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The Wire Final Season

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from: Jeffrey Goldberg
to: David Plotz

It's Time for the Cheese Course!

Posted Monday, March 10, 2008, at 7:19 AM ET

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

Dear David,

First, a moment of appreciation: The Wire is a shockingly good television series, and I'll miss it very much. Maybe more than I currently miss The Sopranos. Heresy, I know, but The Wire was not merely entertainment, though it was, at times, hugely entertaining. Think about this: HBO, a division of the putatively soulless Time Warner, funded, for several years, a barely watched television series with nonfamous, mostly African-American actors that confronted two interconnected subjects, the collapse of the American city and the predicament of inner-city black people, that most premium-cable subscribers, and most everyone else, ignore with great equanimity. Astonishing, when you think about it.

OK, enough gasbagging: It's time for the Cheese course!

As you know, I called for Cheese's death earlier this season (which is uncharacteristic of me, because I don't go around, generally speaking, calling for the deaths of imaginary or nonimaginary people), and to have the deed done by our hometown hero, Slim Charles, was almost too satisfying to watch. Cheese's demise was sublime, and salvational. He died so that we may live—or, more to the point, that our belief in justice might live. The moral arc of the universe may be long, as Dr. King noted, but, at least with Baltimore drug dealers, it bends toward justice. You noticed, of course, that there was redemption only in gangland—the cops have proved themselves ineradicably corrupt (Valchek up, Cedric Daniels out); City Hall is gruesomely cynical (you were right about Carcetti, David), and the newspaper is populated by prize-whoring hyenas. But Slim Charles saves us. The killing of Cheese was more than an individual act of redemption; every drug dealer on the lot knew that, for balance to be restored to their universe, the braying betrayer of Prop Joe had to go. It was his final speech that killed him, a speech that could have been delivered in City Hall or in the newsroom of the Baltimore Sun: "When it was my uncle, I was with Joe; when it was Marlo, I was with Marlo," Cheese said, giving us epigrammatically David Simon's view of our fallen world, one populated almost entirely by empty men with no fixed beliefs, who crave only power and money. And women, too—Nerese, a Clay Davis without those excellent teeth, is mayor now.

There's too much to discuss here, David—Cedric is a legal-aid attorney, Marlo is a vampire, Bubbles is Jesus (I suppose he's always been Jesus), Michael is the new Omar, Maryland has a gay state-police superintendent, and Maury Levy is Jewish. I had no idea that the shyster drug lawyer with the lascivious lips who secretly controls the drug cartels was Jewish until Maury started talking about mishpoche and brisket. I thought the episode laid that on a bit thick—like Entourage-thick.

I haven't said a word about McNulty's new career in homeless-shelter management. I'm leaving it to you to explain to me why McNulty, who is, comparatively speaking, such an uninteresting character, is treated like the dark but redemptive heart of this entire enterprise.

Jeff

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from: Jeffrey Goldberg
to: David Plotz

It's Time for the Cheese Course!

Posted Monday, March 10, 2008, at 7:19 AM 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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