“The Wire” 2002-2008 (2014)
A review
Fashionably six years late, so I can tell you HBO’s “The Wire” holds up.
But I can also tell you, though it’s every bit as bleak, it doesn’t put a scare into “The Sopranos.”
That’s why I (finally) started watching, of course, to see if it matched the hype, to see if all the best-TV-show-EVER buzz was warranted, to try to figure out what the hell Bill Simmons had been writing on and on and on about. (I still don’t know.)
Easy to be extra-critical when you’re coming from that vantage point, to go ahead and find fault with the acting of a couple major characters, to complain about the pace (especially when you’ve stayed up even further past your bedtime to watch one more and been disappointed by an episode that felt like it accomplished almost nothing…)
But, shiiiiiiiiiit.
What restraint the show showed. What dedication to the very-precise plan that, I read, disallowed even the slightest ad-lib. David Simon, Ed Burns and company (Dennis Lehane!) setting out to tell a specific story, chapter by chapter, and to unravel it like a novel and not the tried and tired TV crime drama.
That is so rare, so daring, so Go HBO! that it must be applauded. Even if I never fell for McNulty and Kima, I appreciated the cast organization, and the deft way such a mostly stellar ensemble was treated.
Everyone’s business attended to in due time, and not all at once in a frustrating, convoluted finale. (The finale was frustrating for another reason, in that it left scarcely a hard feeling, everything working out too well. Not well, but better than every depressing previous episode seemed to indicate it should.)
It’s telling, perhaps, that the fourth season is my favorite, followed closely by Season 5.
These folks grew on me, and so even though certain characters (I’m the only one THIS late, right? I can say the character whose name rhymes with Ringer Spell was missing much later on) were absent, they weren’t forgotten nor not felt from, such a part of the story’s fabric they’d become.
And in Season 4, the kids got me. Smart, to focus on the middle-schoolers, to investigate the moments in these characters’ lives when they turn into who they’re to be, the heartbreaking decisions that will take them from child to gangster, child to functioning young adult, child to abuser.
The undeniable authenticity of the show — evident in newspaper people and thegangsters alike — was at its best in the school, where, in scene after scene, and in the very same scenes, youngsters believably, belligerently cried out for and rejected love.
Glad that stuff came four seasons in or I likely would’ve spent the remaining seasons wishing the series had stayed in school.
And, at last, Season 5. From a newspaper person’s perspective, it was just plain fun. Tactically, consistently depressing, of course, but surely the best (and first) believable dramatization of a newsroom I’ve seen on-screen. Punch in the gut, the gather-up-and-talk-buyouts-and-downsizing staff gatherings. Fantastically familiar, the complaints about CP photo options and inch counts.
Superb, sure, for the most part, this most serious of series. Unless I’m really nit-picking or comparing it with “The Sopranos,” which was populated entirely with characters that collectively found their ways, to stay, into your heart and head the way only “The Wire’s” kids did.
Every character in “The Sopranos” was more believably complex, and often just more entertaining, with built-in intricacies and unique subtleties brought forth by consistent, utterly brilliant acting. And that, of course, drove the difficult tale, which, as far as I’ve seen, has been the most magical on television so far.
Of course, in another six years I might finally get around to “Breaking Bad,” the latest Greatest TV Show Ever.
