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The Greatest Show on TV

MARCH 10, 2008        TAGS: THE WIRE, TV, POLITICS         COMMENTS (29)

By Michael Currie Schaffer


If our entire national population were made up of television critics, the airing of The Wire’s final episode on TV might have been a 21st century rerun of Feb. 28, 1983. On that evening, 106 million people tuned to the final episode of MASH. CBS’ Korean War series was so beloved that the network aired it for 11 seasons, eight years longer than the war it depicted. HBO’s labyrinthine drug-trade drama, by contrast, never found an audience to match its critical kudos. Thus a series praised as the greatest show on television quietly ended its run after five seasons—well less, it should be noted, than the war it depicted.

Since a major theme of The Wire was our national loss of common ground, this uncelebrated demise seemed quite appropriate. A grimly realistic show about Baltimore dope dealers was never destined to have its finale splashed, like the sugary final episode of Friends, across the cover of Entertainment Weekly. Especially not after its focus expanded into the equally bleak worlds of politics, labor, real estate, and education in a largely poor, black metropolis that never recovered from the decades-old collapse of its industrial economy. Writing in the New Yorker, Margaret Talbot noted that the show’s audience in many ways resembled the modern city it chronicled, “mainly the urban poor and the affluent elite, with the middle class hollowed out.”

For those of us in those demographics, though, the show represented a weekly miracle—albeit still not quite an exercise in cultural communion. On-demand cable services allowed technically accessorized fans to watch episodes at 12:01 a.m. the Monday before their Sunday-night time slots. Others watched the DVD version, released months after a season at $60 for an elegant boxed set; at times, it felt as if the boxes came standard with every rehabbed rowhouse in my gentrified neighborhood. In less pricey haunts, you don’t even have to wait: Bootleg videos of the show are sold on the street. Uncertainty about who had an HBO subscription, who used the on-demand preview, who waited for the official DVD and who bought an illegal disc meant that initiating a water-cooler chat about the latest episode was risky if you didn’t want to be accused of spoiling the drama.

If it was easy to see The Wire’s appeal in neighborhoods similar to those in the show, the series’ popularity with the media was equally understandable. With dozens of characters whose names and backgrounds and motivations were made plain through sophisticated screenwriting, the show differentiated those characters we too often see as monolithic masses: the “corner boys” dealing drugs, the cops who arrest and rearrest them, the kids who trudge by en route to battle-scarred schoolhouses. Playing the fly on the wall to discover their hidden back-stories — Just how did Bodie come to be selling on that corner? Just why did Dukie drop out of school? Why can’t the officers of the Western District do anything about drugs — is why a lot of folks become journalists in the first place.


That it took a fictional program to portray this urban reality, of course, represents an implicit rebuke to the journalistic profession. But critics, at least at those papers that still employ critics, didn’t seem to take it personally. The convoluted sagas of detective Jimmy McNulty, Mayor Thomas Carcetti, corner boy Michael Lee, and drug kingpin Marlo Stanfield were too compelling. And besides, series creator David Simon was himself a longtime reporter who’d come to learn about the off-limits worlds of cops and robbers the same way other reporters do, even those reporters who eventually get promoted to TV reviewer.

Strangely, the one hiccup in the critical love-fest came in the show’s final season, which focused on the inner workings of Simon’s old newspaper, the Baltimore Sun. Where previous seasons had used shades of gray to depict murderers and crime-fighters alike, the media characters were rendered in Manichean terms. One editor was a hero, the other a buffoon; one writer a careerist liar, another a selfless truth-seeker. Are newsroom personalities less complicated than those in stash houses or police precincts? Of course not. Simon’s anger at the Sun’s inability to portray the city was real — and hard to refute. But the ham-fisted treatment bucked the show’s deeply nuanced style. Institutions and their true believers, reporters know, are no good at watchdogging themselves. Alas, when the subject turned to the much-abused institution he once worked for, Simon wrote like a true believer, not like a sharp-eyed outside chronicler of its fate.

In the end, even the most tendentious newsroom scenes weren’t enough to put off The Wire’s own true believers. Ahead of the finale, the internet crackled with predictions about how it would all end. True to form, the conclusion brought closure to a Baroque constellation of story arcs without implying that Baltimore’s larger narrative had really changed. McNulty’s off the force, Carcetti has made himself governor, Stanfield has been forcibly retired, and the once-sweet Lee has moved into a particularly brutal spot in the criminal economy. But the same drugs are still flowing on the west side, the police chief is another dim-witted yes-man, and the developers are still building condos where the great American working class once toiled. The genius of the show was that it delivered riveting drama en route to reaching the most bleakly clinical of world-historical truths: The more things change, the more they stay the same.

If there were any justice — a possibility The Wire did much to discount — the finale would be discussed around the country this morning. With an average 4.4 million weekly viewers, though, television’s greatest show was unlikely to garner such attention. Still, as I mourn its passing, I’d love to chat about just what it all meant. So if you’re not still waiting for the DVD set, or the TiVo recording, or the bootleg copy from the street corner, flash me the secret sign for an analytical re-up.


Michael Currie Schaffer, a frequent contributor to Obit, is writing a book about the pet industry and American culture.

 

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