Through The Wire (no spoilers. promise.)
[appy-polly-logies for the long post]
This Sunday night, the final episode of The Wire will air. Even if you don’t watch the show, by now you probably have some vague idea that it’s set in Baltimore, is gritty, real, and smart. While many of my friends and scores of critics adore the show, it has failed to catch on in the same way that The Sopranos did. Instead of challenging a new and broader audience, The Wire has settled for being watched by its core (and mostly fanatical) viewers.
The storylines of The Wire examine the urban condition, the cruelty of institutions, and the growing divide between the haves and the have-nots in America. It’s a show that leaves you thinking about it. Not in the same way that LOST leaves you thinking about it (which is mostly, “What the fuck is going on?” smattered with a little “Why does nobody ask what the fuck is going on?”), but in a way that forces you to see the sometimes-ugly side of being a hero, the sometimes-noble side of being a criminal, and the frustrating bigger picture that drives individuals to make the difficult life choices that we all face in some way.
When the show ends on Sunday, I’ll miss it immediately. I’ll miss spending time with the characters. I’ll miss the Ballmer accent. I’ll miss being forced to confront the state of this country in such an amazingly effective and entertaining way every week.
You might have noticed that there’s not a nationwide guessing-game surrounding the possible endings for the multitude of characters in the show. That’s because The Wire has shown us how much of these endings have already been written. You live in the street? The street will probably get you, when it’s your time. You’re trying to make a difference? You can only make so much of a difference as is convenient to the powers that be. Their ambition and pride will continue to roll on, despite the effects of their decisions on other human beings.
Earlier this season, I mistakenly came across a clip of a significant character’s death while I was innocently surfing the web. Though I was disappointed that I didn’t get to see it in the context of the episode, my stumbling actually provided me what feels like a more genuine context for understanding this show.
The Wire is not about who-shot-who, or cops vs robbers, or even good vs evil. It’s about the human struggles that will continue until they can be addressed properly in a systemic way. Until social problems can be tackled at their root, there will always be a drug dealer trying to get over. There will always be the cops who chase him. There will always be politicians more concerned with re-election than with the problems of those they were elected to represent, and newspapers more concerned with profits and prizes than reporting a city’s true story.
So it doesn’t matter to me who’s left standing on Sunday night. The individual characters are just examples selected from the bigger picture. And finally, the show’s lack of popularity underscores the very point it tries to make: these things will not change until we choose to pay attention to them.
