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The Wire Final Season

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from: David Plotz
to: Jeffrey Goldberg

Week 10: Spoiler Alert! Maury Levy is Jewish?

Posted Monday, March 10, 2008, at 11:19 AM ET

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

Dear Jeff,

My wife, Hanna, and I were laying wagers as we watched about which character the show would end on. I bet on Michael, thinking that his degradation was the most pointless and heartbreaking in the whole five-season arc and that David Simon would want to leave us with a vision of Baltimore's future. Hanna guessed it would finish with Marlo, as the embodiment—and, in a strange way, also the victim—of the enormous, vicious forces of capitalism that are tearing the city apart. Instead, we got Jimmy and crazy Larry. I suppose this particular pairing was meant as grim commentary on the fate of the American city? Jimmy's final "let's go home" was intended to remind us—as if the previous 64 hours and 59 minutes hadn't—that only lunatics and hopeless romantics would want to make their home in Baltimore.

Our editor John Swansburg asked us—well, he asked you, but let me tee it up—to compare the conclusions of The Wire and The Sopranos. You're the world's living authority on The Sopranos, so I'll leave the heavy work to you, but let me offer a few opening thoughts for you to stomp on. The obvious difference in the finales is that The Wire told us everything and The Sopranos refused to. We know the fate of every Wire character and practically every extra, too. The Sopranos, in what is in my view the greatest final scene in the history of the moving image, left us with pure ambiguity, the fate of its main character unwritten.

Too much has been made of the Dickensian nature of The Wire, but in this case the analogy is apt: What makes Dickens so incredibly satisfying—and occasionally so corny, sentimental, and heavy-handed—is his willingness to be explicit. But one side effect of the Dickensian method is that it ultimately values the overarching story more than any individual person. The internal lives of Dickens' characters are never quite as interesting or compelling as the whole shebang of plot, place, and social issue. The Wire has exactly the same glories and flaws.

The Sopranos is novelistic, too, but from a different literary tradition. I can't name exactly the right novelist or book—maybe it's Dostoyevsky or George Eliot or Proust (I know you or one of our readers has the right answer up your sleeves)—but it always put character first. The Wire was a five-season study of a city. The Sopranos was a six-season study of a person, Tony Soprano. It began and ended internally, in the mind of Tony. That's why The Sopranos was wise to end ambiguously—because no one's life ever gets all tied up, every stray thread snipped. It's always messy and open-ended. I'm Dickensian by temperament, so I loved The Wire's boxed-up ending, but I recognize that The Sopranos' monomaniacal obsession with Tony's character may make it the more enduring show (if not necessarily the better one).

Wait, Maury Levy is Jewish?

I've occasionally wondered whether Levy isn't a Wire prank that David Simon is pulling on himself. Simon, who's Jewish, has cast as the show's only identifiably Jewish male an actor who looks rather like himself—middle-aged, bald, stocky, big-headed, full-featured—and then made that character the most repulsive piece of garbage in the city of Baltimore. You have to admit that's pretty funny.

David

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from: David Plotz
to: Jeffrey Goldberg

Week 10: Spoiler Alert! Maury Levy is Jewish?

Posted Monday, March 10, 2008, at 11:19 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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