The Wire

The dam is about to break. I've been managing my anticipation of Sunday's Season 4 Premiere of HBO's monumental cops & robbers show, The Wire. Like the great Warner Bros. crime dramas of the 1930's, The Wire is filled with sociology, economic criticism, and good people trying to reform a lethal world. Like the best novel you read last year, the end of the final episode will give you a satisfaction that no other television drama even attempts.

With a steadily building fan base from the original broadcasts and (like Season 3 debuting at #1 on Amazon) DVD pick-ups, with a long overdue lionization by the popular press these past two weeks, with the early reviewers all climbing over each other to proclaim this the best season yet, it's looking like this might just be The Wire's moment.

I'll admit it took me three episodes way back at the start of the first season to get hooked. The title seemed small, like a subset of a cop show idea. The setting was gritty and at first the camerawork seemed maybe low budget, artless. And then there was the surfeit of characters, many of which were not exactly as good or brilliant or narratively validated as a typical TV drama.

It turns out The Wire is actually social criticism through drama, a detailed examination of the institutions and bureaucracies that regularly fail We Americans. The title refers to warrant-certified eavesdropping, initially on Baltimore's leading drug dealing infrastructure, but it ends up the metaphor for just trying to survive, whether cop or chief or dealer or user or union leader or politician or, this season, student. It turns out the shooting style is urban poetry. The complex web of characters turns out to be the jazz that keeps the series buzzing around your head all week, all thirteen weeks, until the last episode caps your ass.

I got hooked when mid-level drug dealer D'Angelo explained the game of chess by comparing the pieces to the drug organization's hierarchy. And further when desk-buried Detective Lester Freamon told ambitious young Detective James McNulty that when the wire operation he set in motion eventually reaches city leader corruption to prepare for a similar fate. And forever when McNulty and his partner, Detective William "Bunk" Moreland, did an exhaustive examination of a crime scene communicating entirely (over 50 times in three minutes) with the word, "Fuck."

Each season is a novel unto itself, meaning it's possible to start watching Season 4 cold and still get an incredible, rounded story. Maybe because creator David Simon (Homicide: Life on the Streets) never knows if they'll be renewed for a next season, each 13 episode arc ends with enough closure to make the open ends forgivable. He and the stellar writing team (including ex-cop Ed Burns, accomplished novelists Richard Price, Dennis Lehane and George Pellicanos) are unafraid of killing major characters to advance the story, so unlike every other TV series you've ever seen, there's never ever the sense that the show is ultimately just serving the perpetuation of its formula into the next season.

Each season follows the main cop characters as they come together, always with some shuffling of members, for a new special investigation -- the season's wiretap -- and each season also keeps moving the crooks side as well. However, each season also revolves around a different institutional focus, making for organic season-contained plotlines. Season One focused on the cops vs. dealers. Season Two added the deteriorating Labor situation at the declining Baltimore docks. Season Three replaced that with City Hall, and the slow-burning conflagration when one police Major creates a penalty-free drug zone in an abandoned pocket of the city.

This season continues the political plot, focused on quasi-idealistic City Councilman Carcetti's attempt to become Mayor, but the new action is in the schools, where young kids being raised by other kids decide whether to stick it out or start working the streets dealing. HBO has aired two half-hour specials, surprisingly spoiler-free, that I finally watched tonight to get all set up for Sunday. I'm ready and stoked.

Not just me -- The New York Times says:

This season of "“The Wire"” will knock the breath out of you. HBO'’s formidable police drama, which as a ratings enigma has never been coddled by the cable channel, has become only tougher and tighter through three seasons. But this time around, the "Wire"” row house has undergone a gut renovation. The series looks the same, roughly, from the curb, but the old place has been replumbed and rewired, as "“The Wire"” now focuses on four besieged Baltimore middle schoolers. This shift of emphasis by the show'’s creator, David Simon, is a risky, even arrogant move that pays off in literary television that broadens the mind and blows the heart open.

A few weeks ago Stephen King devoted his full-page Entertainment Weekly end column, concluding by calling the show "a staggering achievement." Just this week the magazine's Ken Tucker listed the show as #1 in his "5 Reasons to Live", writing:

In the opening scene of the new, best-yet season of quite possibly the finest series ever made for television, a black youth goes into a big Home Depot-like store and asks the middle-aged white employee to recommend a nail gun. They exchange questions and answers about power and nail size, but their talk is completely at cross-purposes: The man is talking about home repair; the youth is talking about death. Get used to seeing The Wire on this list. I'm not going to give any plot points away, but if you like [NAME OF YOUR FAVORITE SHOW HERE, AND I DON'T EVEN CARE IF IT'S TWO AND A HALF MEN], you owe it to yourself to watch The Wire. It will rip your heart out and replace it with a new, stronger one.

Simon has said that a fifth season (still not greenlit) would finish the mission, complete the examination of the city institutions in his not-so-fictionalized Baltimore. Here's hoping HBO doesn't let us down. On Sunday night I'll be settling in with some of the finest actors on television, certainly the most emphatically diverse cast on television, and juicing for the yarn to get started.

I'll be eager to find out about these new characters, these kids on the edge of hope or degradation, but I know I'm going to be most psyched to see my old friends. Sima. Prez. Avon. Cutty.

Then there will be that moment, maybe in the first episode, maybe in the thirteenth, but sometime you just know you'll hear that whistled version of "The Farmer in the Dell" echoing down the deserted midnight streets of Baltimore, as the man with the shotgun, a Robin Hood who steals from the drug dealers and gives to himself, comes sauntering by.

Hello, Omar.

Hello Wire, Season Four.