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The Wire Final Season

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from: David Plotz
to: Jeffrey Goldberg

Week 4: Marlo Isn't the Bagels-in-the-Boardroom Type

Posted Monday, Jan. 28, 2008, at 2:40 PM ET

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

Dear Jeff,

Sure enough, within five minutes of my last entry going live, I received e-mails from two reporters who've been chastised for their excessive profanity. One of them, York Daily Record columnist Mike Argento, writes, "An editor pulled me into a conference room and gave me a little lecture about swearing in the newsroom, that one of the editorial assistants, who was religious, complained mostly about taking the Lord's name in vain. Others also received the talk. Didn't do any fucking good."

Do I think Herc is going to help bring down Marlo? No chance. It's Marlo's cash that's keeping Herc in suits and bottled beer. And if there's anything we've learned about him in the past few seasons, it's that he's too stupid and amoral to do anything right.

You know what I'm going to miss most now that Prop Joe's dead? The co-op meetings. (I'm guessing that Marlo is not going to be a bagels-in-the-boardroom kind of drug lord.) Ever since Stringer Bell's funeral home assemblies back in Season 3, the drug dealer councils have been The Wire's funniest scenes, hilariously juxtaposing the aspiration for managerial order with the reality of criminal violence. Come to think of it, wasn't the best scene in The Untouchables the board meeting when Al Capone beats one of his lieutenants to death with a baseball bat? There's something inherently compelling about the combination of crime and bureaucracy (which is also why that Wannsee conference movie was so gripping, too). The choice line from the final co-op meeting comes from titty bar owner Fatface Rick, advising his fellow hoods to: "Buy you some property, hold on until the white people show up, and make a killing."

We're clearly not watching The Wire as carefully as our readers. Several wrote me to point out that the goateed guy boozing in the homeless encampment was Johnny "Fifty," Ziggy's friend from Season 2, who helped "misplace" cargo on the docks. He must have lost his union card after the cops busted Sobotka's fraud operation.

David

tv club
entries
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from: David Plotz
to: Jeffrey Goldberg

Week 4: Marlo Isn't the Bagels-in-the-Boardroom Type

Posted Monday, Jan. 28, 2008, at 2:40 PM 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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