Personally, and I think I’m not so different from most people who say things like “The Wire is the best show in television history,” I came to it rather late—only starting the first season on dvd as the fourth season wrapped up on HBO. Needless to say, I was completely caught up (having watched the fourth season via bittorrent) within only a few weeks. I devoured the show, as, I think, most people who rent/borrow the DVDs do.
Many of my friends got to know the show under similar circumstances, and the arrival of the fifth and final season provided a dilemma. Would we be able to handle watching a show in such unreasonable chunks as an hour a week? Leaked episodes on the internet, screener DVDs, and getting to watch the week’s episode six days early on OnDemand sort of solved the problem, but, to my knowledge, no one has seen the entire fifth season yet.
Yet this season has also been greeted with piles and piles of publicity. It’s been impossible to avoid posts about the show. From watching the show with actual gangsters to having Nick Hornby interview David Simon to linguists discussing pronoun usage in Baltimore to David Simon’s responding to blog posts about the show to—forget it… there have been tons of articles, and here’s a comprehensive list of them.
In short, the chattering classes were excited about the final season of the best show ever, and The Wire was getting unprecedented publicity…
…and now the season is falling flat for many people. The general consensus is that the show has flattened, lost subtlety, and turned into just a huge revenge tale (Simon’s revenge on the Sun for buying him out. This standard reading, then, had become so pervasive, that, as Ezra Klein shows us unintentionally, even the various contributors to The American Prospect can’t really shake their readings of the show out of this narrow, predefined set of parameters in their group blog, WireTAP.
Now, I clearly think the various naysayers are dead wrong with their complaints, but I don’t want to take up space with that. Instead, if you read the WireTAP bit, having already seen episode 4, you will know that many of the complaints they make get addressed in that same episode.
So this makes me wonder, then, about precisely what proportion of Wire viewers are like me, watching it on a per-week basis for the first time this month. Since we’re used to seeing the show a season at a time (more or less), we’re used to withholding on critique until the season is done. Simon has not let us down in the past, tying all the pieces together (where they need to be) by the finale.
Yet now that we are left to ingest the show in smaller portions, that faith in the product gets thrown out of the window. These Wire posts are almost laughably bad, seeing as they engage in equal parts useless whining and ludicrous wishcasting. Everyone (and this is maybe clearest in the more ad hoc articles like WireTAP) geeks out and becomes a fanboy about the show, but the writers then remind themselves that, no, wait, they are serious bloggers and not fanboys, so they throw in the same exact complaints and sound, somehow, hopelessly out of the loop.
So how much, then, of the negativity of the response to the season could the result of, on the one hand, a desire to seem slightly contrarian/critical (”hip”), and, on the other hand, a simple function of the fact that people are having to engage with the show in a different manner?
Update: After sleeping on it, I thought up two other reasons for the complaints. First, a lot of the complainers are, in some fashion, journalists. And they are, importantly, still journalists, whereas Simon hasn’t played that part in over a decade. As a result, the complainers can come from a position of expertise in complaining about whether the Sun plot is realistic or too heavy-handed. The writers at Slate, for example, probably know better how a newspaper is dealing with the explosion of the internet than they do about how to deal with a stick-up boy.
Second, Simon strikes me approaching his critique (and he seems to be explicit about this) as, quite simply, a critique of capitalism itself. Many complainers seem to brush aside the deeper political indictment of the role of late capitalism in Baltimore’s decline. After all, being good, progressive liberals, they’re heavily dependent on capitalism’s continued hegemony. They can appreciate the local critiques–of the schools, of failed law enforcement policy–but when forced to see the critique as far more structural, down to our own very system for organizing our society economically, they move from being champions like Gus to the needling particularists like Whiteying.
Tags: capitalism, David Simon, Ezra Klein, journalism, television, the man, The Wire
January 27th, 2008 at 0:33
Well but except the show *is* doing some stuff that it wasn’t previously doing, specifically, getting kind of dramatic. The critique of journalism I don’t have a problem with. But the fact that all the major characters seem to be suddenly all reckoning at once with the essence of who they are, that’s a new, and less realistic, development. For a show that’s always been hailed as authentic, that’s a big deal. I’m not saying it won’t work out in the end, just that there’s nothing wrong with being worried about it, it looks now.
January 27th, 2008 at 14:54
“It’s morning in Baltimore, Lester.”
There is one problem with that as the answer to why all the characters are having simultaneous crises like this, and that is that over a year has passed since Carcetti was elected. But I think it points a way: the drama is narrative quickening, leading up to the climax of the show (which is, then, why the newspaper plot might be necessary for the final season: it’s a great plot accelerant—McNulty’s vast transgressions will only get caught, he’s practically suggesting, by a snooping press).
As the story gets closer to the end, the players all get more and more desperate, as though acting in full consciousness of the narrative boundaries of the series. Whether that is a legit explanation, I do not know, but that is how I see/excuse it.