The Wire

The Wire is quite a show; it's Stearns and my treat in the evening (we're borrowing the first season from Myrrh and Frankincense's brother, who also owns the third season, but I'm not sure what we're going to do about finding the second, the fourth and the fifth!).

What is most remarkable to me so far (as early in the experience as it is for me) is the way in which the bad guys are not all bad and the good guys are very far from good much of the time.

There is Bubbles, a drug addict/bum who would do anything for his friend. Even while he's teaching his friend to make counterfeit money in order to feed their addiction, there's something very pure and loving in Bubbles. You can see his desire to shake his drug addiction, and yet the way in which it has power over him.

There is Wallace, 16-year-old drug dealer who dropped out of school in eighth grade. He takes care of his (countless!) little siblings and is obviously intelligent (he tells one of other drug dealers that Alexander Hamilton was not a president when he makes a comment about "dead white guys on money"). When a tip Wallace passes up the chain of command leads to someone being killed, he begins to be very troubled by what he's involved in.

There are policemen who are idiots and horrible men and who drunkenly and unlawfully injure the drug dealers. And there's always politics--the [good?] man in charge of the whole operation hides the bad stuff that the cops who work for him do, while disciplining them privately. McNulty himself is a terrible father--he uses his kids to help him with the case in ways that put them in danger. (McNulty is an interesting variant on the single detective--he's divorced and so single, but with complicated family relationships that he attempts to negotiate.)

Here are experts from an interview with David Simon, who seems like quite a character (in the second quotation, he goes into the relationship of The Wire to Greek tragedy and the role of modern institutions in the show):

"...So I made an improbable and in many ways unplanned transition from journalist/author to TV producer. It was not a predictable transformation and I am vaguely amused that it actually happened. If I had a plan, it was to grow old on the Baltimore Sun’s copy desk, bumming cigarettes from young reporters and telling lies about what it was like working with H. L. Mencken and William Manchester."
...

"We’re stealing instead from an earlier, less-traveled construct—the Greeks—lifting our thematic stance wholesale from Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides to create doomed and fated protagonists who confront a rigged game and their own mortality. The modern mind—particularly those of us in the West—finds such fatalism ancient and discomfiting, I think. We are a pretty self-actualized, self-worshipping crowd of postmoderns and the idea that for all of our wherewithal and discretionary income and leisure, we’re still fated by indifferent gods, feels to us antiquated and superstitious. ... But instead of the old gods, The Wire is a Greek tragedy in which the postmodern institutions are the Olympian forces. It’s the police department, or the drug economy, or the political structures, or the school administration, or the macroeconomic forces that are throwing the lightning bolts and hitting people in the ass for no decent reason."