a lot of thoughts on television political drama

[pocochina]

A reviewer at.....Slate? I wanna say Slate, in an argument that the US House of Cards doesn’t count as political drama, compared the show to Game of Thrones. In my lingering irritation at the article - um, spoiler alert, the titular game is not musical chairs - I started to condense some thoughts about what, exactly, political drama is, and how it

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THE WIRE SPOILERS: One of the things that The Wire gets right is that in a society, especially a capitalist society though I think that it's not actually down to capitalism-qua-capitalism alone, is the way in which people fill vacuums. Certainly it's true of the politicians, but it's also true of everyone who takes any job or role, whether legal or illegal, or someone like Omar who is ostensibly not part of the system at all; people are able to hold onto positions only insofar as those positions represent some need that other people have that is not fulfilled by everyone else. Carcetti can't institute grand sweeping political changes that are going to be unpopular, which means that whatever his initial ideas are that run counter to the way things are done eventually get ground down into almost nothing. The system (which is really a matter of statistics -- numbers of people, as well as certain powerful players, who themselves are generally beholden to the numbers of people) demands that people behave a certain way, under threat of losing their jobs and thus their lives, and the possibility of making positive changes (in oneself or others) are severely limited. The true visionaries who actually are able to create new roles for themselves, or find a way to game the system, generally are eventually defeated because this can only be sustained for so long (hence Stringer and Omar die, Avon goes to jail, McNulty and Bunny get fired, etc.). I tend to think that the difference between Carcetti and Royce eventually becomes almost imperceptible, though the reason Carcetti becomes Royce is because of exceptional external circumstances.

I tend to think in terms of scientific principles, and I mean this basically as a metaphor rather than an actual statement of fact. But basically any process is going to increase entropy; it is unavoidable. Entropy is not intrinsically bad, but it's intrinsically associated with decay and death. Sometimes the things that decay are bad things that should have died. But ultimately any structure needs a constant flow of "free energy" in in order to maintain it and not collapse. Baltimore is a dying city, and part of that is that there are very few people with any real degree of "free energy" with which to enact change to help prevent the structures from collapsing. I think of it this way: Carcetti may want initially to hire a Daniels and not a Valchek, but because the amount of room with which to navigate the system and still keep his job is limited, he has to do the "easier" thing, the thing which requires lower energy (/commitment/resources), rather than the thing that requires more energy (/commitment/resources). This goes on every level -- up to and including Jimmy who has to make the cost-benefit analysis of whether to drink or not, when he has a finite amount of internal resources for coping with the stresses of his job and he can only really maintain his commitment to sobriety when he's on the beat rather than in homicide or major crimes, and is dedicating fewer of his internal resources to a grand fight against the entire system.