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The Wire Final Season

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from: David Plotz
to: Jeffrey Goldberg

Week 8: I'm Stunned You Still See Idealism in Carcetti

Posted Monday, Feb. 25, 2008, at 3:21 PM ET

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

Dear Jeff,

Did you know that Gus Haynes is Barack Obama's closest friend? Did you know that a beagle owned by Gus Haynes won this year's Westminster dog show? Did you know that Ralph Lauren bottles Gus Haynes' sweat and sells it as perfume?

I've always liked Carcetti's wife because of her combination of sweetness and brittleness, exactly what you'd expect from a careerless political wife. She didn't give much away in that scene last night, but you really didn't detect her unease with her husband? Also, I'm stunned that you still see idealism in Carcetti. The homeless speechifying is entirely cynical, purpose-built to humiliate the governor: He doesn't have any substantive policy to back up the gasbaggery. Carcetti has betrayed everything he once said about how he would govern: He's clinging to stats, seeking cheap PR victories, casting off allies, all in the service of his own power. What action has he taken this season that was not designed to promote Carcetti?

(Oh, I just thought of a third example of woman as conscience: Unlike all the male cops, Kima refuses to play along with the serial-killer sham and rebukes Lester.)

David Simon, mind reader: A few weeks ago, I rapped The Wire for ignoring the working world of black men:

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.

Now Episode 8 shows us Dukie trying to get a legitimate job at a Foot Locker-like store and getting ruefully turned away by Poot, Bodie's old corner-running buddy.

You're right, of course, about the Chris-Marlo tension—that Atlantic City exchange was electric. I agree that the show is setting up some kind of spectacular denouement for Chris: His unease with Marlo, Bunk's DNA evidence against him, the budding conflict between him and Michael, his anxiety about his children—all of these point to some kind of showdown. So from an emotional perspective, your Marlo murder scheme makes sense. But I still don't think the worldview of The Wire would permit the kind of void that Marlo's assassination would leave.

The death of Marlo, taken together with the deaths of Prop Joe and Stringer Bell—and the imprisonment of Avon—would suggest that the smartest and most ruthless drug dealers really can be stopped (even if the police don't do it) and that the drug organizations really can be degraded. (You're a journalist who studies Israel: The entire premise of Israel's policy of targeted assassination is that killing the smartest and most capable leaders of Hamas will paralyze the organization because the surviving lieutenants won't be as effective.) But less effective drug gangs would mean progress on an institutional scale, and that is something that The Wire refuses to accept as a possibility. So I think the only way Marlo can die is if someone is established as an equally brilliant, equally ruthless heir, and none of the gangsters we've met—not even Chris, who's too pensive and moody and facing airtight DNA murder evidence—has the brains and skill to replace Marlo.

But I've been wrong about everything and you've been right, so Chris will probably pop one in Marlo's skull five minutes into Episode 9.

David

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from: David Plotz
to: Jeffrey Goldberg

Week 8: I'm Stunned You Still See Idealism in Carcetti

Posted Monday, Feb. 25, 2008, at 3:21 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.

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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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