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By: Matt Fay
Warning - If you have never seen HBO's The Wire, stop right now, go to your local video store and rent or buy the first four seasons on DVD, take the rest of the week off work, watch every episode, find a TV with ONDEMAND, watch all of this final season's episodes. If this is not reasonable to do, then read on.
"There ain't no back in the day. Ain't no nostalgia. Just the street and the game"
-Cheese, The Wire
This past Sunday marked the final episode of one of the finest television programs to ever grace the small screen. The Wire was more than just a television show, entertaining as it was. It was a warning, a “wake-up call,” a demonstration of a self-evident and self-replicating cycle of violence in the streets and corruption in politics. It was an indictment of a system that can be seen in every part of American politics and culture. Set in Baltimore, The Wire, could just as easily been showcasing New York; Los Angeles; Chicago; or Washington, D.C. But Baltimore provided a unique window into urban life in America through the eyes of street cops, detectives, “bosses,” dockworkers, drug kingpins, “corner boys,” “hoppers,” “soldiers,” junkies, teachers, school administrators, students, and journalists. Every story, unique in and of itself, was connected to one another. Each character had a connection to the rest of the story, even in a peripheral way.
When The Wire debuted in 2002 I knew of only one other person who had heard of it, let alone seen it. I stumbled across the show, more or less, by accident, but I was immediately hooked into the world I was introduced to by Detective Jimmy McNulty; the drunken, rabble-rousing, womanizing, ever-passionate, all or nothing, police detective; who would be the center of this tale, no matter how long the list of characters too numerous to name. McNulty’s personal failings, women and booze, never tempered his passion for his job, though they would often get in his way. “He was true, honest-to-God, murder police,” Sgt. Jay Landsman would opine at the faux-wake that would serve as McNulty, and fellow detective Lester Freeman’s, retirement party in the final episode.
While almost always at the center, McNulty was just a small part of the larger story. Of all the quotes by disparate characters following the show’s opening credits, one by Zenobia, a peripheral character from the fourth season sums up each individual story. “We got our thing, but it’s just part of the big thing,” was her way of describing the life of the “corner boys,” youths whose job it was to hold the drugs on the street corners to keep the older offenders from facing charges. Everything has its own system, its own bureaucracy. The police, the schools, city hall, all the way down to the drug dealers and junkies each had their own system, their own rules. Each system is, in its own way, a part of the larger system. There were those willing to buck their system, whether it was McNulty and Freeman creating a fake serial killer in the final season in order to secure money and manpower to take down ruthless drug kingpin Marlo Stansfield; or Omar, a homosexual Robin Hood-in-the-hood, rougher than the roughest “roughneck,” stealing from the same kingpins the cops were trying so hard to take down.
The characters, and the interwoven stories between them, showed a world that is little seen by some, and even less understood by most. There was a certain honor in the anger Avon Barksdale, the first ruthless drug kingpin the Wire exposed its viewers to, displayed when his soldiers, in an attempt to kill Omar, broke the longstanding “Sunday Truce” and its prohibition against violence on a “Church day.” There was a certain respect for “hopper” turned “soldier” Bodie as he defends his corner against a Marlo Stansfield hit squad. It was easy to feel for Frank Sobotka as he turned to illeagal means to save his dockworkers union in the second season or police Major “Bunny” Colvin’s “legalization” of drugs in an unoccupied area of his district to reduce crime in the more populated areas in the third season. There was an admirable idealism in white City Councilman Tommy Carcetti’s run for mayor in an essentially “black” city, and it was heartbreaking to see his idealism corrupted by his ambition to become governor, where he could “…do more good.” There was nothing harder than watching the next generation pigeon-holed by a well-meaning federal program like No Child Left Behind and its standardized testing, and watching frustrated teachers being forced to “teach the test” pushed on them by some Washington, D.C. bureaucrat, instead of teaching their students something that would help them escape the life on the corner already set out before them.
There is a redemptive quality to The Wire. Bubbles, the junkie/snitch with the big heart, finally accepts his role in a young man’s death and celebrates his one year anniversary sober. Kima Greggs, the conscience of the police department, juxtaposed against McNulty’s maverick image, not willing to falsely identify one of Avon Barksdale’s soldiers who shot her while working undercover in the first season, exhorting Bunk Moreland to tell McNulty, “She’s real police, Jimmy.” There is McNulty, having caught a mentally disturbed copycat to his fake serial killer, refusing to pin the fake “murders” on him even if it would be politically expedient to do so.
In the show’s final montage the circle begins again. Young Detective Sydnor complains to a judge in a repeat of the show’s opening episode where McNulty complained to the same judge setting in motion first season’s course of events. There is Dukie, the young man who could never make it as a corner boy, now following Bubbles’ path to self-destruction. There is Michael, the reluctant former Marlo Stansfield soldier, now playing Omar’s Robin Hood role. And there is pre-adolesecent Kenard, the budding sociopath responsible for Omar’s killing. Will the cycle continue to play itself out?
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