Now that the dust from the writers' strike has finally settled and programmes are slowly limping back on to our screens, one thing seems clear: most of the shows launched this season are wounded, in some cases fatally reports Sarah Hughes...
We already know the high profile casualties: NBC's big-budget Bionic Woman remake failed to impress, ABC's Sex And The City wannabe Cashmere Mafia was all high heels and no substance, the same channel's Big Shots proved that some ideas are best kept in the locker room, while CBS's Viva Laughlin still gives me nightmares months later - and I only watched 30 minutes of one episode.
But there are smaller casualties too, shows which remain as US TV parlance has it "on the bubble" in that no-man's land between renewal and cancellation. Some such as the execrable Women's Murder Club and the misguided Wild At Heart remake Life Is Wild deserve to go, others such as CBS's smart vampire drama, Moonlight, and the amusing if unfocused Reaper should, but probably won't, survive.
Nor is it plain sailing for the shows that will live to fight another season. The likes of Life, Dirty Sexy Money and Chuck survived because of the writers' strike, not despite it. In a longer season, declining audiences and uneven plotting would almost certainly have seen them cancelled before June. Even Pushing Daisies, which received largely positive reviews in the US, was far from an unqualified hit, its whimsy repulsing as many as it delighted.
It was a largely similar story for cable TV, with John From Cincinnati, In Treatment and Tell Me You Love Me all firing blanks for HBO, although Flight of the Conchords was a deserving hit. Showtime, perhaps wisely, held fire on all new shows bar Californication.
Indeed of all the new series that burst on our screens so brightly last September only two made a real impact: AMC's Mad Men provided the season's one bit of real quality and proved that there is still room out there for powerful, intelligent and thoughtful drama, while the most talked about new show of the year in the US was the frothy, fluffy and disturbingly popular Gossip Girl, which made the covers of Entertainment Weekly and New York Magazine, was dissected in the New Yorker and the New York Times and may yet change the way in which we view television - it was watched more on internet downloads than on regular TV.
The writers' strike also had one further consequence - it may well have helped to loosen the stranglehold US imports have long had on British television. The truncated season, coupled with the fact that many of the most hyped new shows failed to deliver, has meant that many of these imports received lukewarm UK receptions at best.
Yes, there are still some great US shows out there - Battlestar Galactica's final season is proving suitably doom-ridden while The Wire's last episodes proved that it is possible to go out on your own terms, Lost has recovered its mojo, Friday Night Lights remains the best drama that sadly no one has seen, 30 Rock continues to prove that Tina Fey is the queen of US comedy - but the days when every quality piece of programming seemed to come from the US are, you could think, edging towards an end, not least because of budget cuts for foreign acquisitions. Now all that's required is for British television to come up with some high quality homegrown programming...
Showing posts with label The Wire. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Wire. Show all posts
Tuesday, 6 May 2008
Tuesday, 11 March 2008
Putting all the pieces together
For five seasons, critics have worshiped The Wire—and lamented that more people don't. Newsweek's Devin Gordon marks the passing of what may be TV's best drama ever...
We ' re building something here. And all the pieces matter.
—Det. Lester Freamon
About 3,000 miles away from Hollywood, in a crusty dive called Kavanagh's on the corner of East Lexington and Guilford Avenue in downtown Baltimore one of the most highly praised dramas on television is coming to an end. The bar is set up for a policeman's wake—a framed photograph, rosary beads, a bottle of Jameson—and soon, in this smothering August heat, the place will be filled with large men pretending to be drunk. It is the last scene on the last day of filming on the last season of The Wire, the HBO series that started out in 2002 as a drama about a single West Baltimore detective unit but has evolved, with furious ambition, into the story of an entire city in decline. The show is legendary here—many of the characters are based on people plucked from the city's recent past—and the cast and crew are often treated like folk heroes.
On the sidewalk outside Kavanagh's, the creator of The Wire, former Baltimore Sun crime reporter David Simon, a salty, pugnacious guy with a bald head, thick chest and the kind of pale pink skin that catches fire in any kind of sun, chats with a black teenager with a gold grill in his teeth and dreadlocks spilling out from underneath a lopsided Baltimore Ravens cap. He came by to give Simon a T shirt that he'd made. "Did you see this?" Simon asks a visiting journalist. "This is what they're selling in West Baltimore now." The shirt features a photo of one of the show's most fabled characters, a female assassin named Snoop, played by former Baltimore gang member Felicia Pearson, who spent six years in prison on a juvenile murder conviction. Very few people watch The Wire—about 4 million per episode, about half what the mighty Sopranos drew—and this pleases Simon enormously because it appeals to his underdog instincts, and his conviction that bare-knuckled authenticity isn't for everyone. And besides, he's got the fans he really wants. "I'd rather have the allegiance of these people than all the viewers in the world," he says. "Mainstream America has 100 shows to love. The other America has this one. I'm proud of that. That's why this"—he holds up the shirt—"makes me so happy. Because you know what this is? This is subversive."
If you've never seen an episode of The Wire, which began its final season on Jan. 6, by now you're probably sick of hearing about what a fool you are for missing it. The show has become an object of worship among critics and culture snobs (Barack Obama told TV Guide that it's his favorite show) and they—OK, we—can be flat-out annoying in our zeal for it, as if there are only two types of people: enlightened fans of The Wire, and everyone else. Worse, with all our talk about the show's Dickensian cast of nearly 30 principal characters, its novelistic, episode-opening epigrams, its street-level patois and labyrinthine detail about city bureaucracy, we tend to make The Wire sound like homework. In fact, the show is riveting, infuriating and funny as hell. (In one scene last year, a schoolteacher locks his keys in his car and one of his 13-year-old students, already an accomplished car thief, helpfully jimmies the door open for him.) Baltimore's ruling class has complicated feelings about The Wire—there's more to their city, they complain, than crime and blight—but its embrace by Baltimore's underclass hints at its uncomfortable truth. "There is a sense around here that someone finally said, 'Your lives are worthy of the same degree of drama and meaning as beautiful housewives'," says Simon. "That's a simple thing, but it becomes profound. It becomes a bit of connective tissue between these two Americas that are going their separate ways."
We ' re building something here. And all the pieces matter.
—Det. Lester Freamon
About 3,000 miles away from Hollywood, in a crusty dive called Kavanagh's on the corner of East Lexington and Guilford Avenue in downtown Baltimore one of the most highly praised dramas on television is coming to an end. The bar is set up for a policeman's wake—a framed photograph, rosary beads, a bottle of Jameson—and soon, in this smothering August heat, the place will be filled with large men pretending to be drunk. It is the last scene on the last day of filming on the last season of The Wire, the HBO series that started out in 2002 as a drama about a single West Baltimore detective unit but has evolved, with furious ambition, into the story of an entire city in decline. The show is legendary here—many of the characters are based on people plucked from the city's recent past—and the cast and crew are often treated like folk heroes.
On the sidewalk outside Kavanagh's, the creator of The Wire, former Baltimore Sun crime reporter David Simon, a salty, pugnacious guy with a bald head, thick chest and the kind of pale pink skin that catches fire in any kind of sun, chats with a black teenager with a gold grill in his teeth and dreadlocks spilling out from underneath a lopsided Baltimore Ravens cap. He came by to give Simon a T shirt that he'd made. "Did you see this?" Simon asks a visiting journalist. "This is what they're selling in West Baltimore now." The shirt features a photo of one of the show's most fabled characters, a female assassin named Snoop, played by former Baltimore gang member Felicia Pearson, who spent six years in prison on a juvenile murder conviction. Very few people watch The Wire—about 4 million per episode, about half what the mighty Sopranos drew—and this pleases Simon enormously because it appeals to his underdog instincts, and his conviction that bare-knuckled authenticity isn't for everyone. And besides, he's got the fans he really wants. "I'd rather have the allegiance of these people than all the viewers in the world," he says. "Mainstream America has 100 shows to love. The other America has this one. I'm proud of that. That's why this"—he holds up the shirt—"makes me so happy. Because you know what this is? This is subversive."
If you've never seen an episode of The Wire, which began its final season on Jan. 6, by now you're probably sick of hearing about what a fool you are for missing it. The show has become an object of worship among critics and culture snobs (Barack Obama told TV Guide that it's his favorite show) and they—OK, we—can be flat-out annoying in our zeal for it, as if there are only two types of people: enlightened fans of The Wire, and everyone else. Worse, with all our talk about the show's Dickensian cast of nearly 30 principal characters, its novelistic, episode-opening epigrams, its street-level patois and labyrinthine detail about city bureaucracy, we tend to make The Wire sound like homework. In fact, the show is riveting, infuriating and funny as hell. (In one scene last year, a schoolteacher locks his keys in his car and one of his 13-year-old students, already an accomplished car thief, helpfully jimmies the door open for him.) Baltimore's ruling class has complicated feelings about The Wire—there's more to their city, they complain, than crime and blight—but its embrace by Baltimore's underclass hints at its uncomfortable truth. "There is a sense around here that someone finally said, 'Your lives are worthy of the same degree of drama and meaning as beautiful housewives'," says Simon. "That's a simple thing, but it becomes profound. It becomes a bit of connective tissue between these two Americas that are going their separate ways."
Simon and his writing staff, made up largely of urban-crime novelists such as George Pelecanos ("The Night Gardener") and Dennis Lehane ("Mystic River"), as well as old pals from the Sun, like Bill Zorzi, who spent 20 years covering courts, cops and city politics, are not optimistic people. The Wire is filled with revelations, but its authors aren't holding their breath waiting for a new day. "I think 'The Wire' is going into the archive as an artifact of where we were as a country when we fell on our a–– and became a second-rate society," says Simon from his trailer near the set, parked just across a courtyard from city hall. As he talks, the mayor's office looms over his shoulder through the window behind him. Each new season of The Wire has focused on a different organ in Baltimore's flat-lining civic physiology, with the aim of articulating "why an American city can no longer solve its problems," says Simon. Season one explored the justice system through the prism of a prolonged wiretap case against a powerful drug dealer named Avon Barksdale. Season two shifted focus to the city's waterfront, profiling its eroding community of blue-collar dockworkers. Season three examined city politics in the heat of a mayoral election, while the show's standout fourth season followed a group of boys through Baltimore's overmatched school system. "David has a social conscience, but he's never ax-grinding," says Dominic West, a British actor who plays combustible Det. Jimmy McNulty. "Very rarely in life are there out-and-out villains. People do things for reasons. And you see those reasons on this show."
In this fifth and final season, The Wire's probing eye focuses on the media, a subject that Simon knows intimately from his years as a newspaperman. The Baltimore Sun's leadership gave HBO permission to film in its newsroom, and in a scene during the first episode, a pair of actual Sun veterans—including Simon's wife, Laura Lippman, who no longer works at the paper—watch from the window as a fire blazes a mile or two away. After a minute, the paper's city editor, Augustus (Gus) Haynes (a superbly gruff Clark Johnson), comes over and suggests that maybe they should find out what's going on. "What kind of people stand around watching a fire? That's some shameful shit right here," Haynes says. The scene is vintage "Wire," delivering a bitter-pill message with a healthy dose of gallows humour. "The next and last argument we wanted to have," says Simon, explaining the season's media focus, "is about why nothing ever gets fixed. While the American empire slipped off its pedestal, what the fuck were we paying attention to?"
Serial killers, mostly. In one of the show's most grandiose storylines yet, a homicidal maniac with a thirst for homeless men is loose in Baltimore during season five—only not really, because the killer is actually a fiction created by McNulty and fed-up fellow Det. Lester Freamon (Clarke Peters). It's all a brazen publicity stunt designed to shame the mayor into funneling a few more pennies into a police force so strapped for cash that it had to shutter its wiretap investigation into a soft-spoken but brutal drug kingpin named Marlo Stanfield (Jamie Hector). As fanciful as the phony-killer plotline may sound, it is executed with The Wire's customary verisimilitude, and Simon's point is never far from the surface. The story is "very much a critique [of] the fixation that Americans have with the pornography of violence, as opposed to the root causes of violence," Simon wrote in a December e-mail. "We have zero interest in why the vast majority of violence actually happens and what might be done to address the issue. But give us a killer doing twisted shit or, better still, doing it to pretty white girls, and the media and its consumers lose all perspective." (Simon and his creative partner, Ed Burns, a former Baltimore cop and schoolteacher, have been declining all media interviews for months in deference to the ongoing Writers Guild of America strike; Simon agreed to answer follow-up questions about the new season for NEWSWEEK because the principal reporting for this story occurred prior to the strike.)
For all of Simon's passion on the subject of journalism—and maybe because of it—the fifth season of The Wire doesn't quite match the power of the fourth. Simon accepted a buyout from the Sun in 1995. Several more rounds of staff cuts have shrunk the paper's newsroom from about 450 reporters to fewer than 300, and Simon believes the reductions have crippled a proud institution. But fury has a way of flattening people into caricature, and some of the key personalities in Simon's fictional newsroom lack the lively mind and tangle of motivations that other characters on The Wire, even the rotten ones, possess in spades. A callow young reporter with ethics issues, played by Tom McCarthy, is almost robotic in his deceit, and the top editor who coddles him is a naive blowhard in prissy suspenders. Simon vigorously disputes this criticism, though to give him his full say would require spilling major plot points. He does point out, correctly, that "the vast majority" of his newsroom "is made of ordinary souls, professional and trying to find their way through ... I believe people in [real] newsrooms will recognize the dynamics and characters and issues throughout. If I'm wrong, you won't be the only guy I hear from." The character of Haynes, in particular, is a healthy antidote. On set, Johnson, who has also directed several episodes, calls Haynes "the editor that every reporter dreams of having," and Simon's fondness for him is clear: he gets all the best lines. "You know what a healthy newsroom is?" Haynes says at one point. "It's a magical place where people argue about everything, all the time."
The media storyline is just one of a dozen or so that The Wire will wrap up over the next three months. Old faces will reappear, including an imprisoned, though no less influential, Avon Barksdale ("I'm what you might call an authority figure around here"), and season two's elusive crime lord known as the Greek. When the finale airs in March, the culture will not convulse the way it did after the sudden end of The Sopranos, but fans of The Wire, who adamantly believe they've got the better show, are likely to feel a deeper, more personal sense of loss. Simon promises he won't pour salt in the wound with a Sopranos-style snap to black. "I actually thought that was a great ending," he says. "But this is a different show. We'll pay out what we've set in motion."
Across town from Kavanagh's, at a farmers market in the parking lot of the racetrack in Pimlico, a second unit is finishing up the last scene for a character named Bubbles, a homeless heroin addict who has struggled, with little success, to get clean since the first episode of The Wire. (Simon and Burns covered similar narrative terrain in 2000 with their Emmy-winning series for HBO, The Corner.) Bubbles is a figure of weakness and decency on the show, and his crushing ups and downs have made him into a fan favourite. Between takes, Andre Royo, the actor who plays Bubbles, breaks out a script of the final episode with the front page covered in signatures from the cast and crew—a parting gift to himself. "When my manager first got the call about this part, I didn't want to go in for it," Royo says. "A junkie snitch named Bubbles? I was upset, actually. I was, like, 'Are white people still doing that?' But to come from that moment, where I was in my life then, to this moment five years later—it's very emotional. This was my biggest break. Bubbles will stay in my heart forever."
Royo, like nearly every other actor on The Wire, had no high-profile credits before he joined the show—and hardly any since. Only the rakishly handsome Dominic West has been able to cross over into major movie work, playing supporting roles in a few "trashy films," as he calls them, such as "300" and "Mona Lisa Smile." Lance Reddick, a regular on The Wire, can now be seen doing Cadillac ads and bit parts on Numb3ers and CSI: Miami. After every season, Clarke Peters, who plays Freamon, gets back on a plane for London, where he lives and works as a stage actor. "Let me indict Hollywood as much as I can on this one," says Simon. "We have more working black actors in key roles than pretty much all the other shows on the air. And yet you still hear people claim they can't find good African-American actors. That's why race-neutral shows and movies turn out lily-white."
None of the actors on The Wire has ever been nominated for an Emmy. Overall, the show has earned just one nomination in four seasons. (Pelecanos and Simon, for writing. They lost.) What really steamed Simon, though, was a story two years ago in Emmy Magazine, the Academy's trade publication, about diversity in television. The story made no mention of The Wire. "Nothing," says Simon. "Not in the whole issue." The silent treatment from Hollywood, though, has cultivated a theatre-company camaraderie around the show, a nervy pride in what can be accomplished by unheralded artists in a supposed backwater like Baltimore. "You get a lot of cachet from being the underdog," says West. "And I rather enjoy that feeling—that you're a cult thing, a secret delight. That means a lot more than an Emmy." Simon is less diplomatic. "I don't give a fuck if we ever win one of their little trinkets. I don't care if they ever figure out we're here in Baltimore," he says. "Secretly, we all know we get more ink for being shut out. So at this point, we wanna be shut out. We wanna go down in flames together, holding hands all the way. It's fun. And it's a good way to go out—throwing them the finger from 3,000 miles away."
Further reading: Debating the Legacy of The Wire: Did Season Five Tarnish the Show That Invented the Dickensian Aspect Ratio?; One Last Long, Boozy Irish Wake for David Simon’s Accidental Masterpiece; Ten Questions Left Unanswered by the 'Wire' Finale; Actor Ptolemy Slocum on the Emotional Last Night of Shooting ‘The Wire'; Sternbergh on ‘The Wire’ Finale: The Anti-‘Sopranos’; David Simon Still Has Some Things to Say; 'The Wire' spins out a future that is believable if not exactly cathartic; The Wire': Goodbye, farewell and amen; Still Defiant: David Simon Caps Five Seasons of Unspooling The Wire; David Simon on cutting 'The Wire'
The Wire: The Last Word (HBO)
Serial killers, mostly. In one of the show's most grandiose storylines yet, a homicidal maniac with a thirst for homeless men is loose in Baltimore during season five—only not really, because the killer is actually a fiction created by McNulty and fed-up fellow Det. Lester Freamon (Clarke Peters). It's all a brazen publicity stunt designed to shame the mayor into funneling a few more pennies into a police force so strapped for cash that it had to shutter its wiretap investigation into a soft-spoken but brutal drug kingpin named Marlo Stanfield (Jamie Hector). As fanciful as the phony-killer plotline may sound, it is executed with The Wire's customary verisimilitude, and Simon's point is never far from the surface. The story is "very much a critique [of] the fixation that Americans have with the pornography of violence, as opposed to the root causes of violence," Simon wrote in a December e-mail. "We have zero interest in why the vast majority of violence actually happens and what might be done to address the issue. But give us a killer doing twisted shit or, better still, doing it to pretty white girls, and the media and its consumers lose all perspective." (Simon and his creative partner, Ed Burns, a former Baltimore cop and schoolteacher, have been declining all media interviews for months in deference to the ongoing Writers Guild of America strike; Simon agreed to answer follow-up questions about the new season for NEWSWEEK because the principal reporting for this story occurred prior to the strike.)
For all of Simon's passion on the subject of journalism—and maybe because of it—the fifth season of The Wire doesn't quite match the power of the fourth. Simon accepted a buyout from the Sun in 1995. Several more rounds of staff cuts have shrunk the paper's newsroom from about 450 reporters to fewer than 300, and Simon believes the reductions have crippled a proud institution. But fury has a way of flattening people into caricature, and some of the key personalities in Simon's fictional newsroom lack the lively mind and tangle of motivations that other characters on The Wire, even the rotten ones, possess in spades. A callow young reporter with ethics issues, played by Tom McCarthy, is almost robotic in his deceit, and the top editor who coddles him is a naive blowhard in prissy suspenders. Simon vigorously disputes this criticism, though to give him his full say would require spilling major plot points. He does point out, correctly, that "the vast majority" of his newsroom "is made of ordinary souls, professional and trying to find their way through ... I believe people in [real] newsrooms will recognize the dynamics and characters and issues throughout. If I'm wrong, you won't be the only guy I hear from." The character of Haynes, in particular, is a healthy antidote. On set, Johnson, who has also directed several episodes, calls Haynes "the editor that every reporter dreams of having," and Simon's fondness for him is clear: he gets all the best lines. "You know what a healthy newsroom is?" Haynes says at one point. "It's a magical place where people argue about everything, all the time."
The media storyline is just one of a dozen or so that The Wire will wrap up over the next three months. Old faces will reappear, including an imprisoned, though no less influential, Avon Barksdale ("I'm what you might call an authority figure around here"), and season two's elusive crime lord known as the Greek. When the finale airs in March, the culture will not convulse the way it did after the sudden end of The Sopranos, but fans of The Wire, who adamantly believe they've got the better show, are likely to feel a deeper, more personal sense of loss. Simon promises he won't pour salt in the wound with a Sopranos-style snap to black. "I actually thought that was a great ending," he says. "But this is a different show. We'll pay out what we've set in motion."
Across town from Kavanagh's, at a farmers market in the parking lot of the racetrack in Pimlico, a second unit is finishing up the last scene for a character named Bubbles, a homeless heroin addict who has struggled, with little success, to get clean since the first episode of The Wire. (Simon and Burns covered similar narrative terrain in 2000 with their Emmy-winning series for HBO, The Corner.) Bubbles is a figure of weakness and decency on the show, and his crushing ups and downs have made him into a fan favourite. Between takes, Andre Royo, the actor who plays Bubbles, breaks out a script of the final episode with the front page covered in signatures from the cast and crew—a parting gift to himself. "When my manager first got the call about this part, I didn't want to go in for it," Royo says. "A junkie snitch named Bubbles? I was upset, actually. I was, like, 'Are white people still doing that?' But to come from that moment, where I was in my life then, to this moment five years later—it's very emotional. This was my biggest break. Bubbles will stay in my heart forever."
Royo, like nearly every other actor on The Wire, had no high-profile credits before he joined the show—and hardly any since. Only the rakishly handsome Dominic West has been able to cross over into major movie work, playing supporting roles in a few "trashy films," as he calls them, such as "300" and "Mona Lisa Smile." Lance Reddick, a regular on The Wire, can now be seen doing Cadillac ads and bit parts on Numb3ers and CSI: Miami. After every season, Clarke Peters, who plays Freamon, gets back on a plane for London, where he lives and works as a stage actor. "Let me indict Hollywood as much as I can on this one," says Simon. "We have more working black actors in key roles than pretty much all the other shows on the air. And yet you still hear people claim they can't find good African-American actors. That's why race-neutral shows and movies turn out lily-white."
None of the actors on The Wire has ever been nominated for an Emmy. Overall, the show has earned just one nomination in four seasons. (Pelecanos and Simon, for writing. They lost.) What really steamed Simon, though, was a story two years ago in Emmy Magazine, the Academy's trade publication, about diversity in television. The story made no mention of The Wire. "Nothing," says Simon. "Not in the whole issue." The silent treatment from Hollywood, though, has cultivated a theatre-company camaraderie around the show, a nervy pride in what can be accomplished by unheralded artists in a supposed backwater like Baltimore. "You get a lot of cachet from being the underdog," says West. "And I rather enjoy that feeling—that you're a cult thing, a secret delight. That means a lot more than an Emmy." Simon is less diplomatic. "I don't give a fuck if we ever win one of their little trinkets. I don't care if they ever figure out we're here in Baltimore," he says. "Secretly, we all know we get more ink for being shut out. So at this point, we wanna be shut out. We wanna go down in flames together, holding hands all the way. It's fun. And it's a good way to go out—throwing them the finger from 3,000 miles away."
Further reading: Debating the Legacy of The Wire: Did Season Five Tarnish the Show That Invented the Dickensian Aspect Ratio?; One Last Long, Boozy Irish Wake for David Simon’s Accidental Masterpiece; Ten Questions Left Unanswered by the 'Wire' Finale; Actor Ptolemy Slocum on the Emotional Last Night of Shooting ‘The Wire'; Sternbergh on ‘The Wire’ Finale: The Anti-‘Sopranos’; David Simon Still Has Some Things to Say; 'The Wire' spins out a future that is believable if not exactly cathartic; The Wire': Goodbye, farewell and amen; Still Defiant: David Simon Caps Five Seasons of Unspooling The Wire; David Simon on cutting 'The Wire'
The Wire: The Last Word (HBO)
Monday, 10 March 2008
So many characters, yet so little resolution
After all these years, all those dead bodies and so many criminal contortions of the law, the wiretap in The Wire didn’t bring the bad guys to justice. Perfect, opines Alessandra Stanley. Technology and good intentions couldn’t win out in Sunday night’s finale of The Wire. The best and most dyspeptic police drama on television would never conclude with a triumph of good over evil. Victories were few, and Pyrrhic.
Truth flickered here and there, but never really came to light. Some people received their comeuppance, but most didn’t. Police work faltered and recouped — a tattered, tainted form of justice was meted out, sort of. Some people were killed or worse. (Alma, an honest reporter at The Baltimore Sun, was exiled to the Carroll County bureau.) A few deserving people came out ahead, or at least even, but nothing really changed: the drug trade thrives and the system in Baltimore drifts on, corrupt and self-sustaining, held together by convenience and a lie too big to bring down.
David Simon did not end his series the way The Sopranos came to a close, in a frozen tableau of ambiguity. The Wire went out the way it came in five seasons ago, not so much tying up loose ends, though it did, as meticulously proving that there is no end. For every major character who died or moved on, a new incarnation sprang up. And the most poignant was probably Michael, the young protégé of Marlo, the drug kingpin. The boy killed as he was told, but he questioned the logic and the fairness of each hit. When he realized he was the next target, Michael turned not into the next Marlo, but the spitting image of his boss’s nemesis, Omar, a hunted man turned rogue hunter, preying on drug dealers with a shotgun under his coat.
Which doesn’t mean there wasn’t a happy ending or two. Thanks to the same illegal wiretap that first got him into trouble, Marlo walked, but it turned out he didn’t have far to go. Throughout this season and last it was never quite clear whether Marlo — the most enigmatic of drug dealers — was the true heir to Stringer Bell, the dealer turned businessman, or to Avon Barksdale, the dealer who couldn’t leave the streets. In the finale Marlo walked out of a meeting of real estate developers and found himself back on a corner, confronted by minor hoodlums, no longer really welcome even there. And that was a vindication for Omar, whose Ahab-sized obsession to punish Marlo rose from the grave: Omar died goading Marlo to come back down to the street, and Marlo finally did, only to be taunted by corner boys loyal to Omar’s legacy.
The Wire was always a tale of symmetry and disparity. In each season the unfairness and corruption of the streets was mirrored in a different layer of society — the police, the port, City Hall, the schools and the media. All along, individuals who tried to live up to their personal responsibilities were crushed by a vast, entangled system jerry-built to duck accountability.
Detective Jimmy McNulty created the hoax to make the collar, and it cost him his job only because he felt compelled to come clean. In the final episode his successor was anointed in a scene that pointedly echoed the first episode of the first season. Then a newcomer to the homicide squad, McNulty revealed his insubordinate streak by complaining to Judge Daniel Phelan about murky doings in the police department. On Sunday night viewers watched young Detective Leander Sydnor complain to the same judge about the murky doings he witnessed in the department, and the detective didn’t even see the half of it.
Even the smartest, most truth-seeking characters never fathomed the full picture. Gus, the clear-eyed, honorable city editor, couldn’t steer his self-deluded bosses at The Baltimore Sun away from a bum story, one that was mostly made up by Scott Templeton, the rat reporter. Gus was the first to suspect that Scott fabricated quotations and facts, but even Gus never guessed that the entire serial-killer story was a hoax, invented by McNulty to force City Hall to override budget cuts and provide the cars and man-hours that he and Detective Lester Freamon, the detective in love with his wiretap, needed to get Marlo."Maybe you win a Pulitzer with this stuff," Gus warns his boss, "and maybe you have to give it back." But the odds were stacked in management’s favour. Corruption within the newsroom was entwined with the scams and lies of City Hall and the police department. As Norman, the mayor’s cynical adviser, put it, "everybody is getting what they need behind some make-believe."There were so many characters, all richly drawn, and none of them got the last laugh, not even Norman, who saw the dark humour in everything. When the mayor and his men learn that the serial-killer story they pumped up for political gain was invented by their own detectives, they were aghast and ashen. Norman was tickled. "It has a certain charm to it," he said. "They manufactured an issue to get paid, and we manufactured an issue to get you elected governor." Norman added that he almost wished he was still a reporter at the newspaper so that he could write an exposé of the mess; little did he know that The Baltimore Sun propped up the lie.
Every happy ending came with a sad coda: Bubbles, the former addict and pariah, was at long last invited up the basement stairs to share a family meal in his sister’s dining room. But, of course, young, lost Duquan took his place on the street, injecting the same drugs it took Bubbles much of his life to overcome.
The Wire ended at just the right time: too soon. And it’s not that Mr. Simon’s series was the only intelligent drama on television. The difference is that most smart shows try to dazzle viewers with what they don’t know: House on Fox throws out the rarest diseases and most far-fetched diagnostic tools to update Sherlock Holmes and Numb3rs on CBS twists every crime to fit an advanced mathematical formula.
The Wire worked with primary sources that anybody could grasp if they looked closely out the window on the train from New York to Washington. It’s the same view of Baltimore — abandoned row houses, gutted factories and bullet-pocked store fronts — that McNulty takes in when he parks his car and looks down at the city from afar.
"It is what it is," is what McNulty and others would say to end a conversation. The Wire was what it was, and that was a lot.
Further reading: the brilliant New Yorker article; Secrets of the City in the Columbia Journalism Review
Sunday, 9 March 2008
As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods
The Wire comes full circle in its gripping finale says the Chicago Tribune's Mo Ryan. The following piece discusses the series finale of The Wire (which aired Sunday on HBO). If you're a fan of the show, I recommend watching the finale before reading what's below...
An image has been in my mind since I watched the series finale of The Wire. It’s a scene of a character named Dukie preparing to shoot up drugs. It’s only a brief glimpse at Dukie’s fate, but it’s heartbreaking. We met Dukie (Jermaine Crawford) and three other eighth-grade boys two years ago, in Season 4 of The Wire. He was a shy, smart, gawky youth who didn’t quite fit in on the tough streets of West Baltimore. He blossomed when his teacher, a former cop, started giving Dukie clean clothes and soap and showing him how to use a computer. As he gained confidence and shed some of his reticence, it was impossible not to care about Dukie, whose rare smiles were heart piercing.
Dukie’s home was shared with drug addicts who resided in a nightmarish row house with no running water. He moved in with Michael (Tristan Wilds), a classmate whose boss was the ruthless drug lord Marlo (Jamie Hector). As The Wire’s fifth and final season progressed, I naively hoped that Dukie, who’d dropped out of high school to look after Michael’s brother, would make his way out of that grim world. I hoped someone would help him, or that this bright, kind young man would find a way to overcome his severely limited options. But it wasn’t meant to be. Perhaps Dukie never had a choice. And over the series’ five unforgettable seasons, The Wire has made us look hard at the lives of people who have few choices.
Eventually Dukie was cast out by Michael, who had to cut all ties with friends and family to survive. Dukie wasn’t good at selling drugs, so he scratched out a living by scavenging metal and junk from the crumbling buildings of Baltimore. And as The Wire’s resident addict, Bubbles (Andre Royo) did back in the day, Dukie started using drugs to numb the pain. In Dukie’s last scene, the camera remained distant. The viewer didn’t see the needle piercing Dukie’s skin — the wordless scene ended just before that moment. It’s almost as if the filmmakers couldn’t bring themselves to show the full extent of Dukie’s downfall. We only see him preparing the syringe and bringing it up to his arm, but through The Wire’s unsparing depiction of Bubbles’ life, we have a pretty good idea of what Dukie’s existence will be from now on: misery.
Dukie may not be real, Bubbles may not be real, but thanks to the show’s masterful writing and acting, I won’t soon forget them. The Wire illuminated ways of life I’ve never experienced, and though I wept for Dukie, I thank the show for creating him and dozens of other memorable characters. We also won’t forget Randy (Maestro Harrell), Dukie’s classmate, who lived with a foster mom in Season 4 and who demonstrated an entrepreneurial flair (he made pocket money selling snacks to classmates). As we saw earlier on The Wire, a terrible chain of events left him an angry, perhaps even vicious young man. By Season 5, the sweet, enterprising eighth-grader had been replaced by a menacing thug. And thanks to The Wire’s meticulous storytelling, we know exactly why.
We won’t forget Michael, who supplied the most memorable line of The Wire’s second-to-last episode. As he was being cast aside by Michael, Dukie tried to get him to recall some silly caper that they’d both been part of only a year or two ago. Didn’t he remember? Dukie asked. “I don’t,” Michael almost whispered. Was his meagre childhood so far away that he truly couldn’t remember anything enjoyable? Or was he making himself forget those rare instances of happiness, as a way of armoring himself? Just as Dukie’s only choice was to numb the pain, Michael had only one option: To shed any sentiment and become tougher than those who would kill him. To survive, these young men had to lose what made them human.
And that’s what was heartbreaking. Thanks to the show’s incisive writing and the brilliant work of the young actors who played Dukie, Randy and Michael, we knew what they were like when they were human, when they were just kids. We knew their quirks and flaws and slender dreams. To see each of them crushed by circumstances outside their control was terrible, but I couldn’t look away. This is the stuff that wrenching drama is made of.
Over five seasons, The Wire has expanded the possibilities of what television drama can achieve. The finale was as good as the show gets: Tightly plotted and masterfully directed, it was viscerally affecting on a number of levels. And as we saw the fates of various characters unfold in Sunday’s 90-minute closer, I kept thinking of a line from King Lear: “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods, they kill us for their sport.”
That’s what Dukie, Randy, Michael and Bubbles were to the gods of Baltimore: Nobodies. Drop-outs with only no realistic chances of betterment. All along the way, individuals in positions of power had chances to make altruistic choices that would help people like them, just the powerful had opportunities to improve the police department, make the schools better, govern wisely, etc. The show doesn’t preach or grandstand, but over five seasons, anger at the fate of the Dukies of the world has been the driving force of The Wire. It has used a meticulously created, fascinating universe to hammer home this point: The powerful, even those who start out with ideals, end up leaving the powerless to their narrow, almost unavoidable fates. Those in power try hard to ignore that fact (if their culpability occurs to them at all) and continue to choose the short-term, selfish path.
Not everyone in The Wire was without options. The finale showed various characters taking stands, drawing lines in the sand and refusing to cross them. Yet most of them paid for their stands. Rebels may evade their ultimate fate for a time, and they’re celebrated within the mythology of the show. (Didn’t the solo gangster Omar start to seem like a superhero this season? And the show has always had a soft spot for the renegade cop Jimmy McNulty.) But in The Wire’s Baltimore, nobody escapes the consequences of rebelling. It’s only a matter of time before the gods get around to killing the peskiest flies.
Thank goodness the show allowed Bubbles to get clean. I don’t know if I could have dealt with him falling “down in the hole” again. He was able to change himself, even if nothing about the streets ever really changes. But he survived, and he’s even found a sliver of peace, and that’s more than I thought he’d get as the series came to a close. Bubbles’ speech before other recovering addicts in the March 2 episode was one of the most emotionally intense moments The Wire has ever created (Royo is only one of many amazing actors in this enormously talented cast).
Surprisingly, Det. Kima Greggs (Sonja Sohn) didn’t appear to pay a price for exercising her free will and speaking out. She told her bosses that Jimmy McNulty’s serial killer was an invention, but by the end of the episode, she was still a “murder police,” or a homicide detective. Then again, maybe she is being punished – she’s stuck in the Baltimore version of Groundhog Day. On The Wire, it’s a place where senseless murders and revenge killings are almost unbearably repetitive. Kima may not have paid a price for telling the bosses about McNulty’s illegal scheme, but will her competence at her job change anything in Baltimore? Not likely.
Most everyone else who made a stand was crushed or exiled, as is usually the case on The Wire. Cedric Daniels (Lance Reddick) finally got the top job at the Baltimore police department, but he refused to prettify the crime statistics for the city’s ambitious mayor, Tommy Carcetti (Aiden Gillen). By the end of the final episode, Daniels was gone from the department. Of course, Bill Rawls (John Doman) landed on his feet. Despite the scandal over McNulty’s scheme, Rawls, Daniels’ eternal enemy within the police department, was promised a promotion by a mayoral aide if he “did what he was told.” He had no problems with that. Daniels, on the other hand, was told that his problem was that he failed to do what was told, the same assessment that Michael received from his fellow enforcer, Snoop, in the March 2 episode. Thinking for oneself is frequently punished on The Wire: Those in power are shown to consistently frown on it.
Michael was always “asking why when you should be doing what you’re told,” Snoop said – just before Michael shot her. In the end, Michael’s need to think for himself meant that he had to go solo – unless he was willing to fall in line, he’d be the enemy of Marlo’s organization. Just as Daniels had become an irritant that the police bureaucracy had to eventually expel. The fact that brave choices are usually punished within the world of The Wire fits with creator David Simon’s world-view, which holds that individuals are capable of change, but institutions are not. On The Wire, the powerful institutions and the individuals who hold the levers of power crush those who don’t toe the line.
According to the show, change from within isn’t possible — for gangsters, teachers, politicians or anyone else inside a big organization. When it comes to the Baltimore police, the eventual ascension of the political hack Stan Valcheck as commissioner, which was shown in the finale’s closing minutes, surely undid anything good that Daniels or his protégés ever accomplished. In some cases, I disagreed with the withering finality of that assessment — that institutions aren’t ever capable of change — but I must credit the show with never wavering from its central assumption: Whatever their original intentions, all power structures or bureaucracies morph into entities that exist to reward the powerful and punish the independent.
Though the series as a whole is a towering achievement, I wasn’t a fan of this season’s newspaper story line, which wasn’t executed with The Wire’s typical subtlety and understated realism. The show has done a brilliant job of depicting, with savage honesty, what makes big institutions dysfunctional, and nobody can argue with the idea that newspapers are in crisis. But the main cause of that crisis is not reporters who make things up, as Scott Templeton did at the fictional Baltimore Sun. Still, there’s been so much media coverage of The Wire’s journalism angle that it would feel like overkill to dwell on it here.
I wouldn’t blame the newspaper story line, however, for the show’s low Nielsen ratings this season. If online forums are anything to go by, many hard-core “Wire” fans have been gobbling up the final episodes as they appeared one week early via HBO on Demand. And besides, the show’s ratings have always been on the low side. TV viewers are used to happy endings, or at least progress of some kind as a program moves to its end point. But what's the old saying? "The more things change, the more they remain the same." That was certainly The Wire's opinion.
Though the change felt somewhat abrupt, but it was clear The Wire was turning Michael into Baltimore’s new Omar. The legendary Omar (Michael K. Williams) was a street legend in West Baltimore; he robbed drug dealers but was smart enough not to get caught or killed. In the end, though, he was just as powerless as Dukie. In the show’s most shocking moment, he was killed a couple of episodes ago by a corner kid who’d grown up in Marlo’s cold, unforgiving world. Omar’s budding superhero status obviously couldn’t last. That his life ended so senselessly made sense within the world of The Wire. As Snoop (Felicia Pearson) said in the March 2 episode, “Deserve got nothing to do with it.”
Did Namond (Julito McCullum), another eighth-grader in Season 4, “deserve” to end up in a stable, loving home, after being removed from the drug world and adopted by a former top cop, Bunny Colvin? No more than Randy deserved to end up in a brutal group home; no more than Dukie deserved live on the streets. Perhaps Namond will be the next Bunny Colvin (Robert Wisdom), a smart, eloquent reformer (though Colvin was spit out by the system when his unorthodox views proved troublesome). Dukie sure seems like the next Bubbles. Perhaps the recently promoted Ellis Carver (Seth Gilliam) is the next Cedric Daniels – a smart, honorable man constrained by a system that rewards unquestioning loyalty. And though Marlo’s out of the drug game, for now, the mysterious Greek and his minions are still putting heroin and crack on the streets of Baltimore.
ln its closing montage, The Wire seemed to say that nothing changes. Those who leave the streets, for whatever reasons, will be replaced by a new generation of dealers, users and cops. But that grim conclusion doesn’t begin to convey the depth and compassion of The Wire. The show never held back from bearing witness to “the suffering of the world,” as the finale’s quote from Kafka put it. The Wire found humane and empathic and funny ways to tell interesting stories about life, and its creators loved Baltimore, as the finale’s many montages made clear.
The dry humour of the people who inhabited that world never failed to make me laugh out loud. I can’t quite believe I’ll never see my favourite character, Bunk (Wendell Pierce), deliver some hilariously cynical comeback. I’ll never see Daniels’ glare or Omar’s swagger. From the mayor’s office to the police department to the grungiest back alley, The Wire showed us people so richly nuanced and detailed and real we wouldn’t be surprised to meet them in the street. After five seasons, it’s exceedingly hard to let them go. Jay Landsman (Delaney Williams) gave the eulogy at a mock wake for Jimmy McNulty, who ended up leaving the police force. But Landsman could have been talking about the show itself. “He learned no lessons, acknowledged no mistakes … [but] brother, when you were good, you were the best of us.”
Further reading: An LA Times round-table discussion with several cast members. A lengthy David Simon interview on the Alan Sepinwall blog.
An image has been in my mind since I watched the series finale of The Wire. It’s a scene of a character named Dukie preparing to shoot up drugs. It’s only a brief glimpse at Dukie’s fate, but it’s heartbreaking. We met Dukie (Jermaine Crawford) and three other eighth-grade boys two years ago, in Season 4 of The Wire. He was a shy, smart, gawky youth who didn’t quite fit in on the tough streets of West Baltimore. He blossomed when his teacher, a former cop, started giving Dukie clean clothes and soap and showing him how to use a computer. As he gained confidence and shed some of his reticence, it was impossible not to care about Dukie, whose rare smiles were heart piercing.
Dukie’s home was shared with drug addicts who resided in a nightmarish row house with no running water. He moved in with Michael (Tristan Wilds), a classmate whose boss was the ruthless drug lord Marlo (Jamie Hector). As The Wire’s fifth and final season progressed, I naively hoped that Dukie, who’d dropped out of high school to look after Michael’s brother, would make his way out of that grim world. I hoped someone would help him, or that this bright, kind young man would find a way to overcome his severely limited options. But it wasn’t meant to be. Perhaps Dukie never had a choice. And over the series’ five unforgettable seasons, The Wire has made us look hard at the lives of people who have few choices.
Eventually Dukie was cast out by Michael, who had to cut all ties with friends and family to survive. Dukie wasn’t good at selling drugs, so he scratched out a living by scavenging metal and junk from the crumbling buildings of Baltimore. And as The Wire’s resident addict, Bubbles (Andre Royo) did back in the day, Dukie started using drugs to numb the pain. In Dukie’s last scene, the camera remained distant. The viewer didn’t see the needle piercing Dukie’s skin — the wordless scene ended just before that moment. It’s almost as if the filmmakers couldn’t bring themselves to show the full extent of Dukie’s downfall. We only see him preparing the syringe and bringing it up to his arm, but through The Wire’s unsparing depiction of Bubbles’ life, we have a pretty good idea of what Dukie’s existence will be from now on: misery.
Dukie may not be real, Bubbles may not be real, but thanks to the show’s masterful writing and acting, I won’t soon forget them. The Wire illuminated ways of life I’ve never experienced, and though I wept for Dukie, I thank the show for creating him and dozens of other memorable characters. We also won’t forget Randy (Maestro Harrell), Dukie’s classmate, who lived with a foster mom in Season 4 and who demonstrated an entrepreneurial flair (he made pocket money selling snacks to classmates). As we saw earlier on The Wire, a terrible chain of events left him an angry, perhaps even vicious young man. By Season 5, the sweet, enterprising eighth-grader had been replaced by a menacing thug. And thanks to The Wire’s meticulous storytelling, we know exactly why.
We won’t forget Michael, who supplied the most memorable line of The Wire’s second-to-last episode. As he was being cast aside by Michael, Dukie tried to get him to recall some silly caper that they’d both been part of only a year or two ago. Didn’t he remember? Dukie asked. “I don’t,” Michael almost whispered. Was his meagre childhood so far away that he truly couldn’t remember anything enjoyable? Or was he making himself forget those rare instances of happiness, as a way of armoring himself? Just as Dukie’s only choice was to numb the pain, Michael had only one option: To shed any sentiment and become tougher than those who would kill him. To survive, these young men had to lose what made them human.
And that’s what was heartbreaking. Thanks to the show’s incisive writing and the brilliant work of the young actors who played Dukie, Randy and Michael, we knew what they were like when they were human, when they were just kids. We knew their quirks and flaws and slender dreams. To see each of them crushed by circumstances outside their control was terrible, but I couldn’t look away. This is the stuff that wrenching drama is made of.
Over five seasons, The Wire has expanded the possibilities of what television drama can achieve. The finale was as good as the show gets: Tightly plotted and masterfully directed, it was viscerally affecting on a number of levels. And as we saw the fates of various characters unfold in Sunday’s 90-minute closer, I kept thinking of a line from King Lear: “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods, they kill us for their sport.”
That’s what Dukie, Randy, Michael and Bubbles were to the gods of Baltimore: Nobodies. Drop-outs with only no realistic chances of betterment. All along the way, individuals in positions of power had chances to make altruistic choices that would help people like them, just the powerful had opportunities to improve the police department, make the schools better, govern wisely, etc. The show doesn’t preach or grandstand, but over five seasons, anger at the fate of the Dukies of the world has been the driving force of The Wire. It has used a meticulously created, fascinating universe to hammer home this point: The powerful, even those who start out with ideals, end up leaving the powerless to their narrow, almost unavoidable fates. Those in power try hard to ignore that fact (if their culpability occurs to them at all) and continue to choose the short-term, selfish path.
Not everyone in The Wire was without options. The finale showed various characters taking stands, drawing lines in the sand and refusing to cross them. Yet most of them paid for their stands. Rebels may evade their ultimate fate for a time, and they’re celebrated within the mythology of the show. (Didn’t the solo gangster Omar start to seem like a superhero this season? And the show has always had a soft spot for the renegade cop Jimmy McNulty.) But in The Wire’s Baltimore, nobody escapes the consequences of rebelling. It’s only a matter of time before the gods get around to killing the peskiest flies.
Thank goodness the show allowed Bubbles to get clean. I don’t know if I could have dealt with him falling “down in the hole” again. He was able to change himself, even if nothing about the streets ever really changes. But he survived, and he’s even found a sliver of peace, and that’s more than I thought he’d get as the series came to a close. Bubbles’ speech before other recovering addicts in the March 2 episode was one of the most emotionally intense moments The Wire has ever created (Royo is only one of many amazing actors in this enormously talented cast).
Surprisingly, Det. Kima Greggs (Sonja Sohn) didn’t appear to pay a price for exercising her free will and speaking out. She told her bosses that Jimmy McNulty’s serial killer was an invention, but by the end of the episode, she was still a “murder police,” or a homicide detective. Then again, maybe she is being punished – she’s stuck in the Baltimore version of Groundhog Day. On The Wire, it’s a place where senseless murders and revenge killings are almost unbearably repetitive. Kima may not have paid a price for telling the bosses about McNulty’s illegal scheme, but will her competence at her job change anything in Baltimore? Not likely.
Most everyone else who made a stand was crushed or exiled, as is usually the case on The Wire. Cedric Daniels (Lance Reddick) finally got the top job at the Baltimore police department, but he refused to prettify the crime statistics for the city’s ambitious mayor, Tommy Carcetti (Aiden Gillen). By the end of the final episode, Daniels was gone from the department. Of course, Bill Rawls (John Doman) landed on his feet. Despite the scandal over McNulty’s scheme, Rawls, Daniels’ eternal enemy within the police department, was promised a promotion by a mayoral aide if he “did what he was told.” He had no problems with that. Daniels, on the other hand, was told that his problem was that he failed to do what was told, the same assessment that Michael received from his fellow enforcer, Snoop, in the March 2 episode. Thinking for oneself is frequently punished on The Wire: Those in power are shown to consistently frown on it.
Michael was always “asking why when you should be doing what you’re told,” Snoop said – just before Michael shot her. In the end, Michael’s need to think for himself meant that he had to go solo – unless he was willing to fall in line, he’d be the enemy of Marlo’s organization. Just as Daniels had become an irritant that the police bureaucracy had to eventually expel. The fact that brave choices are usually punished within the world of The Wire fits with creator David Simon’s world-view, which holds that individuals are capable of change, but institutions are not. On The Wire, the powerful institutions and the individuals who hold the levers of power crush those who don’t toe the line.
According to the show, change from within isn’t possible — for gangsters, teachers, politicians or anyone else inside a big organization. When it comes to the Baltimore police, the eventual ascension of the political hack Stan Valcheck as commissioner, which was shown in the finale’s closing minutes, surely undid anything good that Daniels or his protégés ever accomplished. In some cases, I disagreed with the withering finality of that assessment — that institutions aren’t ever capable of change — but I must credit the show with never wavering from its central assumption: Whatever their original intentions, all power structures or bureaucracies morph into entities that exist to reward the powerful and punish the independent.
Though the series as a whole is a towering achievement, I wasn’t a fan of this season’s newspaper story line, which wasn’t executed with The Wire’s typical subtlety and understated realism. The show has done a brilliant job of depicting, with savage honesty, what makes big institutions dysfunctional, and nobody can argue with the idea that newspapers are in crisis. But the main cause of that crisis is not reporters who make things up, as Scott Templeton did at the fictional Baltimore Sun. Still, there’s been so much media coverage of The Wire’s journalism angle that it would feel like overkill to dwell on it here.
I wouldn’t blame the newspaper story line, however, for the show’s low Nielsen ratings this season. If online forums are anything to go by, many hard-core “Wire” fans have been gobbling up the final episodes as they appeared one week early via HBO on Demand. And besides, the show’s ratings have always been on the low side. TV viewers are used to happy endings, or at least progress of some kind as a program moves to its end point. But what's the old saying? "The more things change, the more they remain the same." That was certainly The Wire's opinion.
Though the change felt somewhat abrupt, but it was clear The Wire was turning Michael into Baltimore’s new Omar. The legendary Omar (Michael K. Williams) was a street legend in West Baltimore; he robbed drug dealers but was smart enough not to get caught or killed. In the end, though, he was just as powerless as Dukie. In the show’s most shocking moment, he was killed a couple of episodes ago by a corner kid who’d grown up in Marlo’s cold, unforgiving world. Omar’s budding superhero status obviously couldn’t last. That his life ended so senselessly made sense within the world of The Wire. As Snoop (Felicia Pearson) said in the March 2 episode, “Deserve got nothing to do with it.”
Did Namond (Julito McCullum), another eighth-grader in Season 4, “deserve” to end up in a stable, loving home, after being removed from the drug world and adopted by a former top cop, Bunny Colvin? No more than Randy deserved to end up in a brutal group home; no more than Dukie deserved live on the streets. Perhaps Namond will be the next Bunny Colvin (Robert Wisdom), a smart, eloquent reformer (though Colvin was spit out by the system when his unorthodox views proved troublesome). Dukie sure seems like the next Bubbles. Perhaps the recently promoted Ellis Carver (Seth Gilliam) is the next Cedric Daniels – a smart, honorable man constrained by a system that rewards unquestioning loyalty. And though Marlo’s out of the drug game, for now, the mysterious Greek and his minions are still putting heroin and crack on the streets of Baltimore.
ln its closing montage, The Wire seemed to say that nothing changes. Those who leave the streets, for whatever reasons, will be replaced by a new generation of dealers, users and cops. But that grim conclusion doesn’t begin to convey the depth and compassion of The Wire. The show never held back from bearing witness to “the suffering of the world,” as the finale’s quote from Kafka put it. The Wire found humane and empathic and funny ways to tell interesting stories about life, and its creators loved Baltimore, as the finale’s many montages made clear.
The dry humour of the people who inhabited that world never failed to make me laugh out loud. I can’t quite believe I’ll never see my favourite character, Bunk (Wendell Pierce), deliver some hilariously cynical comeback. I’ll never see Daniels’ glare or Omar’s swagger. From the mayor’s office to the police department to the grungiest back alley, The Wire showed us people so richly nuanced and detailed and real we wouldn’t be surprised to meet them in the street. After five seasons, it’s exceedingly hard to let them go. Jay Landsman (Delaney Williams) gave the eulogy at a mock wake for Jimmy McNulty, who ended up leaving the police force. But Landsman could have been talking about the show itself. “He learned no lessons, acknowledged no mistakes … [but] brother, when you were good, you were the best of us.”
Further reading: An LA Times round-table discussion with several cast members. A lengthy David Simon interview on the Alan Sepinwall blog.
Friday, 7 March 2008
The Wire resists sentimentality
Usually, scenes in HBO's The Wire hold almost equal weight muses Matthew Gilbert. When the anarchic anti-hero Omar was killed a few weeks back, it wasn't a flaming sweeps-styled moment, an event fraught with foreshadowing and pumped up with soundtrack. A central character for all five seasons of the series, Omar was shot from behind by a kid. Next scene.
Thankfully, the series finale operates in a similar fashion. Remember the stylistic manipulations that David Chase so boldly toyed with in the closing minutes of The Sopranos? There's none of that string-pulling in this 93-minute episode, which airs Sunday at 9. Creator David Simon continues to let the accumulated drama of each character speak for itself, adding only hints of final-episode momentousness and sentiment around the edges. We can bring our own emotions and surmises to our last glimpses of Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West), Bubbles (Andre Royo), Lester (Clarke Peters), and even Prez (Jim True-Frost), without having to compete with dramatic pyrotechnics.
On Sunday night, Simon gives almost every character a final telling moment, an instant of character revelation that is poetic and small. There are, of course, more obvious plot wrap-ups afoot, in terms of the Marlo Stanfield (Jamie Hector) investigation, and whether or not the evidence against the drug lord will survive the system. Does Baltimore Sun reporter Scott Templeton (Tom McCarthy) get exposed for fabrication? Who will fall when McNulty's fake serial-killer case is fully exposed? The big answers are provided, in all their outrageousness, irony, cruelty, ambiguity, and justice.
Thankfully, the series finale operates in a similar fashion. Remember the stylistic manipulations that David Chase so boldly toyed with in the closing minutes of The Sopranos? There's none of that string-pulling in this 93-minute episode, which airs Sunday at 9. Creator David Simon continues to let the accumulated drama of each character speak for itself, adding only hints of final-episode momentousness and sentiment around the edges. We can bring our own emotions and surmises to our last glimpses of Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West), Bubbles (Andre Royo), Lester (Clarke Peters), and even Prez (Jim True-Frost), without having to compete with dramatic pyrotechnics.
On Sunday night, Simon gives almost every character a final telling moment, an instant of character revelation that is poetic and small. There are, of course, more obvious plot wrap-ups afoot, in terms of the Marlo Stanfield (Jamie Hector) investigation, and whether or not the evidence against the drug lord will survive the system. Does Baltimore Sun reporter Scott Templeton (Tom McCarthy) get exposed for fabrication? Who will fall when McNulty's fake serial-killer case is fully exposed? The big answers are provided, in all their outrageousness, irony, cruelty, ambiguity, and justice.
But the "Wire" finale is most powerful in its smaller flourishes, the ones that sink in later, that will keep sinking in after the series is long gone. The model came last week, when Michael (Tristan Wilds) shot Snoop (Felicia Pearson), and it was handed to us as just another point in time. The sheer ordinariness of Snoop's demise is one of the moments of "The Wire" that will haunt me long after the show is gone. "How my hair look?" she asks Michael before he pulls the trigger. "It look good, girl," he says, a last gift before goodbye.
The Sopranos had a mythic sensibility, and its ending suited its life, as we obsessed over the fate of one larger-than-life family. The Wire has thrived on a more distanced perspective - it's about Baltimore and its systems as much as it's about specific characters. We've been spying on the action as if through one of the show's many closed-circuit cameras or ceiling mirrors. Kudos to Simon for leaving that distance intact right to the very end. As much as we've been following kids and cops and politicians over the years, we've really been looking at the social, economic, legal, governmental, educational, and penal systems from afar.
And those systems are still up and running. for good but mostly for ill, when we last look at the show's Baltimore. Bubbles may be on the road to recovery, but Dukie (Jermaine Crawford) is on the road to becoming another Bubbles. Omar is gone, but is there a new Omar on the horizon? The city is still failing to save its neediest, the media is still emphasizing the wrong things, the statistics are still being doctored. Well-intentioned individuals like McNulty are still getting crushed by greater forces.
And yet for all the failures there are small successes when all is said and done - fragments of truth in the Sun's coverage, small victories by the under-funded police department, an endangered kid who makes it onto the debate team. Like everything about The Wire, the finale is sweet as well as bitter, but mostly bitter.
Thursday, 6 March 2008
Too few were plugged in, but The Wire was electric
Too few were plugged in, but HBO's The Wire was electric says Roberto Bianco in USA Today.
If a great series ends and nobody watches, is it really over? For HBO's The Wire, sad to say, the answer is yes. After five critically acclaimed, scaldingly brilliant seasons, David Simon's Baltimore-set classic airs its final episode Sunday (9 ET/PT), no doubt to far fewer viewers than it deserves. Never a huge audience draw, peaking at about 4 million viewers, The Wire has seen its numbers dip below 1 million this season — sometimes so far below that they barely registered on the ratings scale.
If a great series ends and nobody watches, is it really over? For HBO's The Wire, sad to say, the answer is yes. After five critically acclaimed, scaldingly brilliant seasons, David Simon's Baltimore-set classic airs its final episode Sunday (9 ET/PT), no doubt to far fewer viewers than it deserves. Never a huge audience draw, peaking at about 4 million viewers, The Wire has seen its numbers dip below 1 million this season — sometimes so far below that they barely registered on the ratings scale.
On the bright side, those who tune in for the extended 90-minute finale are likely to be satisfied with a conclusion in which justice is served to the extent possible without violating the series' commitment to realism. And while any newcomer probably would be perplexed by the plot, even a first-time viewer could not fail to be impressed by Dominic West, Wendell Pierce, Andre Royo, Lance Reddick, Sonja Sohn, Clarke Peters and Deirdre Lovejoy, Emmy contenders all. Just be sorry you missed the now-departed Michael K. Williams and hope the voters didn't.
From start to finish, The Wire has been one of the best series ever produced for American television, one in which the commitment to honesty and authenticity has never wavered. Despite that quality, its subject matter — nothing less than the failure of the world's most powerful nation to solve the fundamental problems of its urban centres — was never likely to pull in a mass, casual audience.
Still, when a show this good does this poorly, it is worth pausing to consider what happened.
One thing the falling numbers can tell you is that The Wire simply went on too long, outrunning its audience's interest. It's wonderful to have the luxury and ability to structure your series like a novel, and then stretch it out over a six-year span. But if Simon wanted viewers to get to the end of the story, he clearly needed to get there faster himself. He might also have considered skipping this year's detour into the troubles of Baltimore's The Sun, the series' weakest and worst-acted subplot. It didn't detract much from the season as a whole, thanks to the strength of the other stories and actors, but it didn't help much either.
Of course, most of the original viewers had already left before the season started, probably out of exhaustion. Despite what you may have heard or feared, The Wire was not hard to follow, but it did require close, weekly attention. Many viewers were just unwilling to make that kind of commitment, particularly to a show that, by the very nature of its focus on wrenching social issues, could only promise an ambivalent ending at best.
Yet while the show may bear part of the blame for a ratings decline, they would not have collapsed if HBO had not collapsed as well. As any other network would have known, The Wire was never going to be a stand-alone success; it needed the nurturing and protection only a lead-in hit could provide. And that is something an indulgent but not helpful HBO, long past the ratings glory days of The Sopranos and Sex and the City, has been unable to offer.
Still, for The Wire, failure may just be a temporary condition. This is a series that will live on through repeats, on DVDs and in whatever form the future holds. And it's one that is sure to grow in reputation with each new viewer's discovery. Which means we can answer one more question, this one from The Wire's James McNulty, who asks near Sunday's end, "It was worth it, wasn't it?"
Damn right it was.
Wednesday, 5 March 2008
The Wire's war on the drug war
The writers of The Wire have used the latest issue of Time magazine to plead for greater leniency for non-violent drug cases...We write a television show. Measured against more thoughtful and meaningful occupations, this is not the best seat from which to argue public policy or social justice. Still, those viewers who followed The Wire — our HBO drama that tried to portray all sides of inner-city collapse, including the drug war, with as much detail and as little judgment as we could muster — tell us they've invested in the fates of our characters. They worry or grieve for Bubbles, Bodie or Wallace, certain that these characters are fictional yet knowing they are rooted in the reality of the other America, the one rarely acknowledged by anything so overt as a TV drama.
These viewers, admittedly a small shard of the TV universe, deluge us with one question: What can we do? If there are two Americas — separate and unequal — and if the drug war has helped produce a psychic chasm between them, how can well-meaning, well-intentioned people begin to bridge those worlds?And for five seasons, we answered lamely, offering arguments about economic priorities or drug policy, debating theoreticals within our tangled little drama. We were storytellers, not advocates; we ducked the question as best we could.
Yet this war grinds on, flooding our prisons, devouring resources, turning city neighborhoods into free-fire zones. To what end? State and federal prisons are packed with victims of the drug conflict. A new report by the Pew Center shows that 1 of every 100 adults in the U.S. — and 1 in 15 black men over 18 — is currently incarcerated. That's the world's highest rate of imprisonment.
The drug war has ravaged law enforcement too. In cities where police agencies commit the most resources to arresting their way out of their drug problems, the arrest rates for violent crime — murder, rape, aggravated assault — have declined. In Baltimore, where we set The Wire, drug arrests have skyrocketed over the past three decades, yet in that same span, arrest rates for murder have gone from 80% and 90% to half that. Lost in an unwinnable drug war, a new generation of law officers is no longer capable of investigating crime properly, having learned only to make court pay by grabbing cheap, meaningless drug arrests off the nearest corner.
What the drugs themselves have not destroyed, the warfare against them has. And what once began, perhaps, as a battle against dangerous substances long ago transformed itself into a venal war on our underclass. Since declaring war on drugs nearly 40 years ago, we've been demonizing our most desperate citizens, isolating and incarcerating them and otherwise denying them a role in the American collective. All to no purpose. The prison population doubles and doubles again; the drugs remain.
Our leaders? There aren't any politicians — Democrat or Republican — willing to speak truth on this. Instead, politicians compete to prove themselves more draconian than thou, to embrace America's most profound and enduring policy failure.
"A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right," wrote Thomas Paine when he called for civil disobedience against monarchy — the flawed national policy of his day. In a similar spirit, we offer a small idea that is, perhaps, no small idea. It will not solve the drug problem, nor will it heal all civic wounds. It does not yet address questions of how the resources spent warring with our poor over drug use might be better spent on treatment or education or job training, or anything else that might begin to restore those places in America where the only economic engine remaining is the illegal drug economy. It doesn't resolve the myriad complexities that a retreat from war to sanity will require. All it does is open a range of intricate, paradoxical issues. But this is what we can do — and what we will do.
If asked to serve on a jury deliberating a violation of state or federal drug laws, we will vote to acquit, regardless of the evidence presented. Save for a prosecution in which acts of violence or intended violence are alleged, we will — to borrow Justice Harry Blackmun's manifesto against the death penalty — no longer tinker with the machinery of the drug war. No longer can we collaborate with a government that uses nonviolent drug offenses to fill prisons with its poorest, most damaged and most desperate citizens.
Jury nullification is American dissent, as old and as heralded as the 1735 trial of John Peter Zenger, who was acquitted of seditious libel against the royal governor of New York, and absent a government capable of repairing injustices, it is legitimate protest. If some few episodes of a television entertainment have caused others to reflect on the war zones we have created in our cities and the human beings stranded there, we ask that those people might also consider their conscience. And when the lawyers or the judge or your fellow jurors seek explanation, think for a moment on Bubbles or Bodie or Wallace. And remember that the lives being held in the balance aren't fictional.
The authors- Ed Burns, Dennis Lehane, George Pelecanos, Richard Price and David Simon are all members of the writing staff of HBO's The Wire, which concludes its five-year run on March 9.
Tuesday, 4 March 2008
The Wire: David Simon on journalism's fatal flaws
David Simon found himself Monday afternoon bunkered down in the bowels of the law school building on the USC campus, discussing the demise of journalism as it relates to the fifth -- and sadly, final -- season of "The Wire." To summarize Simon's thoughts on the fall of newspapers and how the show weaves that depressing topic into politics, crime, corruption and, basically, the decay of civilization, he addressed it this way: "Everyday human beings matter less. The game is rigged. The house odds are against you."
Never the optimist, Simon said the foundation for The Wire was built upon the Greek tragedies -- "Both Stringer and Omar had to die. There was never a doubt." -- and the film Paths of Glory, directed by Stanley Kubrick and starring Kirk Douglas, which he called the only important political film of all time, except for 10 minutes of The Candidate with Robert Redford. Simon, still a Baltimore resident, toiled at the Sun for seven years, which included some time off to focus on his books Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets and The Corner, both of which were turned into TV projects, the former a critically beloved but low-rated series for NBC, and the latter a miniseries for HBO. He still loves the paper and it kills him to see it decimated by lay-offs that ultimately followed the Sun's local ownership to that of the Tribune company.
Never the optimist, Simon said the foundation for The Wire was built upon the Greek tragedies -- "Both Stringer and Omar had to die. There was never a doubt." -- and the film Paths of Glory, directed by Stanley Kubrick and starring Kirk Douglas, which he called the only important political film of all time, except for 10 minutes of The Candidate with Robert Redford. Simon, still a Baltimore resident, toiled at the Sun for seven years, which included some time off to focus on his books Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets and The Corner, both of which were turned into TV projects, the former a critically beloved but low-rated series for NBC, and the latter a miniseries for HBO. He still loves the paper and it kills him to see it decimated by lay-offs that ultimately followed the Sun's local ownership to that of the Tribune company.
"I'm heartbroken at what's happened to the Sun," he said, and even though he's much more well known now for his TV work, he still considers himself a newspaperman (and can be seen in a cameo in the Wire finale, slaving away in a newsroom cubicle). "The Sun went from being a paper trying to get it right to a flashier, dynamic paper that knew less of the city than before (Tribune took over)."
When asking the assembled students what was the overriding theme of this season in regards to what happens at the fictional Sun, he shoots down many theories: Yeah, Templeton's making up of sources and quotes play a part but it's not the overriding theme that Simon wants to get out, and, no, it's not just about the strive for Pulitzers. Rather, it's the "do more with less" theory that managing editor Thomas Klebanow asks his writers and editors at the beginning of the season. It failed miserably.
"The whole season of The Wire is about what didn't happen," he explains. "The governor cooking the stats didn't get in the paper. The No Child Left Behind stories that didn't get in, and Prop Joe's death is just a brief."
With management's mantra to make the Sun a Pulitzer Prize-grabbing operation, the Sun's already limited resources can't find the time -- and the paper certainly doesn't have the manpower -- to adequately address the real needs of Baltimore; such as why the schools are failing the city's children, why the police can't make a dent on crime, the backroom politics and decisions that can, ultimately, make a difference in people's lives. Instead, the paper focuses on the homeless. Not an unworthy topic certainly, but not at the expense of everything else.
Remember the scene early on this season when Gus looks out the window and sees a fire blazing in East Baltimore and nobody's covering it? Simon said it was a metaphor for journalism burning to the ground. He recalled being on the newspaper staff and watching in horror, under the tenure of Sun editor John Carroll, as the paper spent hundreds of column inches on the ills of lead paint poisoning, blaming it for the increased drug trade, kids dropping out of school, overcrowding in the city's jails, the Orioles falling to last place... OK, not so much the O's descent into baseball oblivion, but you get the point. And, Simon said, when a Sun reporter met with the governor and the paper's self-obsessed topic of lead paint poisoning didn't come up, the writer falsely included a conversation with the governor anyway into his piece. At that point, Simon walked away from the paper, disgusted as hell.
Simon's other diatribe was mounted against the Internet. Not so much against the vast availability of information, but how that information is given away for free and that there's no regulation of bloggers, the vast majority of them ill-concerned about truth and news gathering. He partly blames newspapers themselves for their current predicament, for not charging readers to access stories online and that readers get what they pay for. It's easy to post comments about the coverage of the war in Iraq, and to use the news gathered there for your own blogging, but he warns that online readers don't have the moral ground to criticize a paper's coverage unless they're footing the bill. You want to do your own reporting in the Middle East and express your own opinions? Fine, he says, just make sure you pay the tab for what it costs to send journalists over there.
The session ended with more Wire-related questions. One student was blown away by the revelation that Cheese is Randy's father (though maybe that shouldn't have been all that surprising consider their surnames are both Wagstaff). Another asked why there's no music in the show -- except for the opening and closing credits -- and Simon said it's because he hates a score and believes it's meant to manipulate the audience. Also, he still considers himself a novice on the set and leaves most of the film-making decisions to his production team, and keeps his focus on the script.
Finally, Simon said he was grateful for the 10.5 hours HBO gave him to conclude the series -- the final episode was only supposed to be an hour but HBO's Carolyn Strauss gave him the OK for an extra 30 minutes when Simon wasn't able to wrap up the series in the allotted time -- and that if he had a full 12 episodes, more would've been shown about the Randy-Cheese relationship and a plot-line about Cutty -- the former gangster who did time and then came back to the neighbourhood to run a makeshift boxing gym -- could've been explored.
But, as The Wire ends its glorious run, this is no time to get greedy or ask what could've been. What viewers have received for five season is pure manna, a gift from the TV gods. Where we're normally given "The Housewives of Orange County" and "The Hills," here we were offered a study on the rise and fall of America's free-market system seen through the eyes of the entrepreneurs of the media, the warriors of the drug trade and the politicians from where it all trickles down.
Simon's other diatribe was mounted against the Internet. Not so much against the vast availability of information, but how that information is given away for free and that there's no regulation of bloggers, the vast majority of them ill-concerned about truth and news gathering. He partly blames newspapers themselves for their current predicament, for not charging readers to access stories online and that readers get what they pay for. It's easy to post comments about the coverage of the war in Iraq, and to use the news gathered there for your own blogging, but he warns that online readers don't have the moral ground to criticize a paper's coverage unless they're footing the bill. You want to do your own reporting in the Middle East and express your own opinions? Fine, he says, just make sure you pay the tab for what it costs to send journalists over there.
The session ended with more Wire-related questions. One student was blown away by the revelation that Cheese is Randy's father (though maybe that shouldn't have been all that surprising consider their surnames are both Wagstaff). Another asked why there's no music in the show -- except for the opening and closing credits -- and Simon said it's because he hates a score and believes it's meant to manipulate the audience. Also, he still considers himself a novice on the set and leaves most of the film-making decisions to his production team, and keeps his focus on the script.
Finally, Simon said he was grateful for the 10.5 hours HBO gave him to conclude the series -- the final episode was only supposed to be an hour but HBO's Carolyn Strauss gave him the OK for an extra 30 minutes when Simon wasn't able to wrap up the series in the allotted time -- and that if he had a full 12 episodes, more would've been shown about the Randy-Cheese relationship and a plot-line about Cutty -- the former gangster who did time and then came back to the neighbourhood to run a makeshift boxing gym -- could've been explored.
But, as The Wire ends its glorious run, this is no time to get greedy or ask what could've been. What viewers have received for five season is pure manna, a gift from the TV gods. Where we're normally given "The Housewives of Orange County" and "The Hills," here we were offered a study on the rise and fall of America's free-market system seen through the eyes of the entrepreneurs of the media, the warriors of the drug trade and the politicians from where it all trickles down.
All that, and Omar too.
Saturday, 16 February 2008
A newspaper can't love you back
The new season of The Wire tackles the world of media, specifically The Baltimore Sun, generating a fire-storm of controversy around series creator David Simon. In this sneak peek at his essay from Esquire's March 2008 issue, Simon offers a tribute to the newsroom he once loved.
To this day, I can -- if I suffer to think on it -- stand apart from the moment, watching as I try to slip my own skin, to disappear myself.I have hair and forty less pounds. I’d pressed my pants for the first time all semester, even worn a tie, though I took it off in the car, thinking it made me look presumptuous. Shit, I am in that newsroom looking like the college kid I am, a fifth-year senior anyway, surrounded by the battle-hardened professionals of a delicate, precise craft.
They know I am ridiculous.
They’ve read it, in fact.
At the four o’clock meeting in the conference room, there is revelry -- at my expense no doubt. From my perch on the metro desk, I hear Phelps, the state editor, say something, his words followed by a burst of laughter. Fuck, shit, fuck.
That week -- my first as a Baltimore Sun stringer -- I had done something remarkable. I had managed to declare that oral sex was no longer a crime in Maryland. I felt sure of this when I wrote such and had it published in my state’s largest newspaper. Having edited the campus daily the year previous, I was confident in The Diamondback’s reporting and comfortable using it as boilerplate for Sun articles I wrote about the university. And in covering a rape trial involving a student victim, I misinterpreted an appellate decision and single-handedly liberated the blowjob from the shackles of Old Line State tyranny.
The first phone call came from a member of a gay-rights group, and while I abhor stereotype as much as the next man, I confess he lisped at me in disgust: “Check your facts, mister. When I suck cock, it’s very much a crime in Maryland. . . .”
The second call, somewhat more restrained, came from John Bainbridge, The Sun’s man at the court of appeals and a lawyer in his own right: “Listen, I read your article today, and I’m not sure you’ve got the appeals decision correct. . . .”
So it’s my first correction -- an ugly one. And my secret, sacred, wafer-thin plan to write my way onto a major metropolitan daily had been rendered ridiculous in a solitary blow. All that remained was a Bushido-like end to it, a slow, ceremonial evisceration on the newsroom floor. Listening to my excuses, Phelps had been short and blunt: “Write the correction and call it in to rewrite.”
The rewrite man -- the legendary Jay Spry -- took the time to re-explain my obvious failings in the matter, all the while addressing me as Mr. Simon, as if decorum required the condemned be granted one last comic honorific. So journalism was out. And I was still about forty credits short of an academic degree. Options: I had been a busboy. I had played guitar in bad bar bands. I had edited my college newspaper, and now, given the chance to report for one of the great gray ladies of American newspapering, I was a fucking joke.
“What are you going to do?” my girlfriend asked.
“Tend bar, maybe.”
“How do you make a grasshopper?”
“Rum and coke?”
A day later and Phelps called again. Some kid had goose-stepped down the hall of a campus dormitory and fired a BB pellet into a coed’s leg a few months back. Seems he was going to be sentenced to community service in Upper Marlboro. I hung up the phone, wondrous that my shame had not been referenced, then drove to the circuit court the next morning.
And now, with about twenty-five inches filed and sent to the state desk, I have come to rest, waiting while editors in the four o’clock shape the next day’s local front. I am sweating profusely, unsure what to do with my hands, my face, my soul. A Styrofoam cup of water sits in front of me, untouched. More laughter from the conference room, and finally they emerge -- Phelps and the others.
He looks at me, pulls on his mustache, frowns.
Dead. I am dead to him.
And then Phelps turns and whispers something to the tall editor beside him, something about me, clearly, because the tall guy is heading my way. I rise and actually drop my eyes. It will be fast, I tell myself. It will be fast and then I can go.
“You’re Simon?”
“Yes.”
“Good story today.”
I wait.
“I like the way you held back some of what you had, the quote from the Anti-Defamation League guy at the end. Too many people write the top of the story and then have nowhere to go.”
He extends a hand.
“I’m Steve Luxenberg. The metro editor.”
“The correction,” I blurt.
“Yeah,” he nods, ready for it. “You can’t rely on other people for your boilerplate. You need to report everything.”
He pauses.
“But that’s a good story going tomorrow.”
He leaves and I stand there for a long moment, looking around the newsroom: Phelps at the state desk, twisting that god-awful mustache, editing. Spry and Ettlin on rewrite, catching dictation from Paris or Washington. Bainbridge, Banisky, and two dozen others I couldn’t yet name banging out copy at the deadline rush. An expanse of computer terminals and battered desks so vast that it can only belong to one of America’s great newspapers.
I have a story in The Baltimore Sun tomorrow. At five that morning, I drive to an all-night drugstore, buy six copies, return to bed wide-eyed, alert.
“Good?” my girlfriend asks.
“Local front. Stripped, with art.”
She gives a small sound, buries her face in a pillow.
“The metro editor knows my name.”
I had read my Mencken. I knew what he said about newspapering, what he claimed for the profession. “The life of kings,” he called it. And for an adolescent growing up in the mid-1970s, it appeared exactly that.
Emerging from childhood, I had seen Halberstam and Hersh take apart the fraudulent premises and practices of Vietnam, then followed daily as my hometown paper brought down Nixon for stealing an election and lying about it. My father, a public-relations man with latent ambitions as a newsman, took all the local papers and The New York Times on Sundays, as well as every newsmagazine. When I was twelve, he took me to Arena Stage for a Front Page revival. “Who the hell’s going to read the second paragraph?” wailed Walter Burns.
I laughed until I hurt and left the theater oversold. I would be a newspaperman. I would join the great gray line of ink-stained hacks, a character of the kind that my father knew and loved. From the Swopes to the Runyons, from Broun to Pegler to Mencken, then back again to Hecht and MacArthur, Homer Bigart and Meyer Berger.
I was an angry kid, by and large, with a cynic’s wariness of authority that was in harness with a good newspaperman’s contempt of cant and hyperbole. I loved a snide turn of phrase. I edited my high school paper, pissed off the faculty advisor, who thought about firing me, won some awards. I edited my college rag, pissed off the media-board chairman, who thought about firing me, won some awards.
I spent the fifth year of college pulling more than a hundred bylines in The Sun. They hired me to fill in for a reporter on leave, and when that reporter returned, Luxenberg gave me a permanent position. At twenty-three, I was the youngest reporter on staff, covering ghetto murders, drug raids, and four-car fatals. And while The Baltimore Sun might not be the greatest name in major dailies, it was a solid, serious enterprise, a second-tier paper with a national presence. It was carrying seven foreign bureaus, a twelve-reporter Washington bureau, a national desk with its own general-assignment staff. And here was the thing in 1983: The Sun was going to get better. Most all of America’s newspapers were going to improve, except maybe for those afternoon editions already being butchered on the altar of television news. There was some consolidation still to come, a shaking out of the weaker rags in multipaper markets, but on the whole, the big market dailies were monopolies, providing the only serious, consistent coverage of their cities.
Watergate and Vietnam had shown how essential a sophisticated newspaper could be, had proven that while the daily chase of sirens might belong to television, the examination of real issues would demand smarter, comprehensive coverage. Television would be the new tabloids, but newspapers would hire more and better writers and transform themselves into the new magazines. And magazines? Shit, they were going to be publishing masterworks if they wanted to compete with the best newspaper writing. Twenty-five years ago, newspapers -- the big ones at least, those controlling their markets -- were unrivaled in their relevance.
So The Sun would also rise. This much I knew.
I am sitting in a car on the 900 block of Baylis Street in southeast Baltimore, engine off, watching a door and waiting. Zorzi is beside me, checking his notes.
“Black family? On this street?” He shakes his head.
“Doesn’t seem right, does it?”
It didn’t. Baylis ran through Highlandtown, an all-white working-class neighborhood. But the address is all we have left on the string.
“You want to hit the door?”
“I don’t want to go up there cold,” I say. “Let’s wait and watch. See what’s up.”
And so we settle in. The address has come from the police computer, listed as the last location on a twenty-something black guy with a particular name. I got that much by convincing a plainclothesman to sign into the system and do a search for me.
The name itself? That came from an old court case, a file Zorzi dug from the courthouse basement. Not satisfied with the docket alone, he’d found the court reporter and had the full proceedings transcribed, and sure enough, a kid named Dontay Carter had used this name and D.O.B. as an alias, pretending to be someone else at his sentencing on a gun charge.
So on a hunch, my plainclothesman runs the alias, and we come up with a minor arrest eight years back on Greenmount Avenue and a request for a gun permit to work a security job. The permit request gives us this Baylis address.
And the Carter kid? He’d killed a guy, carjacked and abducted a couple others -- a salesman, a Hopkins physician, taxpayers, white people. For a week or so, he was a one-man crime wave until police finally ran him down and charged him, identifying him as simply Dontay Carter, of no fixed address.
And so this was journalism. A scavenger hunt -- from A to B to Z on a patchwork of known facts and guesses. It was not the most important story I’d report on, nor my best work. There were stories to be written that would argue for social change, stories that might challenge the institutional status quo, stories that might win prizes. Many of them would be legitimate and some would be manufactured, and, yes, there is stuff in my yellowed clip book that creeps into those categories. But when I think back on what I love about newspapers, I think of sitting in that car, waiting with Bill Zorzi.
For me, the religion was in the chase, the pursuit of accumulated fact and quote, the rush to deadline, and the arrogance of standing up like the village griot at the campfire and running down a story that hadn’t yet been heard. And then the next day, maybe, doing it again.
For that alone, I can have no regrets. Nah, son, fuck law school. And fuck the M.B.A. I’ll never have. And fuck all that Chaucer and Cervantes and Proust I might never get around to reading. On a given day, I learn something that you didn’t know and then, my authority drawn only from scrawl on pages of a pocket notebook, I write it up clean so the rest of you can get your hands filthy with ink, reading my righteous shit. In the less fevered lobes of my brain, it was as pure as that. I swear it was. Never mind the clouds on the horizon. Never mind that the paper was sold by the Abell family after a century and a half of local ownership. Besides, everyone in the newsroom is congratulating one another on having gone to the L. A. newspaper chain, rather than, say, Gannett. If you had to get bought, everyone says, Times Mirror was the way to go.
And yes, there’s talk of some buyouts, but the rumors were talking about no more than twenty or thirty positions across the newsroom. If that happened, it wouldn’t cut too deep.
And then there’s the new management coming in. Fresh faces with great reps and résumés -- John Carroll from Lexington, a Sun veteran, and Bill Marimow from Philadelphia. These guys were ascendant, their reputations preceding them. Would they be signing on in Baltimore if the future here is anything but bright?
When the first buyout offer was finally on the table -- a year’s salary to anyone who left the Sun voluntarily -- I interviewed with the Washington Post and was offered a job on their metro desk’s investigative unit. I turned it down before talking money with anyone, telling the Post M.E. I was staying in Baltimore.
“I actually resent the notion that everyone thinks there are eventually only going to be four papers worth reading.”
He was polite: “Let us know if you change your mind.”
And even after the first buyouts, there was still a lot of talent in the newsroom, a reservoir of beat knowledge and institutional memory and ethical ballast. Beside me in the car that night, Bill Zorzi is the most dogged, most wonderfully neurotic reporter I know. To work a story with him is to double your reach, and if there is a fact that needed to be known and could be known, he would eventually bring it back and lay the notebook page in front of you like a house cat offering up a murdered mouse.
And while we sit on Baylis Street, I know that Eileen Canzian -- having covered social services and poverty for years -- is quietly working sources, pulling Dontay Carter’s juvenile files and copying each relevant page.
If I needed mayoral quotes, I had Banisky, who owned City Hall. And Warmkessel is over at the city courts if we needed anything else from the clerk’s office there, just as Ettlin or Jane Smith is on rewrite if we need to throw last-minute calls.
And when it finally comes together and it’s time to write, it would be Rebecca Corbett moving it to the desk, and she will protect the copy. Shit, she’ll make it 20, 30 percent better -- graf by crafted graf.
We are good and we are still getting better. And good things come to the patient and faithful, to those who sit and wait. Like the black guy rolling down the street -- age, height, and weight to match the police-computer readout. Sure enough, he’s pulling on the screen door, using his key.
“Bill, I have an erection.”
“Me too.”
At the door minutes later, I use the guy’s name as if I’d known him my whole life, talking fast, leaving no spaces for him to argue or usher us out. Dontay Carter pretended to be you in court some years back, using your name and D.O.B. Why?
“I’m his half-brother.”
Of course you are.
“Do you happen to know where his mother lives?”
“No, but my mother might.”
“Can we call her? Right now?”
And after rushing across town and interviewing the stepmother, we learn more about the life of a violent young man but that, no, she has no idea where Dontay had been staying or where his birth mother can be found.
“I know she was in the hospital. She got burnt with lye.”
“Burnt?”
“Someone threw lye on her. Dontay said so.”
Rebecca is telling us that we have to start writing, that the piece needs to be early if it has any chance at the Sunday front. I go back to the newsroom, where a full take of Carter’s history in foster care, along with careful, annotated notes from Canzian, greets me. I leave Zorzi on the street, telling him we have to locate the mother, that the piece can’t run without quotes from the woman who brought Dontay Carter into the world. He calls every area hospital. He asks for a computer check on ambo runs for burn victims going back weeks. He checks with the patrolmen working the neighborhood where she’s last seen. Nothing.
Eventually, he remembers that the city fire department had started billing for ambulance runs. The communications unit has no record of ambo calls for service going back more than a few weeks, but did the billing unit, by chance, keep records for longer?
He pulls a name and an address on Lennox Street.
“How the hell did you find me?” asks the mother as Zorzi comes through her door, notepad and pen akimbo.
“We got the mother,” I tell Rebecca minutes later, doing my best to make it sound inevitable. We were Baltimore’s newspaper, and we were writing about a kid who had terrorized Baltimore. And that kid had a mother. In Baltimore. Of course we got her.
As I say, it was not an important story or the best story. It doesn’t much matter to anyone past the Sunday when it ran. But it sits in my mind today as the moment when I was, if not living the life of kings, then at least among the princes of my city.
I am at lunch with the new managing editor as I prepare to return to the newspaper after a second book leave. The first book, Homicide, had done well and been made into a television show.
I cowrote a script for the drama, won a screenwriting award, and was offered a television gig for more money than The Sun could ever pay. Instead, I returned to the newsroom and, employing everything I’d learned about crime, violence, and nonfiction narrative from the book project, managed to become a better reporter.
After two years, I’d gone back on leave to report a second book, a year in the life of a city drug corner. I now had an even better sense of the city, of the drug war and its frauds, and I was saving string to write a four-part series on what ailed the city police department.
It was complicated: The B.P.D. was caught in a crossfire of bad practices, bad policies, and simple circumstance. But complicated was what could make the series strong and fresh; complicated was the good part. I try to explain, but the M.E. wants to ask instead about newsroom morale.
“What are people saying?”
“About what?”
“About me.”
“About you? I guess they’re waiting to see where you go with it. The new hires certainly believe in you and John. You hired them. The veterans are waiting to see.” I take a breath, venture further: “You and John came in and said a lot of things publicly about the paper being weak, and naturally that’s taken to heart by the people who were here, working hard. There is some deadwood, I know. But there are people doing fine work, and I guess they’re worried that this isn’t acknowledged.”
“Who is saying this?”
I tell him that he’s asked me for a general sense of what was being said in his newsroom and I had provided such.
“Who is saying these things?” he asks again. “You can tell me, and I won’t reveal the source.”
“Bill,” I reply, “I’m not a snitch.”
We finish the meal in near silence. On the walk back to the newspaper, he asks me again, and I tell him that it is unfair of him to ask me to betray the confidence of coworkers.
“It’s not personal,” I add.
He cites Mario Puzo’s Godfather, the passage where Tom tells Michael that it’s business, it’s not personal. “Everything,” he assures me, “is personal.”
And for the most part, he will be proved right.
No, it won’t be personal when The Sun closes its evening edition and combines staffs, making it a one-newspaper town. And it isn’t going to be personal when Times Mirror puts together a couple more buyouts to reduce the number of reporters and editors on the paper that remained.
To most, the staffing reductions of the 1990s will seem inevitable, almost sensible given the loss of The Evening Sun. But in retrospect, this would be the moment when we finally gave up the pretense of being even a great regional entity, of transforming The Sun into a newspaper with enough resources and authority to truly address modern complexities.
At the very edge of being rendered irrelevant by the arrival of the Internet -- at the precise moment when their very product would be threatened by technology -- newspapers will not be intent on increasing and deepening their coverage of their cities, their nation, the world. They will be instead in the hands of out-of-town moneymen offering unfeeling and unequivocal fealty to stockholders and the share price. And when the Chicago Tribune Company buys Times Mirror and more buyouts follow, the tipping point will be reached. Instead of a news report so essential to the high-end readers that they might -- even amid the turmoil of the Internet -- still charge for their product online and off, American newspapers will soon be offering a shell of themselves in a market unwilling to pay for such and then, in desperation, giving the product away for free. The window will close; newspapers will not be getting better, stronger, more comprehensive. Not ever again.
In Baltimore, the response will be to drop beats, to abandon the pretense of actually covering the city in detail, to regard institutional memory and the need to look at the city’s problems systemically as, well, quaint. The newsroom culture will instead emphasize impact.
No longer would the journalism be rooted in the organic work of reporters sent into the streets to learn new things and then pull smart, balanced stories through the keyhole. Impact means prizes. Now you pick a target and, to the exclusion of all complexity, you hammer on that target, story after story. Most especially, you write additional accounts highlighting the “impact” that The Sun’s coverage has achieved -- covering your own coverage -- the better to show that the newspaper has effected change.
If the newspaper cares about something in December, it cares nothing about it in January; the prize cycle follows the calendar year. If you can source something to The Sun’s reporting -- to documents obtained by The Sun or The Sun has learned -- it reads better than to simply cite the facts, even if they are from the public record. If a politician fails to respond to your reporting by scheduling a hearing or issuing a position paper, you bang on him until he does so.
And worse still, in the newsroom where I grew up -- a semi-intellectual environment where everyone once seemed to be arguing about everything all the time without actually impairing their careers -- dissent will become problematic.
This is the personal part.
Because the new way of doing business apparently leaves no place in the newsroom for fundamental disagreements about content, about reportage, about the substance of what we are doing or not doing. Arguments over quotidian matters such as the slant of Mideast coverage, or an ethical debate over attribution, or the use and overuse of a stylistic device will soon bring transfers and demotions until, finally, an exodus begins. And it will not be the deadwood; those taking the buyouts or simply leaving outright will be the ones with options: Struck, Alvarez, Robinson, Zorzi, Thompson, Wooton, Lippman, among far too many others -- the departures will be the veteran voices of a good newsroom. When they come for Littwin -- our best columnist -- it will involve their anger at a Guild bulletin written during contract negotiations.
“Bill,” he tells the managing editor, “it’s not personal.”
And in response: “Have you ever read The Godfather?”
The divide between new hires who embrace the prize culture and the old guard, many of whom find it a little shameful, will be exacerbated. And old against new is senseless. For the paper to get better, it needs to retain the talent it has and add more. They won’t be chasing the weaker reporters; they’ll be alienating the core of the institution, leaching as much talent as they hire.
So I write a memo to the top editor, arguing this privately, urging him to reconsider this self-defeating mythology in which no one here knew a thing about newspapering until the new regime. Old and new together can build this paper into something greater than the sum of its parts; new set against old cannot.
No response, not a word, except the editor manages to spike my next story without explanation or comment. I go to see him.
“I was disappointed in that story,” he says.
“How so?”
“It was trying too hard not to be a newspaper article.”
“John, I happen to know the feature editor you brought in here to encourage narrative writing -- she read the story in the kill basket and then came in here and told you she couldn’t see why you spiked it. She told you that was the kind of story you brought her here to do.”
He says nothing to that, so I press him: “That’s some of my best work, John. If you spiked it because you were mad at my memo, we can talk about that. But if you spiked it and you’re telling me that kind of journalism has no place at The Sun, then I guess I have no place at The Sun.”
“That,” he says, “may be the case.”
I get up to go, feeling as if I’d cut my right arm off with a butter knife. Before I leave, though, I do one last thing: I speak up for some people in the newsroom, honest players who had watched as standards had changed and who are too scared to complain openly. You’ve hired a lot of good new people, I tell the editor, and I’ve happily worked with many of them.
But there’s a fellow here who is cooking it. He’s trying too hard to write impact stories and he’s making it up and John, we’ve retracted a couple stories already. “You might win a Pulitzer with a guy like that. You might also have to give it back.”
“Who?” he asks.
I give him the name.
“Well,” he says, “one bad hire out of twenty-five is a pretty good record, don’t you think?”
I allow that it is. Then I go to see Rebecca, who is editing one of my last stories. It’s about a couple of homicide detectives -- smart, competent players -- who are working a last week before taking retirement.
Her cursor rolls down the screen and she highlights a quote from one: “My friends are all gone now and the place doesn’t seem the same to me. It’s just time.”
She moves on to some of my own verbiage: “. . . it isn’t the casework they plan on remembering; it’s the time spent doing that work -- the camaraderie, the banter, the strange things that a cop sees every time he goes out on the street . . .”
Rebecca Corbett gets it. She starts to cry and I am secretly delighted. It’s always good when you get your own editor.
“You wrote a goodbye,” she says. “Didn’t you?”
I tell her that I am, in my mind, a newspaperman still. I just don’t work for a newspaper anymore. I tell her that I will go to television on a lark, learn a new skill set, but I’ll eventually get back to what it is I’m supposed to be doing.
Four years later, I am in an editing suite in New York, working on an HBO miniseries. And I get a call from an old friend, a veteran of a newspaper that once lacked for impact but gave good weight to getting it right.
“He did it again.”
“Who?”
He gives me the name. And immediately I know.
This time, the newspaper had been required to apologize privately to the governor. A story -- part of a series of articles tailored for a prize campaign -- claimed that the governor visited with black ministers in Baltimore, solely in response to the power of The Sun’s coverage.
Except it hadn’t happened. Not any of it. The meeting was about something else entirely. The ministers -- one of whom was quoted at length about the righteous things he told the governor about The Sun’s Pulitzer-worthy issue -- had uttered nothing of the sort.
I am a free agent at that point, clear of any newsroom politics or careerist worries. Fuck it, I call the publisher and leave a message. But it’s the editor who returns the call.
“An honest mistake,” he explains.
“John, there’s nothing honest about it. This bullshit about having impact and winning prizes? It leads to shit like this. The guy’s making up meetings that never happened. There are quotes that no one ever said.”
“It was a misunderstanding.”
“It’s the third time you’ve retracted one of this guy’s stories. Not corrections -- I’m talking about the very premise of the story having to be retracted.”
“What were the other two?”
It took me a long moment to regroup.
“John,” I said finally, “if I was the editor of a major metropolitan daily and I had to retract three stories by the same reporter, I would remember it until the day I fucking died.”
I’m not prescient. At that moment, I can’t yet fathom all the still-to-come Tribune Company cost cutting at The Sun, the Kafkaesque reductions in staffing, the slow-motion demolition of the Washington bureau, the shuttering of the foreign bureaus.
And I am still as clueless as the captains of the newspaper industry when it comes to the Internet, still mistaking the Web as advertising for the product when, in fact, it is the product. I don’t yet envision the steep declines in circulation, the indifference of young readers to newsprint, the departure of display advertising to department-store consolidation and classified space to Craigslist.
Admittedly, I can’t even grasp all of the true and subtle costs of impact journalism and prize hunger. I don’t yet see it as a zero-sum game in which a serious newspaper would cover less and less of its city -- eliminating such fundamental responsibilities as a poverty beat, a labor beat, a courthouse beat in a city where rust-belt unemployment and crime devour whole neighborhoods -- and favor instead a handful of special select projects designed to catch the admiring gaze of a prize committee.
I have no way of knowing that for all of its claims to renewed greatness, The Sun will glean three Pulitzers in twelve years, as compared to, uh, three Pulitzers awarded to The Sun and its yet-to-be-shut-down evening edition during the twelve years prior -- a scorecard that matters only to a handful of résumés and means nothing to the thousands of readers soon asked to decide whether they need a newspaper that covers less of their world.
I can’t yet see that what ails The Baltimore Sun afflicts all newspapers, that few, if any, of the gray ladies are going to be better at what they do, that most will soon be staring at a lingering slide into mediocrity.
I only know, as I hang up the editing-suite phone, that I’ve lost my religion, that too much of what I genuinely loved is gone. I turn to David Mills, my coproducer on the HBO project. He’d worked with me on the college paper, then at The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Times, The Washington Post. But we wrote that first television script together, and when I returned to the metro desk, he went to Hollywood, never looking back.
“Brother,” I say, “we got out just in time.”
True enough. But the other day, I saw a column of black smoke due east of I-95 just above Eastern Avenue -- dark and thick enough that I drove there. It was a roadside car fire, no injuries. Nothing worth a call to the desk. Good thing, too, because Spry is long dead, and Ettlin retired last year. Who I was gonna call it in to, I have no clue.
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