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The Wire Final Season

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from: Jeffrey Goldberg
to: David Plotz

Week 7: No Room for Robin Hood in Marlo's Baltimore

Posted Monday, Feb. 18, 2008, at 11:21 AM ET

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

Dear David,

Slow down there, Slim Plotz. You write as if you were watching Chinatown. Last night's episode had its moments—Clay Davis' moment most especially—but it also gave us more of McNulty's wearying, improbable scamming and more Baltimore Sun pedantry, of which this reporter is thoroughly sick.

And while I'm on a rampage, let me defend Omar's decision to shoot Savino in the head. Strike that, I won't defend Savino's killing, in case I run for office one day and someone dredges up this post as a defense of cold-blooded murder, but I would argue that the killing was of a piece with Omar's methods. That said, I agree with your previous assertion (or was that my previous assertion?) that Omar is finished; there's no room for Robin Hood in Marlo Stanfield's Baltimore.

As you note, Richard Price and Isiah Whitlock Jr., in the breakout performance of the season as Clay Davis (listen to me, I sound like Peter Travers), combined this week to remind us of what The Wire once was—a blunt, complicated exposé of the devastated American city, with jokes. Maybe it doesn't take vast courage to portray a black politician as a criminally conniving ignoramus (Aeschylus!), but the impiety of it all—the cynical nod last week to "Lift Every Voice and Sing" comes to mind—is refreshing.

I'll lay off the episode's manifest weaknesses for the moment, since you've fallen in love and I don't want to wound your tender heart, but because I can't help myself, let me point out one moment in which this episode was too clever by half. It came during the trial, when Clay Davis referred disparagingly to the prosecutor, Rupert Bond, as "Obonda." Maybe when the episode was filmed this seemed like a clever joke, but now, with everything we know about Obama's overwhelming popularity among African-Americans (and coming just several days after the Maryland primary), it fell awfully flat.

Dyspeptically yours,
Jeff

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from: Jeffrey Goldberg
to: David Plotz

Week 7: No Room for Robin Hood in Marlo's Baltimore

Posted Monday, Feb. 18, 2008, at 11:21 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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