The Wire: Season Three (****)

"Reform, Lamar. Reform."
-Brother Mouzone

It's not until Season 3 that we truly begin to grasp what The Wire is really about. We saw in Season 1 a depiction of the Drug War that showed it as futile and unfailingly dumb, and we saw in Season 2 a lament for the demise of the working class, but where the rubber meets the road, so to speak, the first two seasons could still be described as a Cop Show. Such a label doesn't do them justice, to be sure, but the label isn't entirely inaccurate for them in the way that it is for Season 3. Here, The Wire truly makes its transformation from a show about cops and criminals to what I can only describe as a City Procedural.

In so doing it asks - and provides at least the first hint of an answer for - a very important question: with a system so clearly broken, why does nothing seem to change?

From that question, a political structure is born. To date, only one politician (with a speaking part, at least) has graced the screen of The Wire: the dirty State Senator Clay Davis (Isiah Whitlock Jr.), whose driver the detail caught rolling out of a Barksdale drug tower with a bag full of drug money (he appeared in Season 2 as well, wrangling more than his share of the dirty lobbying money Sobotka was throwing around). The dirt on a player like him is obvious; on someone like Mayor Clarence Royce (Glynn Turman), the connections are more subtle. Some of the deals, such as those between him and Davis, are under the table. Others, like those with big time developer Andy Krawczyk (Michael Willis) are in the open, but Krawczyk's dealings include some of the "legitimate" investments of Stringer Bell. The political infrastructure needs money for its campaigns, and wherever money is required, the drug trade is never more than a couple of steps away.

A rung down on the power ladder exist the city councilmen, including the white, Italian rep from the first district, Tommy Carcetti (Irish actor Aiden Gillen), his friend Tony Gray (Christopher Mann), and the oft-mentioned, rarely-seen Eunetta Perkins, whose attendance at council meetings is sparse, but who has coasted along for years on the Mayor's ticket out of loyalty. All three will become involved in the upcoming election, with Tony Gray talking about making a run at the chair, which Carcetti sees as an opportunity to split the black vote and sneak into the office himself. Perkins, meanwhile, faces competition from none other than Marla Daniels, the now-estranged wife of our favorite police lieutenant, who left him due to his failure to leave the police department, in light of the observation that his career didn't seem to be going anywhere. She has the ear of Delegate Watkins, an influential State representative who has the ear of the ministers and other important community leaders.

Speaking of Daniels, in any case, his bargaining and good policework in Season 2 have led to the creation of his promised Major Crimes unit, which focuses on high end drug enforcement, its members including such familiar faces as Sydnor (who was missed in S2), McNulty, Greggs, Freamon, and Pryzbylewski. It did not, however, include the promised promotion to Major; that's being held up for political purposes (he's still married to the woman that's challenging a councilwoman on the mayor's ticket).

Notably missing from Major Crimes are the perpetual duo of Herc and Carver, who, frustrated with their treatment in previous seasons, have left for the greener pastures of the Western District, which is under the command of Bunny Colvin (Robert Wisdom) and the always-amusing Lieutenant Mello (Jay Landsman, an ex-cop upon whom Delaney Williams's character of the same name is based), and it's here where the real meat of the season will be focused.

There's an election year coming up, and that means the mayor's office is coming down hard. Ervin Burrell, the erstwhile Deputy for Operations, is now Acting Commissioner, and Rawls is now his Deputy Ops. "The word from on high is that the murder rate will drop by twenty percent by years end," Rawls barks in one of their weekly ComStat meetings, which Rawls uses as an opportunity to taunt, torment, belittle and beshit his ranking officers, which in turn starts the shit rolling downhill: early on, we see him put an entire unit on night shifts because he steamrolls their major into relenting. Of course, in a city like Baltimore, whose police department more closely resembles a MASH unit than a hospital, effecting crime prevention with the police seems like something of a pipe dream. The police fudge the stats for the mayor, who quotes them to get elected, and appoints the police who will ensure the stats will be fudged.

Season 3 of The Wire is in many ways the story of Bunny Colvin, the aforementioned Major in command of the Western District, who, close to his retirement and sick of the bullshit, comes up with a different plan. After an officer of his is shot and nearly killed over a petty hand-to-hand operation, he develops a plan: find three geographical entities of the district that aren't worth salvaging, and setting them up as "free zones" where his officers are instructed not to intervene; in effect, legalizing drugs.

That the show is pro-legalization is not left in doubt. Full disclosure: so am I. So, in fact, are most people with any academic understanding of the consequences of the drug war, who can get over their mealy-mouthed "drugs are bad" moralistic crap.

Rest assured, though, it's not a one-sided portrayal. The free zones, which come to be known as "Hamsterdam", are anything but a utopia; they are hell-holes of debauchery and drugs, prostitution and general chaos. And yet, because of their existence, some remarkable things start to happen. First and foremost, every other street in the Western cleans up, almost overnight. Second, the overall crime rate drops quite substantially. And third, a back-and-forth develops between the police and the drug dealers that would be impossible to fathom under any other circumstance: the dealers feel they need the police, since the stick-up crews see Hamsterdam as gathering fish into a barrel, and the police need the dealers. One of the rules of Hamsterdam is, no violence allowed. But the dealers only know what they know, and before long someone finally gets shot, over some petty bullshit. Colvin's livid at this, and threatens to shut the whole operation down unless they provide him with a shooter. Word reaches Stringer Bell - the shooter was a nobody in his crew - and that night, a scared-shitless kid walks up to the desk at the Western District to confess, a very big dude who no doubt had worse things in store for the kid if he failed to comply quietly slinking out the door. The show, here, is saying something very simple, very powerful, and very true: this murder, like so many others, would never be solved but for an action as rash as Colvin's.

In today's political climate, though, that sort of reform can't possibly stick. When the higher-ups learn what Colvin has done, they are incensed, and orchestrate his fall in a means that's almost perverse (it's no accident that his words in the ComStat meeting in which they crucify him - "Get on with it, motherfu..." - echo those of another character assassinated this season). While the mayor sees the drop in the crime rate and suffers a brief bout of insane consideration for the idea, seeing how it actually plays on the news once the media gets a hold of it triggers a humorous, if tragic, reaction. A visit from the Deputy Drug Czar in Washington, where he threatens millions in federal funding, seals it home: for whatever insane reason, the idea of treating drug dealers and users as anything but criminals is too politically unpalatable to fathom. Even Carcetti, who asks for a tour of Hamsterdam from Colvin personally, and who seems sympathetic to the idea, can't pass up the opportunity to use it to rip the Mayor a new one. The final speech he gives is remarkable for the way it sounds inspiring but manages to say exactly nothing.

Of course, one rogue Major's attempt to reform the War on Drugs isn't the only subject of reform brought into play; a season of The Wire is too big and too sprawling for that. Perhaps the most intriguing part of the season, then, is the attempts to reform the drug trade from within. Avon Barksdale is still in prison, leaving Stringer Bell in control of the West side. At the end of Season 2 we saw him cutting a deal with Proposition Joe to trade some of his territory for the good dope that Joe was bringing in from his connections at the port. By Season 3 the two have formed a co-op that gathers all the major dealers in Baltimore together, both for economic reasons (a discount for buying in bulk) and for conflict resolution, as both Stringer and Prop Joe recognize that the shoot-em-up gangsta lifestyle is bad for business.

Their reform is met with resistance in the form of Marlo Stanfield (Jamie Hector), an up-and-comer who is cold, smart, and utterly ruthless. He wants nothing to do with the co-op, and is making his move on the gamble that Avon Barksdale's crew is weak, with most of his enforcers being locked up in Season 1. When Avon gets out of prison, roughly halfway through the season, it escalates into a full-scale war.

This war, after some inconsistency of direction within the department, provides the ultimate meat for the detail's wiretap investigation. The technical details of this year's investigation dwarf those of the previous seasons, which were more of less limited to wiretaps and gps trackers. Here, where Stringer Bell has evolved the organization into utilizing pre-paid cell phones - "burners", in the drug lexicon - that they organize into a network before dumping their phones every couple of weeks. Given the amount of time needed to process a court order for a wiretap, that makes them difficult to get a line into, to say the least.

Lester Freamon works his magic, though, and soon the detail finds itself tracking down the small-time flunkie for Stringer Bell's gang that's actually purchasing the burners, a boring, thankless job. Before long they are scamming him into buying their phones from him, which are pre-authorized for a tap. Then they're pulling phone numbers off of cell towers to get a line onto a separate, insulated network, using technical gadgetry that I could explain, but then, that would give even more away than I already have. Suffice to say it's very cool.

There's one more aspect of reform that's explored: that of ex-convict Dennis "Cutty" Wise (Chad Coleman). This area of reform, interestingly, is handled with much less cynicism than the other, perhaps because it involves an individual's struggle with his own past nature rather than the struggle against an unflinching bureaucracy or culture. We first meet Cutty on his last day in prison, coming home after doing 14 years for a murder. He was deep in the drug game, and upon his return home finds that the drug dealing culture has changed in his absence, but no so much that they won't have a use for him. "The game done changed", he notes to Slim Charles, whose response is poetic: "The game's the same. Just got more fierce."

But when he finds a rival dealer of Marlo's, who he's been ordered to take out, in his gunsights, he finds he can't pull the trigger. It's not in him any more. He wants out. Avon lets him go.

But where can he go? He was a child when committed his crime, and now he's in his mid thirties. Society rejects him, and you can't really blame them: he's an ex-convict, a murderer. For money, he finds a job cutting lawns with a group of illegals. It's work, at least. Eventually he decides to open a gym; the one thing he does know is boxing. Here he finds some unexpected help in the form of a Reverend, named Wright, who hooks him up with the political connections needed to obtain the right permits, including Delegate Watkins and Marla Daniels. It's not an easy road, but time will allow him to succeed.

I would suppose The Wire is saying that personal battles are more feasible than institutional ones, but there's something deeper going on, something more personal to the show's creators, I think, an affection for the ex-convict, whom everyone else in society passes over on first. On this, the show practices what it preaches. The very Reverend that helps Cutty out is played by Melvin Williams, a real life ex drug kingpin of Baltimore upon whom the character of Avon Barksdale is reportedly based. Snoop, an enforcer of Marlo's, is played by Felicia Pearson, an ex banger who did prison time for manslaughter. There are others. You might argue that the show makes these casting choices for the purposes of upkeeping its renowned verisimilitude, but I would argue that its creators are saying something far more specific: that redemption is possible, but best achieved from within.

With Season Three, The Wire shows its true promise in utilizing the medium of fictional television to make a sharp, true, and unpopular political statement. It succeeds at every aspect, and in so doing makes for one of the most complete dramatic entities ever committed to a screen of any size.