All Hail "The Wire"

You probably won’t have heard it here first, but you will hear it from me with emphasis: The Wire. Is. The. Best. TV-series. Ever!

With the fourth season (out of five projected) just completed, I come not to bury The Wire but to praise it; not to recapitulate the story to date but to urge newbies to give it a try. There is an obsessive community of online partisans of the HBO show, who have discussed every character, theme, and episode at length. Check out Salon or Slate, the blogs House Next Door or Heaven and Here, or all the links therefrom, and you can find out anything you want to know about the show.

I’m also not the first to compare it to a Dickens novel, though as someone who took his senior honors seminar on the novels of Dickens, I make the comparison with some circumspection but no trepidation. The Wire is a fully-realized portrait of Baltimore, much as Bleak House is of London (and while I’m at it, let me also urge the recent BBC production of Bleak House as emphatically must-see TV on DVD.) And now we’ll be impatiently anticipating the fifth season, much as American audiences waited at the dock for the arrival from England of the latest serial installment of Dickens, to find out whether Little Nell lives or dies, or in this case, Omar and Bubbs.

The Wire is the ultimate fruition of a decades-long collaboration between David Simon and Ed Burns. Simon was a Baltimore Sun reporter and Burns was a police detective who became a primary source. Homicide begat The Corner, which begat The Wire. Simon first wrote the book, Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, which was developed by Baltimore-based director Barry Levinson into a well-regarded network tv series that ran for seven seasons. Then Simon and Burns together wrote The Corner, a look at the street-level drug trade from the perspective of a family destroyed by drug use, which was made into an Emmy-winning six-hour miniseries on HBO, directed by Charles Dutton.

With that track record, Simon and Burns were able to develop their own show for HBO, and that creative control raised their work to a sublime level. And what a creative team they assembled -- a company of actors you probably never heard of, who indelibly inhabit their characters without a false note in the whole consort -- a rotation of directors with feature film experience -- and a stable of writers, with such thoroughbreds as Richard Price, Dennis Lehane, and George Pelecanos!

But Simon and Burns lead the mission -- to tell nothing but the truth and the whole truth, and to do it in an uncompromising way, too smart to be dumbed down. Not just about the drug trade or the police, but about all the institutions of the city -- politics, schools, unions. So if you watch television to put your mind to sleep, or at least on automatic pilot, then stay off The Wire. On so many levels you will have to work to understand it -- the language, the plot, the system, the implications.

The Wire has to be “read” with all the concentration and persistence that you would bring to a classic novel. It’s not made up of tidy episodes on which you can drop in at random. You really nead to start at Chapter 1 and work your way through. Seasons 1-3 are now available on DVD, from Netflix or a high-quality video store. You might be able to catch up with a re-run of Season 4 on HBO. And then you’ll be with the rest of us, waiting on the dock for our ship to come in, the one with the fifth and final season in its hold.

Of course, you can bide your time, by immediately going back to watch from the beginning again, because I can assure you, you didn’t get it all the first time through. I can’t imagine a show with greater repeatability, you’ll learn much more on each viewing. Oh sure, you might say, I’ve got 60-odd hours to devote to a TV show, then turn around and do it all over again. Well, time is a precious commodity, but The Wire rewards every hour devoted to it.

It borrows the long-form narrative attraction of the soap opera or telenovela -- you live with these characters long enough to become intimately attached. It has the immemorial appeal of tales of gangsters and police. But it comes out of a tradition of reportorial accuracy and community commitment, leavened by intelligent, skeptical analysis, that carries it far beyond the canny lure of its storytelling. And oh yeah -- it’s funny as hell.

I couldn’t get into character or plot without going on forever, so I’ll conclude this urgent recommendation with the briefest overview for what you’ll be getting yourself into if you follow my advice. Season 1 is about a group of Baltimore poe-lease getting up on “the wire” to infiltrate a gang and bring down a pair of drug lords. Each organization is shown from top to bottom, with parallel dynamics. Season 2 shifts to the port and, before the Dubai Port World uproar, really brought home the reality of container shipping. Season 3 is in essence a rematch of the first, but infinitely ramified, with more serious attention to civic issues than a dozen op-ed pages. Season 4 reflects Ed Burns’ personal journey from the police to the schools -- after 20 years as a detective he became a teacher -- with focus on four middle-schoolers and how they might drift into “the game,” in parallel with the ripped-from-the-headlines story of a mayoralty race in Bodymore, Murderland.

But over all is the presiding genius of David Simon, who not only writes and produces but even shows up in online discussions to clarify and amplify points of discussion or controversy.

Demotic brilliance. That’s the salient characteristic of The Wire -- speaking of the people in the language of the people, and doing it with glittering intelligence. Telling hard lessons in civic engagement, clothed in emotive storytelling -- you’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll quake in your boots, but most of all -- you’ll think.