image courtesy of butukgirl via flickr

right now i’m tired. i’ve done a day in the office, a stint at the gym, managed some ad-hoc dinner and i got to get me this blog post done or y’all’ll have nothing to read when you get to your desks tomorrow.

but there’s something keeping me awake, something calling me from across the room. a place i’ve started to escape to in the evenings. at weekends. damn, even on holiday when i’m already supposed to have escaped.

that place is maryland. tighter than that, that place is baltimore. and deeper even; darker than that, the place i keep going back to? well currently its the city docks. a bit ago it was the west side projects. rumour has it (though i’m not one for spoilers) that i’ll be moving to the halls of government soon enough.

the hl started watching the wire a while ago, thanks in no small part to jonathan bernstein of the guardian, who’s strike rate at spotting and backing shows like entourage, freaks & geeks and arrested development was getting too uncanny to ignore.

the first episode was dark, bleak and awkwardly real, almost too real when the aylesbury estate lies just beyond the threshold, and police helicopters would keep me awake in the fall out of clashes between the peckham boys and the ghetto boys. but regardless of the discomfort my peachy-white-middle-class-college-educated-pinot-noir-supping-gastropub-ass perceived from the first hour of the show, it totally suckered me and jak.

i used to laud the sopranos for its tack-sharp writing, shakespearean story arcs, elegant direction and prodigious acting. what’s so special about the wire is that it took me a whole season (that’s thirteen hours) to do that, not because it’s not good but because its so good i forgot i was watching actors. i forgot the cameras had been placed, the lines had been written, rehearsals attended and locations scouted.

and this is no as-real cop-drama handycam show neither, the viewing experience is as visceral and immediate as the wire tap monitors who trace gang hits and crack deals. its like being in and of baltimore from the (dis)comfort of your sofa.

“It is not designed purely as an entertainment. It is, I’m afraid, a somewhat angry show.”
the wire is utterly radical in its approach to creating a television programme (and God bless HBO for having the balls, and the subscribers, to run with it for five seasons) not least because its creator goes around saying things like that. the traditional, binary good vs evil cop crime tale which has seen american tv through five decades of high ratings (from dragnet to CSI) and which has played out for decades longer across westerns and away into the galaxies was shaken up by the success of HBO’s The Sopranos (admittedly audience’s appetite for embraceable heroic characters in crime goes back further a lot further) but the wire turns that idea entirely on its head. here there is no black and white, only a whole spectrum of grey. institution pitted against institution. organisations and institutions comprised of an army of individuals, a giant mess of well meaning family-men, addicts, vainglorious street soldiers, scholarly tacticians, shamed and fallen family members and old fashioned bigots. and that’s just the law enforcement unit.

the wire has thematic arcs which dictate the pace of the show, this commitment to concepts as opposed than plot twists, a mission to examine life on the Baltimore street (as a microcosm of america) rather than ratings winner means that season two was conceived as a “a meditation on the death of work and the betrayal of the American working class… a deliberate argument that unencumbered capitalism is not a substitute for social policy; that on its own, without a social compact, raw capitalism is destined to serve the few at the expense of the many.” the thing is , that political and social commentary has never been this gripping.there is nothing in the least bit worthy about sitting down to an hour of the wire. sure, it takes some initial effort, but all of your time is rewarded. and you can forget episode opening recaps, locating subtitles or voice overs, this show lives in its here and now, like a surveillance cop if you miss a word of an exchange between two pit guys you’ve dropped the ball, if you’re not in on a conversation between the state’s attorney and the police commissioner then you missed out. the astonishing attention to detail of the show, its embracing (and by the same stroke revelling) in the macro-vernacular of state senators, government officials, police, recovering addicts in aa, longshoremen or crack runners makes you realise that regional accents are nothing. the languages spoken by all the characters could be unrecognisable to one another yet their as much as badge of their trade as a rank stripe or access to a pager number but more importantly you need to understand all of them, not just one to fit the whole thing together.

the deep vein of characterisation and abject humanity which pulses through the wire’s characters, fueling plots, tension and ultimately generating emotional responses in the viewer ably illustrates the old adage about honour among thieves. for when honour is pledged to an institution containing so many disparate soldiers each serving themselves instead of a decree (not longer to protect and serve but to protect and sever to borrow a line from the simpsons) fractures and fissure in the societies they dominate gape wide open.

what is played out in the wire does not so much subvert the notion that good and evil aren’t so easy to define but that they are a choice. It doesn’t matter which institution you belong to; street gang or judiciary - your faults, hang-ups or f*ck ups are neither expunged nor ignored by swearing allegiance. in fact they can be magnified, encouraged to flourish, used to their utmost and ultimately yield fruit of the bitterest sort. should your path into the game have been cleared by nefarious means (nepotism or corruption, bribery or accident) those ties that bind do so with astonishing intricacy and suffocating permanence.

and dammit, i’m still tired but right now i’m thrilled because i’ve got fifty more episodes of the wire to watch before bed.

oh and the music…

lorez alexandria - baltimore o