The last sip goes down smooth
About a year ago,
sasquashme set me a challenge: name a single scene that hooked me into a television series. My response was immediate. The show: The Wire. The scene, Season One: A drunken McNulty is trying to take a corner underneath a Baltimore overpass, and collides with the traffic barrier. It’s a fairly long scene, accompanied by The Pogues, and Jimmy McNulty is trying to make the turn. Again. And again. And again. It’s a drunken flawed hero trying to do his best in the face of his own shortcomings and demons, and without a single word of written dialogue the incomparable Wire writers have set the scene: Welcome to Baltimore.
The Wire just aired its series finale tonight after five seasons of the best writing on television. I don’t say that lightly: I watch Deadwood, and The Sopranos. I just re-watched My So-Called Life. I know good from good.
The Wire is better than all of them, it’s how fine television can be.
The whole series is Dickensian, a fact that the show itself draws attention to in this final season with a wink and a nod: supercilious newspaper editors talk about how to play a story about the homeless, to find the ‘Dickensian’. The series is about McNulty the cop, sure, but it’s equally about the drug dealers he hunts, the superiors that care and those that couldn’t give a shit. It’s about the deals and betrayals at City Hall, it’s about the withering Baltimore dockyards, it’s about journalism at the edge of obsolesce. It’s about gay Robin Hoods and Machiavellian drug lords scrabbling for respectability.
Most heartbreakingly, it’s about lost children and the society that betrays them. Fagan and the Artful Dodger appear in Baltimore’s Western District, and they’ll break your heart, many times over.
What I love about The Wire is that it takes its viewers seriously, doesn’t spoon feed them, doesn’t roll out the exposition for the benefit of people just tuning in. It’s smart and it expects you to be too. The characters, and there are hundreds of them, overlap (eventually) and no scene is thrown away: everything comes back to haunt the characters, often in ways that no one anticipates.
Take this scene, possibly my favourite from the whole five seasons. Here, enforcer Snoop Pearson buys a nail gun. It’s priceless: two worlds collide in a hardware store and it’s hysterically funny. But it’s also telling, and fraught with unspoken violence. It ends up conflating a Home Depot drone with an arms dealer. It’s beautifully written and this particular exchange sets the scene for the entire fourth (and best) season. Hell, maybe for the whole damn series.
If you have the stomach for realistic violence, unfettered and unapologetic language, plots that take YEARS to pay out, and don’t mind complicated responses to complicated questions, The Wire might be for you. I’d recommend starting with Season One and going right through, though. Don’t start in the middle, because pleasures are to be found in the small intersections, as much as the grand heroic missteps.
It’s been a fine ride, and I’ll miss The Wire profoundly.
sasquashme set me a challenge: name a single scene that hooked me into a television series. My response was immediate. The show: The Wire. The scene, Season One: A drunken McNulty is trying to take a corner underneath a Baltimore overpass, and collides with the traffic barrier. It’s a fairly long scene, accompanied by The Pogues, and Jimmy McNulty is trying to make the turn. Again. And again. And again. It’s a drunken flawed hero trying to do his best in the face of his own shortcomings and demons, and without a single word of written dialogue the incomparable Wire writers have set the scene: Welcome to Baltimore.
The Wire just aired its series finale tonight after five seasons of the best writing on television. I don’t say that lightly: I watch Deadwood, and The Sopranos. I just re-watched My So-Called Life. I know good from good.
The Wire is better than all of them, it’s how fine television can be.
The whole series is Dickensian, a fact that the show itself draws attention to in this final season with a wink and a nod: supercilious newspaper editors talk about how to play a story about the homeless, to find the ‘Dickensian’. The series is about McNulty the cop, sure, but it’s equally about the drug dealers he hunts, the superiors that care and those that couldn’t give a shit. It’s about the deals and betrayals at City Hall, it’s about the withering Baltimore dockyards, it’s about journalism at the edge of obsolesce. It’s about gay Robin Hoods and Machiavellian drug lords scrabbling for respectability.
Most heartbreakingly, it’s about lost children and the society that betrays them. Fagan and the Artful Dodger appear in Baltimore’s Western District, and they’ll break your heart, many times over.
What I love about The Wire is that it takes its viewers seriously, doesn’t spoon feed them, doesn’t roll out the exposition for the benefit of people just tuning in. It’s smart and it expects you to be too. The characters, and there are hundreds of them, overlap (eventually) and no scene is thrown away: everything comes back to haunt the characters, often in ways that no one anticipates.
Take this scene, possibly my favourite from the whole five seasons. Here, enforcer Snoop Pearson buys a nail gun. It’s priceless: two worlds collide in a hardware store and it’s hysterically funny. But it’s also telling, and fraught with unspoken violence. It ends up conflating a Home Depot drone with an arms dealer. It’s beautifully written and this particular exchange sets the scene for the entire fourth (and best) season. Hell, maybe for the whole damn series.
If you have the stomach for realistic violence, unfettered and unapologetic language, plots that take YEARS to pay out, and don’t mind complicated responses to complicated questions, The Wire might be for you. I’d recommend starting with Season One and going right through, though. Don’t start in the middle, because pleasures are to be found in the small intersections, as much as the grand heroic missteps.
It’s been a fine ride, and I’ll miss The Wire profoundly.