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The Wire
2nd season in review
Review
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The Wire: 2nd season in review
Monday 05.31.2004
alice ttlg || 11:39 PM
My brother asked today why I wasn't going to watch The Wire anymore so I figured I'd do tonight's writeup on it.
The first season was a tightly woven tapestry, paralleling a police investigative unit with a section of a drug-dealing organization. It worked well, contrasting the beaurocratic politics of the police force with the 'hood politics of the drug dealers, showing the organization (or disorganization) on each side thru a very personal cat and mouse game between the two teams. By focusing narrowingly on a single investigation, it reflected the larger canvas of the entire police force and the world of moving drugs across America. By using only the characters directly involved on each side, it allowed for deeply detailed characters that we could become attached to, on both sides of the law.
I loved every minute of the first season. I loved all the characters, from Bubbs the addict who thinks he might just go straight to the casanova McNulty intent on the moment, whether it's work or sleeping around to the old almost-retired cop drinking his way thru a shift, taking a disability pension to Stringer Bell taking business classes at the local community college and applying the lessons to the drug operations.
And then came the second season. And the producers made one fatal mistake. Instead of following the formula that made the first season so successful, they tried to please the fans and retain popular characters from the first season. Instead of again focusing on one investigation and the cops on one side and the bad guys on the other side, they dragged in most all of the dealers from the first season and wasted half the season reassembling the same cops for the investigation. The bad guys in the port were thinly drawn and barely interesting. Since the investigative team from the first season had been disbursed at the end of the season, the writers had to juggle six balls in the air to find ways to get them all back together. McNulty didn't even join the team until around the ninth or tenth show (of a 13 show season) when the investigation was about to arrest the bad guys.
If they'd gone strictly with the port investigation and assembled a different team with new players and perhaps one or two from before, it could have been great. Leave out some of the first season cops and leave out the drug dealing crew entirely. Leave McNulty as a peripheral character, doing what he can from the Marine Police unit but not entirely on the team. It would have been so much better and they could have showcased new actors as well.
The second season left me bored by the end. And that's why I'm not watching it anymore.
The Wire: Review
Friday 09.06.2002
alice ttlg || 09:54 PM
How do I rate a show as one of the best? It's the best if I have to watch it when it's on, commercials and all, even tho I'm taping it!
HBO gives me the best of both worlds in The Wire, a terrific cops and drug dealers show with no commercials and it gives me something we don't see on TV normally, a plot line that lasts more than a couple eps. Thirteen eps following one investigation, the hook is the wiretap and it's wound around a homicide cop pursuing a murder investigation to the detriment of himself and others, chasing a drug dealer who's managed to fly under the radar long enough to build an empire in the Baltimore projects.
Filmed in Baltimore, written and produced by the guy who did the pilot for Homicide, it's got all sorts of realism, from the sterile cubicles with spiffy computers that the detective squads worked in to the dank basement they get dumped in after pissing off the wrong people to the judge ruled by political expediency, a pragmatic assistant DA to the police supervisors who see their jobs as a rung on the promotion ladder in a corporation.
Dominic West does a great job as the crusading homicide detective, Jimmy McNulty, he even manages to mostly get the accent right, his native English accent only rarely creeping in, mainly when the character's emotions rise. The actor playing Major Rawls (McNulty's boss) shines as a tough as nails guy who deals with reality, both the corporate reality of the police department and the daily reality of being a cop. He is bluntly honest with McNulty, both in his complete dislike for him and about McNulty's motives in pursuing the investigation.
The investigating team is a motley crew, leftovers from other departments, sloughed off on the investigation that nobody wants (except McNulty). Several of them give surprising turns, both good and bad, some rise to the challenge, others fall.
And then there's the drug dealers. The show devotes equal time to them, to exploring their lives, day to day and the corresponding corporate structure of the drug dealers' gang in their "offices" of the courtyards of the projects and nightclubs they inhabit. We see the drug boss taking care of his family, giving his nephew a job and then bailing him out when he screws up, we see how they handle communication and supervision, job reviews, promotions and demotions, all in the harsh terms of guns and money.
A wild card in the mix, an upstart entrepeneur drug dealer by the name of Omar adds to the mix, he's the drug dealing version of a corporate raider, taking over other "companies" by shotgun while whistling Three Blind Mice. And there's the in-betweens, Bubbles the junkie who's also an informant for one of the detectives, imaginative but ruined by his addiction, you want him to make it somehow all the while knowing that the odds are against him getting and staying clean. There's Shardene, a sweet but naive young woman who's stuck in the middle by birth, schooling and/or lack of money, she's a pawn for both sides.
Since it was filmed in Baltimore, a good chunk of the actors came from New York, I've been playing "spot the Wire actor" in reruns of Law & Order, Third Watch and NYPD Blue for the last month or so. All the actors gave excellent performances and the length of the show, 13 eps, is just long enough to thoroughly flesh out the plot but short enough to keep it from dragging (like 24 did after 15, 16 hours).
The word is that they will get a second season but there's nothing official yet because they have to work out the schedule before announcing because that starts the clock on picking up the options on the actors. I have mixed feelings on a second season, on the one hand, this first season was sooooo good, I definitely want more, on the other hand, it was sooooo good and it was self-contained, I'm not sure how they'd handle a second season?
It's kind of like 24, it's a one-shot thing, 24 was the longest day of his life and the Wire is a one-shot combination of homicide and narcotics detectives....although perhaps it could be more permanent, but still it was the orphan status of the team that gave rise to some of the more interesting characters, nobody wanted to be involved, all the cast offs from odd places and what, now there's *another* super drug dealer who's made it to the top of the heap without being noticed?
But still, I'm waiting breathlessly for the finale on Sunday night and for next year!
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