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The Wire Final Season

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from: John Swansburg
to: Jeffrey Goldberg, David Plotz, and Slate staff

Week 10: How Sheee-it Started

Posted Wednesday, March 12, 2008, at 11:15 AM ET

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

Dear All,

I thought I'd offer one final post before Slate bids farewell to The Wire for good. Editing this dialogue has been a highlight of my career. Not because it afforded me the opportunity to work with the likes of David Plotz and Jeffrey Goldberg, though that has been a special pleasure. They learned no lessons, acknowledged no mistakes, and brooked no authority. They did what they wanted to do and said what they wanted to say. But in the end, they gave me good copy. If I ever were to write a serial drama, I'd want them to do the TV Club.

But, no, editing this dialogue was a highlight for a different reason. Were it not for this assignment, I would never have returned to my office one recent afternoon to find this voicemail waiting for me:

Yes, I got a voicemail from state Sen. R. Clayton Davis. How can I possibly hope to top that?

A few weeks back, David posted a bonus entry in which he launched an inquiry into the origins of Clay Davis' signature pronouncement—the now ubiquitous "sheee-it." (Three e's, one i, right Gus?) I had always assumed that David Simon, great lover of inside jokes that he is, had back in his Sun days reported on some real-life state senator who had a penchant for drawing out the vowels of his expletives. But an astute reader had informed David that Isiah Whitlock Jr., who played Davis, had actually uttered his first sheee-it not on The Wire but in Spike Lee's 2002 film The 25th Hour. This ur-sheee-it suggested it was not Simon's invention. So, whose was it?

I endeavored to put the question to Whitlock himself, which is how he ended up on my voicemail. By the time we connected, I knew I wouldn't be the first to ask, but I couldn't resist hearing the answer from the horse's mouth. Here, by way of valediction, is the story as Whitlock graciously told it to me.

He's been saying sheee-it for years. He picked up the habit, he said, from an uncle who apparently deployed the word in much the same way Clay Davis did. Whitlock offered an example: "How'd you enjoy your dinner?" someone might ask his uncle. To which he would respond, "Sheee-it, I tore them pork chops up."

So, we have Whitlock's uncle to thank for the inflection, but it was Spike Lee who gave sheee-it its big break. Lee, having heard Whitlock toss off a sheee-it or two in conversation, encouraged him to use it in The 25th Hour, in which Whitlock played DEA agent Amos Flood (and later in She Hate Me, in which he reprised the role). From there, someone on The Wire writing staff seems to have picked up on sheee-it's unique power. Whitlock says that when he got his first Wire script, it was already written into the part, extra e's and everything.

For all the talk of The Wire's critical success far outstripping its ratings, Whitlock says it's not uncommon for him to be accosted in public and serenaded with a sheee-it from a fan or well-wisher. I asked him if this gets annoying, but he said it wasn't all that much different from someone coming up and asking for an autograph. He takes it as a compliment. Besides, he said, until recently, he didn't realize he had something of a gift. It was only after people started approaching him with hearty, adulatory sheee-its that he discovered there's actually an art to it. "They don't quite do it the way I do it," he said. "They kind of butcher it." The Wire itself, I suspect, will prove similarly hard to imitate.

Best,
John

tv club
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from: John Swansburg
to: Jeffrey Goldberg, David Plotz, and Slate staff

Week 10: How Sheee-it Started

Posted Wednesday, March 12, 2008, at 11:15 AM ET
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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

(To reply, click here.)

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