The Wire - Season One (****)

Because the plot of Season One of The Wire involves cops attempting to catch a drug dealer, to mistake it for a police procedural is a forgivable offense. Certainly as a police procedural it is as raw, realistic and compelling as one could hope for in the genre, but to mistake it for a member of a genre you've seen before is to do it a disservice. It involves police, and criminals, and the interaction between the two, yes. But there's so much more going on. What is The Wire about? The problems, the bureaucracies, the policies, the sycophants, the petty priorities that morph into our policies of America. Baltimore is the canvas. America is the subject. The War on Drugs is the paint.

Consider that it is the War on Drugs that created Avon Barksdale (Wood Harris), who is the kingpin of West Baltimore, and whose control of the cocaine and heroin trade has made him a wealthy and influential man. His empire is large, profitable, and organized, and gets one to realizing just how much structure goes into the flow of the narcotics trade, and how much implicit racism takes place in our categorization of that structure. If they were white, we'd call them a mafia. Because they're black, we call them a gang.

What's his organization, then? Where Avon brings street cred, street smarts, and ruthless ambition to the table, his right-hand man, Stringer Bell (Idris Elba), handles the money and the day-to-day. It goes places you wouldn't guess - you'd expect a drug gang to have outlets to launder their dirty money, and they do - assets like a strip club, an auto body shop, a funeral home, are par for the course. More surprising are the political campaign contributions. It is some time into the first season before the extent of the Barksdale empire is revealed, and when it is, the characters are as surprised as we are. When a driver, who is pulled over going out of a housing project tower with $30,000 in drug money, turns out to work for a state senator, you can see the transition occur between an intelligent and somewhat cynical cop show to a show that has very specific observations to be made about the structure of America, top to bottom.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. The plot of the show starts as one might expect: D'Angelo Barksdale, nephew to the king and a mid-level dealer in his uncle's organization, faces a murder trial. The act itself appears to have been one more of panicked self-defense than of malice, but nevertheless, he's on trial, and we see how his uncle has managed a work-around. There were two witnesses, upon whose testimony the entire case hinges. The first tells it as he saw it, but the second flips on the stand, saying D'Angelo wasn't the shooter. It's pretty clear pressure (alongside money) was applied: Stringer Bell is present in the courtroom, as is much of his muscle: shooters like Wee-Bey (Hassan Johnson), Bird (Fredro Starr), and Stinkum (Brandon Price), scaring the shit out of the witnesses. By the end of the pilot episode, the first witness, the one who didn't flip, will be dead. These motherfuckers don't play.

Homicide Detective Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West), knows all of this. Unlike most of the Baltimore Police Department, whose focus is largely on stats and "street rips" - that is, making undercover drug buys and hoping to roll the people you're buying from, usually juveniles, up on their superiors, which doesn't often work - McNulty's ear is to the ground, and he's natural police even if he's a hopeless alcoholic and seen by the department as a rabble-rousing fuck-up. He and Judge Phelan (Peter Gerety), who presided over the Barksdale trial, go back. McNulty was in the courtroom, and Phelan calls him up to his office. "What happened in there?" Phelan asks him. McNulty lets go of some information, and before he knows what's up, Phelan, who is a political entity, is calling the BPD's Deputy for Operations, Ervin Burrell (Frankie Faison), asking for a detail of police to target Barksdale.

It's in that process that you see the things you don't normally see in a cop show: the internal bureaucracies of a police department. Burrell, the second to the police commissioner and the one largely in charge of the day-to-day operations, is a hack when it comes to policework, though throughout the series will prove himself to be a shrewd political maneuverer. His top major, named Rawls (John Doman), is ruthless and cold, but also whip-smart and eloquent. Burrell wants to please Phelan, but doesn't make it a priority, and tells the unit commanders to pick what cops get sent off to the detail. The result: the commander of the detail, a smart and ambitious Narcotics Lieutenant named Cedric Daniels (Lance Riddick), takes along his best detective Kima Greggs (Sonja Sohn), and her two proteges Herc and Carver (Dominic Lombardazzo and Seth Gilliam), while other departments offload their dead wood.

From Homicide, Rawls sends McNulty, who he sees as disloyal, and an ineffectual detective named Santangelo. Two drunks are sent from Property named Polk and Mahone, who prove useless. Roland "Prez" Pryzbylewski (Jim True-Frost), from Auto Theft, is a fast-becoming-legendary fuck-up who is established to have shot up his own radio car, calling in a distress call saying he was under fire from a sniper (he only avoided being fired because his father-in-law is a Major who has "suction" - friends - at City Hall). Because of him, Daniels is able to horse-trade for Sydnor (Corey Parker Robinson), an effective cop. Lester Freamon (Clarke Peters) makes for the most interesting dramatic choice amongst the cops, as an older cop from the Pawn Shop Unit, who in a classic reveal that literally takes something along the lines of five episodes, is revealed to be a brilliant ex-homicide detective who stirred up shit in the department and for it was buried for thirteen years (and four months) in a unit that does nothing but paperwork.

When the witness from the trial turns up dead, a meeting of the police brass discusses the potential political ramifications of solving versus not solving the murder. At no point in the meeting is the reasoning that the murder should be solved for its own sake ever mentioned. It's typical of the tone of the show.

Eventually, as the case progresses, various factors intercede. The first is the character of Bubbles (Andre Royo), a dope fiend with a great memory who Kima, in narcotics, has made wonderful use of as a confidential informant. When a friend gets stomped on and put in the hospital by some of Barksdale's crew, including young dealers Bodie (J.D. Williams) and Poot (Tray Chaney), who work for D'Angelo, he helps the detail identify many of Barksdale's key players. Another is the ubiquitous Omar Little (Michael K. Williams), a stick-up artist who makes his living robbing drug dealers (a profession not for the faint-of-heart). He's gay, and when his boyfriend (who was helping him with his robberies) is killed by Barksdale's people, he agrees to snitch, albeit in a limited capacity.

If this is seeming like a big show, well, it is: big and seemingly hard to follow, but after a time the characters feel like old friends. Shit. I haven't even mentioned Bunk (Wendell Pierece) yet, McNulty's partner in homicide, and enabler to many of his more self-destructive habits. He is a character all his own, and more quotable than anyone even Samuel L. Jackson has ever played. The scene where he and McNulty investigate an old crime scene, a murder believed to be linked to Barksdale's people, where they hold an entire conversation consisting only of the word "fuck" and its derivatives, is a true classic of the small screen. I'm really not kidding.

These days we expect a degree of serialization in our shows: everything North of Law and Order has at least something in the way of a plot thread or two that connects one episode of a show to another. That said, viewers not expecting it may be more than a little uncomfortable with The Wire's slow structure. Unlike just about every show I've ever seen, The Wire makes no attempt to structure each episode as its own dramatic arc with its own beginning, middle, and end. Some episodes, particularly early in a season, are all setup with little to no payoff. And yet, it's all the more effective, because when you do hit the payoffs, it's almost orgiastic. Most shows play like a series of short stories, connected only by the characters and an arc here and there; The Wire unfolds like a full-blooded novel, rich and textured. There are no "filler" episodes. Every season is a single story, and as Lester Freamon succinctly puts it, all the pieces matter.

That characteristic may be seen as some as the most off-putting aspect of the show but it is in truth its greatest strength.

Another potentially off-putting characteristic to many viewers is the show's strict commitment to verisimilitude. Because it deals with Baltimore drug gangs, the majority of its characters are black (even though its creators are white, The Wire quickly gained a reputation as a "black show"), and it is clearly more concerned with protraying an air of authenticity than worrying about alienating viewers who won't understand what's being spoken. Although as a white guy who grew up in 98% white suburbia I have no real knowledge to draw from, The Wire makes me believe that this is the authentic language of the streets: coarse and vulgar, with no qualms about throwing around the n-word, but also with an air of poetry. This is the culture that produces many of our rap artists, and the connection is not hard to find.

Ultimately that is a goal of any art: to connect its audience with characters that they will almost certainly never in reality meet, but convince them that they are real nonetheless. That's not true just in this case of the Major Players in the story, but also with their underlings. Bodie (J.D. Williams) and Poot (Tray Chaney) are two good examples among many: 16-year-old kids who are already deep in the drug game, dealers working under D'Angelo, whose status in the organization has made them relatively wealthy, who have status in the neighborhood, for whom the threat of jail is an occupational hazard but only really a minor concern, who go about their day and live their lives the best way they know how. In a sense, they're born into the life. Some choose to avoid it, sure, but in so doing forsake wealth and status in favor of a straight life that seems stacked against them. The great irony of the story, which in turn reflects reality, is that so many of these drug kingpins would be so very successful in everyday society if that's what they were raised to be. The Game is nothing if not a ruthless meritocracy.

It's clear where the show's politics lie (and becomes even more clear in the following seasons), particularly when it comes to the politics of the drug war. That most people favor the status quo, the show would argue, is a knee-jerk reaction born from a lack of understanding of why things are the way they are. That drugs do an enormous amount of damage cannot be denied. The character of Bubbles, whose portrayal by Andre Royo as a dope fiend is so convincing that in one memorable anecdote, while filming on the streets of Baltimore, an actual dope fiend wandered onto the set and placed an actual score of heroin into his hand saying he needed that more than he himself did, is the show's acknowledgment of this. The damage done by the drug dealers themselves is even worse. They bring violence and intimidation with them everywhere they go. Thus it's easy to place the blame on them: to say, if you would just come correct and followed the rules, none of this would happen. But of course that's bullshit, and rather than govern a fantasy city where everyone does what you say just because you make what they're doing illegal, the more prudent course seems obviously to face the problem head-on, treat addicts as something other than criminals, and provide a means for people to acquire their drugs that doesn't require distribution via black market gangs, whose only true means of solving disputes is via violence.

If I have drifted afield from entertainment to politics, it's because The Wire meshes the two so seamlessly that it's impossible to discuss otherwise. There's no sermonizing - not in Season One, at least - but by merely depicting its own interpretation of what's going on in the streets, it's impossible to walk away with any other interpretation. The War on Drugs is a sham, and The Wire knows that the best way to communicate this is simply to depict it. What good comes from Season One? Some dealers are locked up, others stay on the street. Where enough damage is done to one organization, another will inevitably rise to pick up the slack. The politicians, and the high-ranking police officers who are close enough to politicians so as to make no difference, will first look to cover their asses before anything else. Much is made, in the reality of the case in The Wire, about the political pressure rolling down the hill to keep the case from sprawling. Considering that when the detectives start to follow the Barksdale money, Lester Freamon's first stop is the Balitmore Board of Elections, it's no wonder.

The Wire is that rare television show that makes a legitimate claim to being more than entertainment. It's entertaining, yes - I was caught up in the characters on both sides of the law as the plot progressed - but more than that, it shows the ability of art to make palatable an otherwise unpopular political argument. Such will be the case with the show as it progresses through its five seasons - always smart, dry, sometimes funny, compelling, realistic, but angry, fed up, and unrelenting in its diagnoses. Why do we continue to fight a war we can't win, against a force of economics that can't possibly be stopped, committing countless amounts of money and resources and effort and energy and innovation? Because not nearly enough people have seen The Wire.