tv club: Talking television.

The Wire Final Season

tv club
entries

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67

from: David Plotz
to: Jeffrey Goldberg

Week 5: An Obit for Hungry Man

Posted Monday, Feb. 4, 2008, at 3:30 PM ET

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

Dear Jeff,

That's disappointing about Marlo's phone. I was hoping they would use the number for opportunistic Wire marketing, selling ringtones from Anwan "Slim Charles" Glover's Backyard Band and vintage copies of the Baltimore Sun, from back when David Simon was still working there.

Gus and Alma's exchange about Joseph Stewart was wonderful. In fact, it may have been even better than either of us noticed. Reader Joshua Levine writes in an e-mail that "one of the other four (?) names [Alma] cited was 'Hungerford,' who she said was found in some building off an alleyway (or something like that). That had to be Hungry Man, so Alma et al. were missing out on more than just who Prop Joe was." (Levine isn't certain about the exact line, and I don't have my DVD at the office to check the quote, so I hope some reader will write in with the correct dialogue.)

This is a random train of thought: Over the past five seasons, The Wire has shown us schools, drug dealers, politicians, unions, cops, and a newspaper. But it occurs to me, as we near its finish, that it has never really shown us young black men at work. It has brilliantly captured the no-choice lives of the young street dealers and the way in which the smartest and most ruthless of them make a career from drugs. But The Wire has never presented the alternative path. Many young black men in Baltimore (or Washington, or Chicago, or wherever) end up in crime, for lack of education, skills, and opportunity. But most of them don't. The unemployment rate for teenage black males—The Wire demographic—is an appallingly high 40 percent, but that still means 60 percent of them are employed. Among the poorest black teenagers, some join the Army, some work fast food or retail, some learn trades, some go on to college and professional careers. (And a few make it as cops: Bunk and Bunny Colvin were ghetto kids who worked their way out through the department.) Ignoring the working world of black men means The Wire shorts a key and tragic point about American life. The lives of the dealers are grim, but the lives of the working poor may be sadder still. There's little glamour serving chicken on the 4 p.m. to midnight shift at Popeyes, and it's hard (though perhaps not impossible) to make a career selling sneakers at Foot Locker. The world shuts out the young men who choose to go straight, just as it shuts out those who choose to sling heroin. Only once has The Wire watched a black man try to enter the noncriminal job market: In Season 3, Cutty finds under-the-table work as a landscaper; in Season 4, he briefly dabbles in the growth industry of truancy enforcement. I wish The Wire had given us a few more young men trying to make it outside of crime, and let us see the bleakness of their world, too.

David

tv club
entries

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67

from: David Plotz
to: Jeffrey Goldberg

Week 5: An Obit for Hungry Man

Posted Monday, Feb. 4, 2008, at 3:30 PM 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.

Join the Fray: our reader discussion forum

What did you think of this article?

POST A MESSAGE | READ MESSAGES

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.)

(1/7)

also in slate