While I was watching television last night, I couldn't help but wonder: is HBO's slightly irritating high-brow marketing strategy to blame for The Wire's piddling ratings share? (I'm convinced, by the way, that the marketing strategy was pitched something like this: "We have a great show on our hands: it's energetic, emotional, entertaining - I know! Let's only focus on talking about how complicated and impossible to follow it is. Then we'll snag that coveted 35-to-pretentious demo. Victory!")
The reason I couldn't help but wonder was this: I was watching American Gladiators. Which had an extremely promising Nielsen debut on Sunday night and probably had nearly as many viewers on Monday. So in between the important intellectual tasks of trying to figure out if the Travelator is fixed or exactly how old Wolf is, my brain was doing something like this: American Gladiators, many viewers! The Wire, not so many viewers! American Gladiators, many viewers! The Wire, not so many viewers!
Eventually, the solution to The Wire's rating problems became clear:
morituri te salutamus
play or get played
I'm finally emerging from a three-week cluster-fuck of publicity, international travel, and familial interaction, each of which exhaust me to a similar degree, which is to say completely. Next week I'll have belated dispatches from Budapest, thoughts on Hungarian, and a sneak peek at the awesomely cracked-out 2008 calendar I got from my local grocery store.
Nothing, however, deserves my first-post-of-the-new-year slot so much as this: The Best Show on Television. The fifth and final season of The Wire premieres this Sunday on HBO, and I feel that it's my duty as someone who typically watches upwards of 80 hours of television a week to do my own small grass-roots part and remind people to set their TiVos or DVRs or VCRs or even - gasp! - to make a note to actually sit down at 9pm and watch the thing like back in the old days. (And if you have HBO OnDemand, you'll find that the season premiere is already available for viewing.)
The Wire is so much better than anything else on television that some might consider it an insult to call it mere television. But I'm Midwestern, earnest, and full of a surprising amount of optimism after the results of last night's caucus (on the Democratic side, in any case), so I choose instead to think that The Wire is one of the few shows that actually does my idea of "television" justice.
Initially, I resisted The Wire as a starlet eschews sobriety. Which surprises even me, in retrospect, because the great Homicide: Life on the Street (another David Simon and Ed Burns project) was a defining show for me growing up. True story: I once wrote a short story for my freshman English class about an imagined interrogation between a serial killer and Andre Braugher's Detective Pembleton. But in the early years of The Wire's run, I was far too emotionally invested in Six Feet Under to consider trying out another of HBO's serial offerings, no matter how sentimental I might have been about the series creators.
Then, last year, the fourth season of The Wire really, finally started to garner some serious mainstream attention. Which, for me, had the opposite effect of that intended: I was just plain put off. I felt like I was being force-fed by ostentatiously liberal TV critics, the kind of critics who were just so thrilled to be championing a show about the inner city, because that made them so fucking real, yo. So many of those pieces felt to me like lady-doth-protests-too-much pleas by the super-white and super-privileged. Like, "We watch The Wire every week! With our black friends - of whom we have many, by the way!"
My response was something along the lines of "Fuck that, I already sat through Crash because of you motherfuckers - and I have me some Wife Swap to watch."
Then, this summer, something amazing happened: my beloved St. Louis Cardinals started sucking. Which opened up a lot of free time for me. So I finally picked up the first season of The Wire.
And: holy shit. When I say Best Show on Television, I am not using hyperbole.
Watching The Wire is like watching a 55-minute master class - in acting, in writing, and in the righteous fury of the disenfranchised. And it's not just watchable for its impeccably researched look into the nuts and bolts of the drug trade or law enforcement or city politics. What makes the show so uniquely compelling is its startling depth of human compassion coupled with its clear-eyed understanding of the inherent brutality of the system, a system that will grind you up and spit you out, no matter what your intentions, no matter what your excuses. You don't just watch the characters on The Wire, you love them - no matter how flawed they might be. And you will rage and rage against the forces that keep these characters so impossibly down.
Because this show is as real as it gets, and if you don't respond on a visceral level to that realness, then I might suggest that you double-check to make sure you're not some sort of early model replicant.
Case in point: my favorite character is Omar Little (no relation), a gay stick-up artist/legend/poet/assassin. The law would label him a murderer. And a lesser show would make him a villain. But on The Wire, Omar takes his mother to church every Sunday. He treats Butchie, the blind bar owner, like his own father. And he loves Honey Nut Cheerios. Every episode, I root for Omar. But I don't root for his redemption necessarily. Nor do I necessarily cheer him on in his more criminal behavior. I just want him alive and living free and honest. In season four he argues that the truth means something, telling Detective (The Bunk) Moreland that "a man's got to have a code." I want him to have the chance to keep on living by that code.
But, in the end, what The Wire has done for me is much more than turn me on to a bad-ass, brilliant homosexual. Which, since this is me we're talking about, is pretty much the definition of shooting fish in a barrel. (Related aside: I would argue that the privileged white version of Omar is Greg House. Discuss.) What the Wire has done for me is, in fact, the greatest gift I could ask for: it got me thinking again.
Let me explain, in the aforementioned earnest Midwestern style:
I grew up in St. Louis, which, along with Detroit, is right up there with Baltimore in the competition for most fucked-up urban environment. Whenever the year's crime stats come out, friends and acquaintances invariably ask me what it was like for me living in what the numbers seem to indicate is basically an out-and-out war zone. Here's the thing, though: I hardly saw that side of the city.
I was born and raised just outside the city limits, in a place called University City. Many might argue (and many have argued) that U-City isn't nearly as sheltered as other St. Louis suburbs. After all, it does abut the city proper, and it's also an area that seems to be a poster city for racial diversity - it's about half black and half white. In St. Louis county, it has a reputation for being progressive and open-minded and even a little bit dangerous. When I was in elementary school, the mother of a classmate once expressed concern to my mother that we lived in an area with so many potential "criminal elements." (I leave it to you to read between those lines.)
So usually, U-City residents are crown-to-toe top-full with pride for their vibrant, diverse community. President Clinton even came to speak in front of our city hall when I was in high school, praising all of us for coexisting so well. Yay, us!
Except for this one small detail. There are two main east-west corridors in U-City: Delmar and Olive boulevards. North of Olive, the white population falls to nearly nothing. South of Delmar, the same thing happens to the black population.
In other words - in honest words - U-City is in fact a poster city not for diverse coexistence, but instead for the country-wide trend of micro-segregation that county-level census data so cleanly covers up.
What I thought was better was actually worse: because I had no excuse, no excuse whatsoever for being so blind to the realities of my city. I thought that I understood the city because I was in a nominally diverse environment, because I had friends of many colors, because I played basketball with a bunch of girls from the city in some seriously shitty neighborhoods. But the truth is this: I lived a mile away from urban heartbreak for eighteen years and was able to pretty much ignore everything that was going on around me - the crime, the poverty, the drugs, the deteriorating schools.
And then - then! - I moved to New York. And once again praised myself for living in diverse areas, moving from nearly inner-city to outer-borough. And I was doing the exact same thing, keeping my head down while wrapping my progressive neighborhood identity around me like a complimentary PBS-pledge-drive muffler.
It took The Wire to give me a good, hard kick in the hypocrisy.
Now don't get me wrong - I'm not saying that I'm now, like, down with the thug life or whatever. I don't run a drug-outreach program or write about the institutional inequalities in the nation's schools or lobby for changes in the nation's foster-care programs. I write about language and books and television. Let's be honest: in the grand scheme of things, I'm just another sheltered, privileged asshole. But now I'm seeing things I wasn't seeing before. I'm a little more aware.
And I'm thinking more and more - which is what, in my heart of hearts, I believe the best television - the best art - should do.
Thinking isn't doing; thinking isn't changing. But it's a good first step.
So make a New Year's resolution and watch the goddamn show already. Because if you think being a mile away from the realities of the American City and still managing to ignore them is reprehensible, recalculate that equation based on the distance from your couch to your TV and see how you feel then.