Wire Torture

With hoops season having wound down, we're slipping into that time of the year when I don't have anything to watch on tv. ESPN shows nothing but baseball, the NBA, and Mel Kiper, and there's very little on regular tv that's worth a damn. Happily, I have a pile of Netflix DVD's from back before basketball season started, and I watched a bunch of episodes of The Wire.

Well, most of a bunch of episodes, anyway. The third disc for Season One had a glitch, right at the very end of Episode Nine. Just as things were reaching a climax, the picture went all pixelated, and the sound disappeared, and things didn't come back to normal until after the crucial bit of action had passed. I wound up needing to look up that episode guide in order to find out what happened (it's very detailed, so don't look at it if you're sensitive to spoilers).

I've still got two episodes to go before the end of the first season (and if you spoil me for later events, Kate will kill you with her brain), but I thought I should take a moment here to plus the series, which really is excellent. Detailed reasons (with minimal spoilers) why you should watch are below the fold.

The short pitch for the series would be "It's Homicide: Life on the Street, only on cable, so they can say 'fuck.'" The creative team behind the show incorporates some of the crew that did the critically acclaimed show for NBC, and it's got a little of the same feel-- an ensemble cast, slick use of music, a focus on the petty and squalid side of crime. It's got a broader scope, though, covering both criminals and cops, and they get to be a little more graphic, being on HBO.

It's also very complex-- not just in the plotting (which is certainly very complicated), but also in the characters. Nobody is entirely good or bad. As somebody recommending the show said, it's one of the rare shows that treats poor urban African-American criminals as human beings deserving of respect. And while it takes numerous shots at politicians and schemers among the police, when the chips are down, some characters who seem to exist only to thwart the protagonists turn out to be very good cops, in their own way.

Two scenes from the first season that really sum up the best points of the show:

1) In Episode Three, one of the mid-level drug dealers comes across two of his underlings playing checkers with chess pieces. He proceeds to explain the rules of chess to them in street terms: The King as the head of the organization, the Queen as a "bad bitch," the rooks as the stash houses (one of the underlings objects that houses don't move, but he points out that they shift the stash several times a week), the pawns as the street-level dealers.

When he explains that a pawn that makes it all the way across the board gets to turn into another type of piece, one of the underlings sees it as a metaphor for his own advancement. "Nah," says the dealer, "the pawns mostly get killed quick." There's an awkward silence, then the underling comes back with "'Less they some smart motherfucking pawns."

It's a terrifically well-done scene, the sort of thing that could easily become really campy and insulting. As it is, though, watching the game click into place for the underlings is fun, and the moment when they realize where they really stand is very effective.

2) In Episode Four, the main protagonist and his partner are sent to work a cold crime scene that may be connected to the drug gang. The murder they're invesitgating was described in chilling detail earlier in the episode by the character who did it, and it's fascinating to watch the detectives reconstruct the series of events, getting every detail right, and finding the evidence that the previous detectives had missed.

The best part, though, is that the only dialogue is variants of the word "fuck." The detectives walk around muttering "Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck fuck," and uncover key facts with a satisfied "Motherfucker." The actors do a fantastic job of communicating what's going on without saying anything outright, and you get a powerful sense of their competence, and the bond between them. These guys are very good at their job, and they work well enough together that they don't need to talk to get the job done.

Again, it's a wonderful bit of film-making.

Those are the absolute highlights, but there are great little moments like that throughout the series. Everybody in the large cast gets a chance to shine, from the lowest junkie to the most conniving politician. The subject matter is occasionally grim, and the characters all have their flaws, but it's compelling television, and the next two seasons are going on the Netflix queue. If you like cop shows, particularly Homicide, it's well worth giving The Wire a look.

But watch out for the disc with a glitch at the end of Episode Nine, because not knowing what went down there really kind of sucks.