I’d been a fan of the show since the beginning of the second season. I was fortunate enough to be stuck home one weekend with a bad cold and HBO OnDemand. I watched the entire first season straight through and was extremely frustrated when I could only watch three episodes of the second. Of all the shows I’ve been a devoted fan, includikng Six Feet Under, Carnivale & Deadwood, none has truly gripped me as much as The Wire and none of those have I rewatched as often.
The most ringing endorsement I ever heard of the show came from an actual low-level stree-thug drug dealer I happened to strike up a conversation with in NYC. We both loved the show for the same reasons, and he was just as taken aback as I was in the writers’ ability to show the true nature of crime and punishment in a major U.S. city, along with all the messy connections, ironies and motivations that the ‘good’ guys and ‘bad’ guys are entangled in.
HBO should be applauded for giving the show a fifth season. The show’s creator, David Simon, has always had a five season arc in mind, the first dealing directly with the drug trade, the second with the death of the working class and it’s intersection with more criminal elements, the third with politics, fourth is education and the fifth will zero in on the media.
I firmly believe that The Wire is not only the best show on TV, it’s the best show that’s ever aired on American television and one of the best examples of storytelling in any medium. You have to give credit to HBO’s execs for greenlighting the show in the first place, then allowing it to tell its story of institutional failure for five seasons. This is a series that is ignored by the award shows, pulls mediocre ratings, makes absolutely no concessions to viewers’ desire for clean, happy endings, and only in its fourth season garned widespread critical acclaim.
Thankfully the DVD medium exists, because that is how The Wire’s legacy will live on in the future. It’s one of just a handful of series that deserves the kind of academic scrutiny usually reserved for books and films. You can interpret Season 3 on a surface, literal level, as a modern greek tragedy, or even better, as an extended metaphor for America’s occupation of Iraq and the war on terror. While Hollywood movies like the recent “Freedom Writers” would have you believe that all it takes is one scrappy, idealistic white teacher to save inner-city schools, last season showed how powerless one person really is in the face of destructive homes, disastrous public policies and gross administrative incompetence. The Wire lives in the gray areas that most of us would rather pretend didn’t exist, and takes down that ridiculous notion of the American Dream in the process. Thanks for making the effort to bring The Wire to a greater audience, because this is a show that needs to be seen.
You hit the nail on the head. David Simon said on the commentary of season 1 that the show is about how people are effected by institutions, those in the middle, those on either side. And they have found some powerful stories, from the “pawns” of the drug trade to the “kings” of the political corruption.
I’m just wondering when the fifth season will begin