Long live The Wire…

It’s truly a tragedy when something amazing, something magnificent, comes to an end.
I’m feeling that way tonight, since we finished The Wire. I know it’s cool at the moment to say, “Well, I don’t really watch TV…I just don’t have the time”. Excuse me for sneering right back at you, but you’re missing out on a lot of good stuff. TV can be looked down upon pretty easily, right? It’s less valid an art form than books, say, (since people are likely reading The Iliad on the toilet)…but there’s some television that has been just as incredible as any classic literature. And The Wire is a piece of that television. I realize entirely that I’m far from the first person to wax poetic about this show…but now that I’m done with it, I feel the necessity to make my own statement on the show.

TV cop shows have been around for a lot of television’s history, haven’t they? An hour (or half that) of a crime, clues, wise-cracking, and a tidy denouement. Boring. Some have been better and some have been worse, but few of them have been original. The Wire is the exception to the rule.

This show didn’t focus on tidily wrapping up a story line within a single episode. You could argue that it followed one case, more or less, throughout all five seasons. It’s easy to care about these characters, much easier than with the typical “go shoot some bad guys” police procedural. These characters could be real people, for all their triumphs and flaws…and I miss them now, which sucks. This show focused on the police, but also the drug dealers (not to mention various kids, teachers, dockworkers, hit men, reporters, and politicians). It’s a show about Baltimore. There are cops in it, but they’re just part of the story. It’s a show about poverty, about the sociological roots of crime, about trying to change the system…it’s about all of these things and more. My only quibbles with The Wire were to do with specific plot points that I wish hadn’t happened, but I can’t change those. And that fact only speaks more strongly to the power this show has had over my imaginatio

If you get the chance, do your brain a favor and watch it. It’s on Netflix (though not streaming, yet), so you really have no excuse. No matter whether it’s cool to watch TV or not.