"The Wire," Year One

Some minor spoilers, but I'll try to keep them to a minimum.

Maybe it shouldn't have surprised me, but I find "The Wire" to be a considerably easier watch than "The Sopranos." Sure, the legalese and the policework is more difficult to follow, it's harder to keep track of the various players, and I found it significantly harder to penetrate the culture of West Side Baltimore than the New Jersey wiseguys. When you get down to it, though, the basic mechanisms are identical. Just swap out the comares for shorties, and the lifted merchandise for drugs, and it's the same old game. The difference with "The Wire" is that there is no charismatic central anti-hero figure. Sure, Stringer Bell has a lot of similarities to Tony Soprano, but the show's not about him. "The Wire" is about the system.

The individual characters in "The Wire" may not be a deftly drawn or as compelling as the ones in "The Sopranos," but I find them much easier to relate to and sympathize with. Detective McNulty is a typical hothead, with the same family problems and libido problems that we see in a lot of similar characters. However, he's not the typical hero figure and gets about the same amount of screen time as a half dozen other members of the large ensemble. It's really the story that drives the show, the day to day ins and outs of the investigation. McNulty becomes sympathetic because the harder he and Lt. Daniels and Detectives Greggs and Freamon push, the more resistance they meet with from their superiors. Every step forward requires the joint efforts of multiple actors, and the balancing of personal interests and political concerns from every corner. With the odds stacked so high against them, it's difficult not to root for the investigators.

It's the same for the characters who are members of Avon Barksdale's drug operations. The drug trade is portrayed as its own institution, with its own problematic rules and internal politics. Omar, the show's wild card who has no particular allegiance to either side, calls it "the game." One scene in particular caught my attention toward the end of the season, when an attorney is consulting with the leadership of the organization, laying out the requirements for a plea deal, calculating how many of their associates are going to have to go to prison and for how long, and who will have to be paid off to ensure their cooperation. The police are entangled in their institutions out of choice, but it's worse for the low level drug dealers and enforcers because these kids don't appear to have any alternatives. Every attempt to extricate themselves just leads to disaster. The drug trade is insidious, but most of the individual participants within it seem to have so little control of their circumstances, it's hard not to care about them too.

The first season of "The Wire" stands on its own very well by using this macroscopic approach, and limiting the story to a single investigation. Though it bucks the conventions of a typical police procedural, creator David Simon, veteran of many cop shows, knows those conventions well enough to use them to his advantage. So we get minor characters like Herc and Carver, who provide a lot of comic relief, but are not limited to being comic relief characters. So we get subplots like Bubbles' doomed attempt to get clean, which gives us a glimpse of the situation from the POV of the junkies being exploited by Barksdale's gang. Then there's poor Homicide Detective Santangelo, who gets caught up in department politics and ends up a pawn between McNulty and their supervisor, Landsman. It's not a big part, but it's one that is wonderfully emblematic of the intricacy and complexity of "The Wire," which shows us again and again how the systems function based on the decisions of the individuals within it, where all the myriad stress points and opportunities for corruption can occur.

"The Wire" may be one of the densest shows I've ever watched, far more challenging than something like "Game of Thrones." The approach to the subject matter is so comprehensive and so uncompromising, it's a little intimidating at first. However, the show does an exceptional job of getting viewers to feel for the plight of crooked cops and drug dealers, for humanizing the people who rarely receive this kind of time and attention anywhere else on television. And then there's the fact that the season has a definitive ending, unlike most police procedurals that deliberately leave the door open for more. Here the investigation concludes, the special unit disperses, and the perpetrators go to jail to do their time. The big problems remain unsolved and there's not much victory to go around. For most, it's back to business as usual. It's a rare finale that leaves the audiences with finality, but with few reassurances.

So where does the show go in Season Two?
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