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The Wire Final Season

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from: Jeffrey Goldberg
to: David Plotz

Week 7: What's More Outrageous, Hamsterdam or Bitey?

Posted Monday, Feb. 18, 2008, at 12:41 PM ET

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

Dear David,

Cut them some slack?

If you say so. I'll stipulate that this is a minor complaint, but I think the "Obanda" reference bothered me because it represented an intrusion into an otherwise excellent subplot of the sort of faux-sophisticated knowingness that infects the newsroom dialogue so egregiously. You'll recall that this has happened before, at a story meeting at the Sun, where the small-talk among the editors concerned the baseball steroid scandal, except that all the supposedly sly references were six months out of date.

Speaking of egregiousness, how can you possibly believe that the Hamsterdam premise was as preposterous as the story line you call, quite succinctly, "Bitey the Bloodthirsty"? The first had to do with an experiment in de facto drug legalization in a small corner of the city by a thoughtful and frustrated police official. The second has formerly competent police detectives concocting from scratch the story of a serial murderer who bites homeless men on the ass, or the thighs, or wherever. I'm quite sure that, in real life, at various times in various places, thoughtful and frustrated police officials have conducted experiments along the lines of Bunny Colvin's; I have never heard of a story in which police detectives defile corpses and kidnap a homeless man, all in order to extract computer equipment from their superiors.

Since you've already asked the readers of this dialogue to contextualize Omar's killing of Savino, let me put this question out there as well: Is Hamsterdam as outrageous an idea as Bitey the Bloodthirsty?

That said, I will admit to something: I'm actually just a wee bit curious to see if Templeton gets caught. I'm assuming it's Gus who will go down, for questioning Templeton's bona fides (this is a guess, but an informed one, since we've all read David Simon on the real-life Sun), but I've become curious. But it's not the sort of curiosity I felt about the fate of, say, Bunny Colvin; it's the sort of curiosity that develops about one-third of the way through an episode of Law & Order.

Back to you, Bitey.

Jeff

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from: Jeffrey Goldberg
to: David Plotz

Week 7: What's More Outrageous, Hamsterdam or Bitey?

Posted Monday, Feb. 18, 2008, at 12:41 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

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