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The Wire Final Season

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from: Jeffrey Goldberg
to: David Plotz

Week 5: What, If Anything, Will Be Templeton's Undoing?

Posted Monday, Feb. 4, 2008, at 5:11 PM ET

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

Dear David,

Excellent point. And very liberal. It is true most young black men in the inner city do not sling drugs, even when the opportunity avails itself, and even when the economic rationale for doing so is overwhelming. There is, as you point out, a whole other world of bleakness, of black men who stay out of the drug trade but find themselves in dead-end jobs at Popeyes and Foot Locker. But here's another point: Many black men, even some who were raised in conditions of West Baltimore poverty and taught by indifferent teachers in crappy schools, wind up not merely managing a Popeyes but managing mutual funds at T. Rowe Price on the Inner Harbor or practicing medicine at Johns Hopkins. The Wire is meant to dramatize the inner city, and we can't fault it for its tight focus, but some things are left out. Taken in isolation, The Wire suggests that life in black America is unrelievedly grim. For many people, it is, but for many others, it simply isn't.

Alert reader and Slate contributor Emily Yoffe writes to correct my too-short list of serial fabricators; she suggests USA Today's Jack Kelley as a worthy addition. She also corrects my earlier assertion that no fabricator had ever interfered in an ongoing criminal investigation. Emily writes, "Jayson Blair came down to DC in the middle of the sniper shootings and started making stuff up about the investigation. ... The prosecutors ended up having a press conference to denounce one Blair story as a total lie, but because they refused to say what was actually going on inside their office, the Times, for a time, took it as confirmation of Blair's superpowers."

I want to thank Emily for correcting my mistakes so promptly (does she do that to you, too?). She also makes an interesting point about what could be Templeton's undoing: "Don't you think that Templeton laid his own trap when he used the name of a random homeless guy as the terrified homeless father of four?" Yes, using the name of an actual live person for a fictional character did seem dumb. On the other hand, do we really think that Templeton will get caught? Hasn't David Simon made it abundantly clear that evil has triumphed at the Baltimore Sun? Templeton will probably end up winning the Pulitzer.

By the way, David, I've noticed very little commentary from you of late on the Sun subplot. Do you secretly love it and not want to share that fact with me?

Jeff

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from: Jeffrey Goldberg
to: David Plotz

Week 5: What, If Anything, Will Be Templeton's Undoing?

Posted Monday, Feb. 4, 2008, at 5:11 PM ET

DISCUSS

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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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