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The Wire Final Season

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from: David Plotz
to: Jeffrey Goldberg

Week 8: Taking Omar Down a Few Notches

Updated Monday, Feb. 25, 2008, at 5:32 PM ET

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

Dear Jeff,

First, let me respond to a reader question about whether we watch the "next week on The Wire" segments at the end of each episode. I don't watch those previews, so I may have missed some foreshadowing. Do you watch them?

Second, because I'd rather read smart Wire commentary than write it, I'm going to hand over this week's final entry to reader Nate Denny, who sent us a perceptive answer to your question about the final scene with Omar's corpse:

I think the whole point was Simon telling us how much we've missed the point in our five years of Omar-worship. The whole episode serves to take Omar down a few notches. He doesn't get his big, badass face-off with Marlo; he gets got by the same little punk (possibly the show's most obnoxious, least sympathetic character) whose face Michael pounded last season and who has nothing better to do than torture cats. Further, a bunch of kids disrespect Omar by rifling through his pockets for souvenirs, Sun writers don't even realize that a legend has passed, and inept city morgue employees almost bag the wrong guy with Omar's name.

No one in the episode realizes how important Omar's passing is, and maybe that's because it's ultimately not that important. Omar is a distraction: entertainment in an otherwise bleak and weighty depiction of the death of a city. Simon puts his finger in our eye and dismisses our favorite character with nary a backward look, and he's probably right to do so.

Talk to you next week,
David

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from: David Plotz
to: Jeffrey Goldberg

Week 8: Taking Omar Down a Few Notches

Updated Monday, Feb. 25, 2008, at 5:32 PM 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 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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