I've started watching The Wire on DVD a little more than a year ago, on the recommendation of everyone of my friends that had seen it in the past. I'm a cop show buff and according to viewers of The Wire, I couldn't call myself a cop show buff unless I gave it a try at least. I resisted for a while. I didn't want to give it to the hype machine, who had befailed me so many times in the past. The show has such a polarizing value that you can be one of its followers or on the hater camp, who pretends the show is too thick and complex for its own good, losing characters in the crazy plotlines.
After watching season one in a single week-end, I thought The Wire was an above average police drama who, despite being over-intellectual and feeling heavy, could keep a grit and a fresh approach to storytelling so it could keep me as one of its viewers. I learned to appreciate Lester's wits, Prez's tireless will, Daniels' righetousness, Bubbles's struggle and Daniels' righteousness. It's really in season two that David Simon's talent is starting to show. A whole new storyline came in clashing with the already existing one of Lieutenant Daniels' unit against the Barksdale Organization. It's during season two that the viewer will start to understand the complexity of Baltimore's drug trade through The Greek, Spyros Vondopoulos, Proposition Joe and Frank Sobotka.
For season three, David Simon brings back the heartless gangster from season one Stringer Bell and gives him the center stage. Simon took it to another level and dug into the human side of the drug trade. With focus on the friendship it between Bell and his childhood friend, kingpin Avon Barksdale, you grow an understanding of the golden prison Baltimore gangsters are building for themselves. It's not about cops and robbers anymore, it's about two worlds growing within the same city. Two universes where rules aren't the same and the clashes of cultures that happen within the same nation, the same cities. In academic talk, you can call The Wire a micro-management approach to socio-political segregation, but it's even more than that. The fires of anger burned under David Simon's fingers as he crafted some of the most tortured, human and beautiful characters in History of television. Hell in History of everything.
I finished season four yesterday. Among the fans of The Wire (which I count myself in), it's considered as by far, the best of them five. I agree. Season Four is, without the shadow of a doubt, one of the finest works of fiction I've ever read, watched, lived, experienced. Critics abide. Season Four follows Pryszbylewski, who left the police after an internal affairs incident, into his new career as a math teacher in Edward-Tilghman middle school. Over there we'll meet Michael, Namond, Randy and Duquan, four friends who will get separated by the hardships of West Baltimore's ghetto. Innocent and pure, they will witness the horrors put by new drug lord Marlo Stanfield, taking over their district with the zeal and efficiency of any historical dictator.
My favorite part had to be the awkward, silent bond that formed in between Chris Partlow (Stanfield's main enforcer) and young Michael Lee. First seen as a silent, cold and efficient killer, David Simon will unfold Partlow as a very smart person with a personnal sense of justice and belonging. Season Four is a life raft where survivors are haning on, but passengers keep being knocked overboard into West Baltimore's ocean, by the new storm named Marlo Stanfield. Of course there are still cops and robbers. Lester Fremon takes the center stage again, back on homicide, he's on the trail of Marlo Stanfield and his mysterious takeover of West Baltimore. He took over the whole territory without dropping a single body in the street, so Baltimore's finest gets on the trail of his mysterious rise to power.
But cop work isn't the center stage anymore. It's about how the institution's rigid views are befailing people and ruining their lives. How a simple gesture can save or doom a person. How humans can survive day-to-day to a war that's not in the papers. I'm going to watch Season Five soon, convinced already that The Wire is one of the greatest work of contemporary fiction ever written. Artists such as Richard Price, Dennis Lehane, George Pelecanos, Ed Burns, Ernest Dickerson and Brad Anderson have collaborated with David Simon over the years to create this larger-than-life version of Baltimore's own hell.
Watch it, it's worth the time and the involvement.
