Visual Style of The Wire

Finally, credit where credit is overdue. I've always thought of The Wire as having noir elements along with the social realism. It's not a documentary - it's exceptionally well-crafted and relevant fiction. Now someone has analyzed the show's visual style and, guess what, in its own way it's as brilliant as the writing:

Style in The Wire from Erlend Lavik on Vimeo.

Major kudos to Erlend Lavik. This one gets added to the canon.

Greatest Board Game Ever

I'm loving how it's now a general knowledge meme that The Wire is the best television series of all time. I hear it every few weeks from random people, most of whom didn't catch it in its initial run, but later on DVD or Netflicks. Watching whole seasons over a single weekend, not three months like we did at the start. Getting it fast, injection.

This got posted today:

Best part:

All hail Michael Kenneth Williams.

Sad

David Mills, RIP:

David Mills, a veteran television writer who worked on the award-winning series "ER" and "The Wire," died after collapsing on the set of his latest production. He was 48.

Mills died Tuesday night in New Orleans, said HBO spokesman Diego Aldana. Doctors at Tulane Medical Center said he suffered a brain aneurism, according to a statement Wednesday from Mills' latest production, "Treme."

Mills was on the set of the new HBO series as it filmed a scene at Cafe du Monde in the French Quarter when he was stricken and rushed to the hospital where he died without regaining consciousness, the statement said.

More:

Mills began his career as a reporter for The Washington Post, before turning to screenwriting. Besides "ER" and "The Wire," he worked on the HBO drama "The Corner," "Homicide: Life on the Street," "NYPD Blue" and was executive producer and writer of the short-lived NBC miniseries "Kingpin," about a Mexican drug cartel.

Mills started his television writing career with Simon, a longtime friend and "Wire" creator, in 1994. The pair wrote an episode of "Homicide" that year, for which they won a Writers Guild of America award. Mills won Emmys for co-writing and executive producing the miniseries "The Corner" and an Edgar in 2007 for "The Wire."

Not terribly well-known outside the industry, he's one of the unique fraternity of great modern television writers, one of "the family" for his work on Homicide: Life on the Streets and The Wire.

Set your DVR for Treme on HBO to catch his fine last work.

Lest We Forget

Sure, Mad Men is the best show currently running seasons on TV. But it still has a ways to go to best The Wire. In fact, I have a co-worker looking for a Mad Men substitute (she's jonesing!) who is now going to try The Wire on my recommendation.

So this curtain call by Charlie C. is here to remind all you fans out there of the greatness:



Any favorite quotes of yours missing? I didn't catch it if it's in there, but mine is, "And I'm not even Greek!"

Ah, as Sima says, "If I hear the music, I'm gonna dance."

All in the game, yo. All in the game.

It's Collegiate!

Okay, Mad Men is the show of the moment, but The Wire is enduring, and now it's a course at Harvard University:

The class will be taught by sociology professor William J. Wilson, one of the best-known African American history professors in the country, who has made no secret of the fact that he is a huge fan of the show.

"I do not hesitate to say that it has done more to enhance our understanding of the challenges of urban life and the problems of urban inequality, more than any other media event or scholarly publication," Wilson told the audience before poking fun at himself, "including studies by social scientitsts."

Nothin' new, though, per Associate Professor Jason Mittell at Middlebury College:



Mittell treats The Wire as he should, in the same league as the novels of Dostoevsky or drama of Shakespeare, at five episodes a week. And there's word of a similar course at Dartmouth.

Yep, best show cop show ever.

And arguably the finest fictional television series yet produced.

PolViz

Team Palin trying to belittle Romney:



Dems drawing targets on GOP:



David Simon, Wendell Pierce and Clarke Peters coming back to HBO via New Orleans.

Uh-oh

So today I'm already hit by a conversation I can no longer have with my lifelong friend who died on Friday. Mo went to Princeton with now disgraced New York Governor Elliot Spitzer (it seems they may have been in the same "eating club"), and now I can't call him to exchange extreme snark.

As everyone surely knows by now, Spitzer just got busted for his involvement with a prostitution ring, a federal crime (client money facilitating women crossing state lines to break the law) that could lead to a conviction, and likely resignation this week.

About a month ago I had a conversation with Mo about the New Yorker profile on Spitzer's slamming drop from earning 70% of the vote in 2006 to a 36% approval rating, George W. Bush territory. When I asked if Spitzer, in college, was as repulsively, explosively arrogant as he appeared to be in the article, Mo simply replied, "No comment."

Damn his discretion!

Soon after the story broke, another friend sent me an email that asked, simply:

Spitzer = Carcetti

Ah, at least! Back on solid ground with an analogy drawn straight from The Wire, which ended its scorching, epic 5-season, 60-episode run last night. That's approximately thirty feature films worth of entertainment, the lion's share of what I see in a theater in a year.

On the show, Thomas Carcetti starts out as adulterous city councilman, runs for Mayor, wins and (SPOILERS AHEAD),
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caps last night's series closer in montage as Governor. He successfully navigated the waters of McNulty's serial killer fraud, and everyone ends up better for it in the end.

What I found in the close to The Wire was a sense of surprise and surely relief that it wasn't as tragic as expected. The writers had called this the Dr. Strangelove season, and the ending had more comedy than pathos, save for the final scenes with Duquand, condemned to a soulless hell of addiction and poverty, just like the "family" we first saw hints of, the fate he momentarily escaped thanks to his drug-dealing buddy, Michael.

McNulty is arguably better off having left the force even if sans pension, Lester is pensioned off at 30 years with the devoted Shardene coming onto him while he's making the doll house furniture that earns him a pretty penny. Daniels sticks to his conscience and ends up free of the institution. Perlman is a judge. Rawls is promoted to state police by a grateful Carcetti. Narese becomes Mayor of Baltimore and -- the most hilarious moment in the montage -- promotes Valcek to Police Commissioner.

Best of all, Cheese gets it right in the head from Slim Charles after threatening an upstanding drug co-op member with his pistol and talking about how he's going to be the Marlo now. Boom! Payback for Tall Man and, most of all, Prop Joe. And in some ways seeming like justice for Omar.

This is now brilliant the storytelling is. I'm cheering for gangster Slim Charles (who takes over the drug trade with Fat Faced Rick). Nice.

While maybe the story didn't end with some maybe adolescent idea of tragic gotterdammerung, and maybe in a weird masochistic way it feels like a gyp, the actual choice made by creator David Simon (nice cameo in that newsroom pan) and crew is perhaps more humanistic, while still provide the closure release you maybe didn't feel at the end of The Sopranos.

The show began with McNulty, and among a cast of equals Dominic West is the only cast lead to receive first billing, not alphabetical. His intellectual vanity kicked off the very first wiretap unit in the very first season. It took a few episodes for him to get it, but he's the catalyst for everything that unfolds on the law enforcement side. The thorn in Rawls' side. The ringleader.

Famously, The Wire took a perpendicular turn with its fourth season, when evidently Dominic West wanted more family time and McNulty, having completed the Avon Barksdale arc over the course of the first three seasons, took a backseat to the four new schoolkids who broke our hearts over thirteen episodes. That was arguably the finest season, brazen it its risks, devastating in its rewards.

With its mere ten episodes (the final being 1 1/2 hours) after the usual twelve, and sudden introduction of the newsprint institution, this fifth and final season seemed at times almost coda on the rest of the series. The cameos by characters past combined with the jarring choice made by McNulty to mess with homeless corpses and create an impossible-to-sustain fiction, in order to fund the actual druglord sting, felt forced, not exactly the show we knew, almost like comment on the preceding body of the series.

Bottom line: who cares. Simon and company again took a perpendicular turn, only this time centered on the character we knew and loved for three straight seasons, keeping the series fresh (it may have felt weird but it didn't feel like retread) and still, in one of those famous second-to-last episodes, pulling all the threads until the tension was eye-poppingly maximus.

I resisted writing about the series closer last night because I wanted a day to reflect on it, see if I had anything to add to Andrew Johnson and Alan Sepinwall (both linked about, along with Sepinwall's lengthy, Wire-literate interview with David Simon), anything original to say, preferably momentous.

Well, I'm short on the momentous, but from a pure narrative point of view, the fact that the series ended with McNulty getting out of his car, carrying in his passenger's seat the last neat little piece of the closure puzzle, staring off at downtown Baltimore while having his first-time version of the usual season-ending musical montage; the fact that the montage was to the original Blind Boys of Alabama opening credits version of Tom Waits' "Down in the Hole" (each season, of course, the opening theme was performed by a different artist or ensemble); the fact that McNulty's last line is, "Let's go home," just points to the simple fact that they knew what they were doing.

This is McNulty's story. Sure, it's Stringer's and Carcetti's and Daniels' and Greggs' and Bunk's -- the list goes on over scores of speaking parts. But at the core was Jimmy, and since we suffered with him, caroused with him, fornicated and investigated with him, we needed to close him out.

While we don't know what job he'll be doing next (Private detective? Series sequel?) we do know that he's completed his arc. The serial killer scam storyline, climaxing with Marlo Stanfield and associates getting arrested (even if Marlo walked away, into his own private purgatory), allowed the writers to take McNulty to the farthest extreme, actual rogue policework, not just bending the rules and skirting the bosses.

Jimmy needed a win to leave, that or die trying (my prediction throughout the season, gladly wrong). He ended up getting one. He's sated; there's nowhere further to go with undercover wiretap investigation. The game goes on and now it's Syndor and Slim on the gerbil wheel, but McNulty has scratched that itch and escaped by the skin of his teeth. There's no going back but no need to.

The remarkable narrative trick was how the powers moved the human pieces to get a desired media and hence new reality result. Everybody ultimately plays their part, disregarding any "truth", and everybody gets paid. The lucky implausibles included the conveniently timed copycat killer at the nick of time and Lester's speedy identification of the courthouse leak, and maybe Elliot Spitzer will hand onto his job thanks to such a twist in real life.

If nothing else, after watching the full breadth of The Wire, it will be interesting to see how it plays out.

Now, if Mo were here I'd hit him with the same note I sent back to my buddy who equated Spitzer with Carcetti. It seems that the Lt. Governor, who may step into Spitzer's shoes by the middle of this week, would not only be New York's first African-American Governor, he would be the state's first blind Governor as well.

Not unlike Butchie, the beloved safe haven for the late Omar Little.

So if Spitzer = Carcetti...

Does Paterson = Butchie?

Reminder

By odd coincidence, TCM was playing Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven tonight at the same time that I was flipping over to watch the new and penultimate series episode of HBO's The Wire. The epigram that opened this one was by drug kingpin enforcer Snoop, the most dangerous woman in Baltimore, "Deserve's got nuthin' to do with it." Clearly an intentional echo of Eastwood's William Mummy's immortal line, "Deserving's got nothing to do with it."

Beautiful.

Lately I've been taking it for granted that The Wire is the best dramatic series ever aired on American television. Sure, it's easy to say that it's the best cop show ever -- maybe cops and robbers being more accurate, more The Untouchables than N.Y.P.D. Blue. And with HBO having truncated the season by three episodes -- 10 instead of the usual 12 or 13 -- for budgetary reasons, a lot of us may have felt we've been carrying water for televauteur David Simon et al. McNulty's moves came too soon, past season callback cameos too fast.

Then came tonight's episode, one of the most satisfying -- and tantalizing -- ever.

What a reminder.

Some previous season and tonight's ep SEMI-SPOILERS AHEAD.
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Second-to-last season episodes have always been the big ones on The Wire. Who can forget Stringer Bell in his development, or when Nick Sobotka i.d.'ed The Greek, or Omar taking down the entire Co-op resupply?

This one was a doozy, starting with Lester's net encircling Marlo and hosannas at City Hall, ending with the entire success in jeopardy and next week's previews seeming to set up that the whole shebang may hinge on whether now Colonel Daniels has regained the moral compass he has long grieved for slipping back when he was in the Western District (although I'm praying Lester's tip from, of all people, Clay Davis, somehow keeps Levy from capitalizing on McNulty's disaster).

What makes The Wire arguably the best ever show on television isn't just the novelistic realism or the relentless commitment to it's compellingly difficult worldview. Those are the underpinnings that validate the narrative brilliance of the show in an almost unfair advantage over science fiction or comedies. In a less politicized, less germane, less pressing genre you would admire the story, maybe even feel deeply for the characters, but you're just able to put it away more quickly. Suspension of disbelief hits its shelf-life.

I'm not so sure it ever will for The Wire.

Because the artists creating the show, the keepers of the narrative, are willing to go deep, go complex, and go long, and most of all because they believe in closure, albeit rolling closure, albeit often delayed to the point of ecstasy, it's complexities never seem like riffing, never seem like usual TV where popular characters are kept alive like cards in a hand, maybe dying for cheap effect or because an actor's contract has run out.

For all it's labyrinthine planting, the payoffs are huge. Marlo showing his steel in the cell, Bubbles making one year, Michael saying goodbye to Bugs and Dukie and maybe turning into the next Omar, maybe Dukie turning Bubs, it is all killer stuff.

But what's coming clear once again the is staggering sweep of The Wire, where the main character can recede for an entire series and the new young characters who seemed to take up his space now occupy completely different positions in the current story. As McNulty said so aptly as to be embraceably overdetermined at the end of last week's episode, "When you start telling the story, you think you're the hero, but by the time..."

Will Det. Bunk Moreland, who opened this season and has (nearly) consistently played by the rules, turn out to be the hero? Will it be Daniels who stands tall, and maybe even survives? Will McNulty somehow pull a rabbit out of his flask?

It seems to me that next week's agonizingly awaited outcome will hinge on which of two rules prevails.

On one hand, season after season, well-intentioned character after character, the show has stuck to it's guns that reformers fail -- the institutions always beat them.

On the other hand, as the Bunk told us just before the opening titles rolled at the beginning of this season, "The bigger the lie, the more they believe."

Oh, man, it's been five wrenching seasons.

I want to go out a believer.

Wired for Speed

If you've never watched The Wire until this season and don't expect to go back starting with Season 1 DVDs (highly recommended), or if you're a longtime viewer/fan who wants a quick recap, this "4 Seasons in 4 Minutes" is a pretty funny to superficially catch up.

And he's not even Greek...