Jeffrey Goldberg and David Plotz were online on March 6 to chat about The Wire. Read the transcript.
David Simon, you crazy romantic, what a tender send-off. And David Plotz, you lucky man, so confident in the notion that our nation's finest news organizations would never harbor any suspected bad guys. They do, though—right up until they don't, just like governments and churches and every other business on earth. Reporters at USA Today had been warning the honchos there about Jack Kelley for years, yet their complaints were written off as jealous backbiting even as he filed wild tales like the one in which multiple heads rolled down the street in Jerusalem with eyes blinking—a story that helped make him a Pulitzer finalist. So everything Gus said in this last episode rang true to me. And in what universe do all the wrongdoers ever get caught? If the last seven years have proved anything, it's surely that the bigger the lie, the more they really do believe.
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StumbleUponYet on the screen, sometimes it's the stuff that actually happened that's the least convincing. My husband, for instance, thought that "bigger the lie" scene in the first episode, where Bunk fools a first-time suspect into believing in "guilt you can Xerox," was the only false note all season. I argued that, no, back in my cop-shop days, police laughed all the time about fun with polygraphs—and as it turns out, the scene is taken straight out of Simon's book Homicide. If there was one thing I personally never heard of, it was anybody being forgiven, ever, after talking to internal affairs. Still, it was satisfying—and even emotionally necessary, in a way—to see McNulty and Lester decline to hold a grudge against Kima.
In the finale, every character reaches his limit and makes his decision: Cedric says no more games with crime stats and leaves the department. Slim Charles cannot hear one more word out of Cheese and blows his head off. Marlo has a panic attack at a fancy cocktail party and is relieved to get back out on the corner where he can bleed in peace. And Gus turns in the newsroom criminal, knowing full well it's Mr. Pants-on-Fire who'll be believed. (True, St. Gus, as you guys call him, is as incorruptible as, oh, Oliver Twist. But the last time I had a moral crush on a TV character who seemed too heroic to be true, it was Matt Santos, and he turns out to have been modeled on Obama—so, hey, espero que si, se puede!)
All the characters who make the right call suffer for it but are OK with the consequences—Cedric and Rhonda, Gus and Alma, even Jimmy and Lester, who choose to retire rather than get paid to do some nonjob. Those who make the wrong choice, on the other hand, are rewarded—or, if you prefer, punished with ill-gotten success: The paper takes home the prize but misses the story. Though Scott Templeton will never be caught now, he's going to find the newsroom lonelier than he ever thought possible.
From the opening scene of Carcetti waving his hands around in an incoherent lather after learning there is no serial killer to the sweet parting shots of Baltimore, this finale was so lovingly put together that I actually burst into tears at the sight of David sitting in the newsroom chewing on his pen. And how could you not love his sentimental "-30-" to "the life of kings"?
Gratefully,
Melinda
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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
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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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