Jeffrey Goldberg and David Plotz were online on March 6 to chat about The Wire. Read the transcript.
Jeff and David,
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StumbleUponI appreciate you letting me stop by the clubhouse. I need the company, because it's been a tough couple of weeks for the gays. First, smoking killed Omar—after all, Kenard wouldn't have had a clean shot if Omar hadn't been so focused on his soft pack—then Michael shot Snoop. After years in which The Wire gave us more gay characters than all of the networks combined—and mostly black gay characters at that—Kima is the only homosexual left standing. (I refuse to treat Rawls' preposterous Season 3 gay-bar cameo as anything more than a red herring.)
David, yesterday you wondered if Snoop had ever been "explicitly identified as gay." Like all Marlo's people, she kept her private life on the down low, but in the final episode of Season 4, when Bunk said he was "thinking about some pussy," she told him, "Me, too." I'm pretty sure she wasn't talking about a domestic shorthair.
Snoop was the first convincing butch lesbian on television—a no-apologies, cross-dressing bull dyke. I wonder if Felicia Pearson will ever work again. I know an off-Broadway show that could desperately use her butch swagger, but her voice is too small for theater, and she's too street even for that last refuge of Wire actors, Law and Order. (I've spotted Michael, Clay Davis, Daniels, and Bubbles recently.)
There have always been complaints that The Wire's writers don't do well by the women on the show, but for me Kima Greggs has always been a credible—and likable—character. I was sorry when she broke up with Cheryl—no more make-out scenes—but also because the relationship always convinced: Cheryl's annoyance that Kima should go back on the streets in Season 2 after she almost died in Season 1 was understandable, but so was Kima's frustration at being smothered. The tension between them when Cheryl wanted a baby and Kima didn't could happen in any relationship, as could the painful awkwardness of maintaining family ties after a breakup. Kima's boozing and womanizing in Season 3 wasn't as believable, but the show's writers love nothing more than parallelism, and they needed Kima to keep McNulty company on his descent to hell. She might not be ready for family life yet—she failed the IKEA test—but she seems to know herself better now: still not ready to settle down but forging "a connect" with Cheryl's son. Snitching on McNulty, as I see it, is just another stop on her path to maturity.
And, of course, there was Omar. He had three gorgeous boyfriends—Brandon, Dante, and Renaldo—whom he loved, body and soul. He even put together his own LGBT version of the James gang. (When Tosha was killed during a robbery in Season 3, her lover Kimmy's grief was, weirdly, a joy to witness.) We homosexuals just don't get to see this stuff on television.
Unlike The L Word, The Wire never presented a glamorous fantasy of beautiful people in gorgeous clothes. Unlike 'tween shows like South of Nowhere, the characters had more pressing problems than mean moms. And unlike the few shows on network television that manage to include gay characters, there were more than two of them on The Wire.
So, thanks, Wire writers. Just promise me you'll never mention Rawls' secret gay life again.
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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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