Show, Don’t Tell
Excessive hand-holding could bring down The Wire in season five.By Jesse Singal
January 11, 2008
Bubbles (Andre Royo) sells copies of the Baltimore Sun to commuters in season five of “The Wire.” (Courtesy HBO.com)
The Wire has changed TV. That much we know. In portraying the drug and police trades of Baltimore with unprecedented authenticity and complexity, HBO’s drama has proven that it’s OK to ask a lot of a TV audience. Viewers are capable of following dozens of intersecting plot lines, characters that don’t resort to catch phrases, and long-term stories that don’t end tidily. The title of a recent New Yorker profile of The Wire’s creator, David Simon, was “Stealing Life.” This is as good a summation as any of the show: As The New Yorker put it, on The Wire “nearly every scene is grounded in documentary truth,” but the show still manages to feel as alive and organic as the most vibrant fiction out there.
While the first three seasons of The Wire garnered widespread praise from television critics, the show transformed from an underground phenomenon to a mainstream hit during its fourth season—although based on the show’s inexplicable lack of awards attention, it could be argued that it’s still flying under the radar. Last season, Simon was able to bring together a remarkably gifted cast of child actors and expertly layer the story of perpetually screwed-over young men and women on top of all of The Wire’s usual intrigue. Many critics have referred to it as the best season of any show in television history, and have already pointed out the impossible task that lies before Simon: one-upping himself in season five, the show’s last hurrah.
The first episode of the fifth season, which aired Sunday night, shows promise. We are immediately inundated with a number of the show’s typically interrelated plotlines, most of them connected to the fallout from Mayor Carcetti’s (Aidan Gillen) shift in funding from the police department—and elsewhere—to the city’s failing schools. As a result of this belt-tightening, the major crimes unit—responsible for investigating drug kingpin Marlo Stanfield (Jamie Hector) and the 22 bodies left entombed in Baltimore’s vacant row houses by his chilling lieutenants Chris Partlow (Gbenga Akinnagbe) and Snoop Pearson (Felicia "Snoop" Pearson)—has been disbanded. The resultant politics feel authentic, as usual. Carcetti has to figure out how to explain to his constituents that the police will no longer be actively investigating the murders of 22 residents, and his discussions with his deputies over how to do so are appropriately cynical. “I don’t want anyone saying we’re giving up on those murders,” Carcetti tells his top advisor (Reg E. Cathey) and two police higher-ups. “I don’t want to see that headline.”
On top of all of this comes The Wire’s newest, and, for hard-core Wire fans, most controversial, plot arc: the newsroom at The Baltimore Sun, which is suffering from severe budget and personnel cuts. The action here focuses on City Editor Gus Haynes, an old-school journalist who isn’t happy with the Sun’s upper management. There’s already been a fair bit of panic about the newspaper storyline. Some have wondered whether Simon, a former reporter at the Sun, simply has too much resentment toward his old employer and the declining state of journalism to tell a story about them with his characteristic nuance and subtlety. He did, after all, tell the New Yorker: “The newsroom I worked in had four hundred and fifty people. Now it’s got three hundred. Management says, ‘We have to do more with less.’ That’s the bullshit of bean counters who care only about the bottom line. You do less with less.” The “do more with less” line shows up, more or less verbatim, in the episode.
If Simon’s desire to make a point overwhelms his desire to tell a compelling story, season five could end up being less compelling than its predecessors. The Wire, through its first four seasons, deftly touched upon everything from crumbling inner-city schools to the collapse of elements of the white middle class to the politicization of police work to the racial intricacies of politics—and this is an extremely abbreviated list. It has always been clear that Simon and the show’s other architects have strong opinions on all of these subjects, but said opinions are never delivered in a heavy-handed way. When the show makes a point, that point slowly bubbles up and forms itself through layer after layer of plot-driven complexity. There are no flashing signs that say “THIS IS THE MORAL.” The story provides the point, not vice-versa.
That is what has people so worried about the Sun plotline. Simon’s vendetta against the paper makes itself apparent in the first episode. The scenes at the Sun contain far too many instances in which a Good Journalist goes toe-to-toe with a Bad Journalist. At one point the paper’s white executive editor, James C. Whitting III (Sam Freed) sits in on a metro desk editorial meeting. After a reporter mentions an almost-completed story about the University of Maryland not meeting its desegregation goals, he quickly tables the idea. He tells the staff that he has spoken with his friend, the school’s—also white—dean of journalism, who assured him the situation was improving, statistics notwithstanding. As he finishes up this lame excuse, the camera lingers awkwardly on Haynes as he smirks, almost directly at the viewer, for a good three or four seconds.
Yes, we get the point: Haynes is a good journalist with integrity, and Whitting isn’t. There are similarly strained scenes throughout the episode, such as when two of the Sun’s younger staff members, Alma Gutierrez (Michelle Paress) and Scott Templeton (Tom McCarthy), have a drink at a bar. When Gutierrez asks Templeton where he wants to end up career-wise, he quickly replies, “Times or Post. Where else?” Gutierrez says, “I dunno, this is still a pretty good paper.” There are more subtle ways to signal that one character is more baldly ambitious than another than through thin dialogue like this.
The problem here isn’t that some characters are being portrayed as more virtuous than others. The Wire has never withheld such judgments—most viewers are rooting for Omar (Michael Kenneth Williams), the gay stickup artist who only robs drug dealers and who lives by a stringent, coherent code that dictates he leave civilians alone, and not for Chris and Snoop. But Omar, Chris, and Snoop rarely sit around talking about their philosophies, or lack thereof. We’ve come to judge them based on their actions, on the fact that one is a Robin Hood-like figure and the other two execute a vicious drug dealer’s enemies with a gunpowder-powered nail gun.
More of The Wire’s characters have been slowly drawn via dozens of interactions and decisions. Some are more inscrutable than others, but almost all of them defy easy description. Even those that seemingly fit a cliché—Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West), after all, is the stereotypical Cop Who Gets Results, Rules Be Damned—manage to transcend that cliché through sheer depth and the intricacies of their lives within the show. There’s a danger, however, that the newsroom of the Sun will be a mere storyboard, whereas the show’s other venues are rich dioramas. No one who watches The Wire is interested merely in a battle of “good” reporters versus “bad” reporters at a declining paper; no, we want the details. We want the backstabbing, the compromises, the maneuvering. These, after all, are the engines of the rest of the show. And none of them can function correctly when the show’s characters carry giant neon signs displaying their archetypes.
Of course, I could be overreacting. We’re still only one episode in, and there is certainly time for these characters to be fleshed out. Overall, the first episode was quite good. But two scenes neatly encapsulated all of the concerns shared by many of The Wire’s fans. Early in the episode, Templeton says, “I wonder what it would be like to work for a real newspaper.” Later, McNulty says, “I wonder what it would be like to work for a real police department.” Again—we get the point. The average Wire viewer, of course, picked up on the fact that Baltimore’s police department and major newspaper are in similarly dire situations long before this lead-fisted reminder. As the season progresses (and all episodes are already wrapped, so we’ll have to hope for the best), hopefully The Wire will remember that it needn’t treat its viewers like kids, and that its ability to tell adult stories in an adult way is the reason it’s so brilliant. Through four seasons it has been the best show in television history, and excessive hand-holding is one of the only things that could prevent it from solidifying this legacy.
Jesse Singal is an Associate Editor at Campus Progress.