), but except for that technical issue, it's the same thing.

I think we can spend all day unpacking the meaning of Prop Joe's execution, but let me make one larger point: What we saw in the undoing of Prop Joe was The Wire at its best. What we saw in the Baltimore Sun subplot this time around was The Wire at its worst. Prop Joe and Slim Charles and all the rest are complicated people; it's too bad David Simon couldn't make the newsroom similarly complicated. The editors of the Sun aren't characters; they're walking indictments. The low moment came when Klebanow warned Gus against cursing in the newsroom. Ridiculous. I'm not saying that once or twice between John Peter Zenger and now, some shmuck in some newsroom somewhere warned a colleague about the use of foul language. But for fuck's sake, that was the most unbelievable thing I've seen in The Wire's five seasons.

Jeff

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from: Jeffrey Goldberg
to: David Plotz

Week 4: Cheese Must Die!

Posted Monday, Jan. 28, 2008, at 10:29 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

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