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The Wire Final Season

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from: Jeffrey Goldberg
to: David Plotz

Week 10: The Major Flaw of the Final Episode

Posted Monday, March 10, 2008, at 1:27 PM ET

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

Lance Reddick in The Wire

Dear David,

In re: the last episode of The Sopranos—I missed it. Was it any good? I haven't heard much about it.

I thought you were going to "tee up" the Sopranos question for me. Seems like you answered it, and pretty well, too. I think David Chase is Dostoevsky, and David Simon is Dickens (and Larry David is a nitrous oxide Kafka and David Cassidy is Tom Wolfe and David Milch is … who, exactly?). By framing the question this way, you're forcing a retreat from my earlier contention that The Sopranos may be less durable than The Wire. Character studies are eternal, and Tony Soprano was the most complicated character ever to appear in a television drama.

The Wire's pedestrian, journalistic (not that the two are necessarily the same) final scene left me a little cold, and not only because it featured Jimmy McNulty, who remained, until the bitter end, exceedingly uninteresting. I don't know that I agree with your statement that the last minutes of The Sopranos represent the "the greatest final scene in the history of the moving image"—don't ask me to nominate an alternative, please—but it was absolutely brilliant. The last half-hour of last night's Wire—in particular those lingering shots of Baltimore (Look, tall buildings! Over there, container ships!)—brought to mind, more than once, the montage song from Team America:

Show a lot of things, happening at once,
Remind everyone of what's going on, (what's going on?)

The minor sin of last night's episode was in its over-explication. It's not much of a sin in the scheme of things. The major sin of last night's episode was the major sin of the entire season: the soap-opera brouhahas at the thoroughly unbelievable Baltimore Sun. I won't beat this dead horse anymore, though. Unless you want me to.

I'm not sure, by the way, that David Simon modeled the most repulsive character in The Wire on himself. I think he modeled the most repulsive character on an ugly stereotype.

Jeff

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from: Jeffrey Goldberg
to: David Plotz

Week 10: The Major Flaw of the Final Episode

Posted Monday, March 10, 2008, at 1:27 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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