newcritics

Among the people in the world that I truly idolize are David Simon and Edward Burns. Simon had a 22 year career covering the police beat for the Baltimore Sun before writing a book length piece of journalism Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets that inspired the NBC cop show, Homicide.

Burns spent 20 years as a detective on the Baltimore police force before retiring and joining with Burns to write The Corner.Published in 1997, The Corner, which follows a year in the lives of a community of junkies and dealers living on one corner in West Baltimore, is one of the greatest pieces of long-form, immersive journalism ever written, interweaving narrative journalism from inside corner life with research journalism covering supporting history, politics, and medicine.In 2000 HBO adapted The Corner into a miniseries, a condensed docudrama (6 hours) that was so frighteningly real that it was uncomfortable to watch (in large part thanks to the remarkable acting of the improbably named Khandi Alexander, whose portrayal of Fran Boyd was as good or better than any other acting ever done in television history).After the success of The Corner mini-series, HBO turned Simon and Burns loose allowing them for the first time complete creative control over a TV project. The result was The Wire, the best cop show in the history of television. But that compliment is too reductive. At its best, for example during the entirety of its first season, The Wire was the most realistic and gripping portrait of life inside the inner city crack trade ever presented to the public. Try watching one of these conventional cop shows–Law and Order or CSI–after watching the first season of The Wire and it’s laughable, like comparing Teletubies to Tolstoy.

When it comes to keeping it real, Simon and Burns are the only game in town

The fourth season of The Wire, which wrapped up this past Sunday, was the worst of the series thus far because it was the least real, the most stagy and writerly. Too much of the dialog was stiff, deployed in the service of plot exposition in the manner of Law and Order. And too often the subplots (in particular one involving an ex-cop and an academic running a pilot program for bangers in a West Baltimore middle school) seemed designed to allow Simon and Burns a mechanism for explaining policy points (like the non-narrative chapters of The Corner), failing as drama because they were boring and preachy.

Even still, on balance this year’s season of The Wire was stunning television, with scripts and stories from great novelist/screenwriters like Richard Price and Dennis Lehane. Simon and Burns have expanded the show with a cast of 60 and inside stories involving not only cops and crack dealers but also Baltimore city hall and the city’s school system. On display is the complex interweaving of interests and motivations that actually drive behavior of police chiefs, mayors, and city council members in the real world.

This season’s most compelling new element was the tale of Thomas Carcetti, a city councilmen and one of the few remaining representatives from the old white Italian political clubs in what is now a majority black city. Carcetti runs for mayor and, against all racial odds, wins, in part thanks to information leaked to his campaign from the police department. The show brilliantly depicted all the jockeying of political interest groups, the dirty tricks (outgoing mayor Royce collects campaign money above the contribution limits by hosting a poker game with city council members in which the mayor is expected to win every hand), the racial politics, the financial wrangling with city budgets. Carcetti is spectacularly acted by Aiden Gillen, who perfectly looks the part dressed in suits that are nice but always seem a little too big.

And Simon and Burns have created TV’s greatest ever outlaw. Omar Little, played by Michael K. Williams, lives completely outside all society–a gay man whose trade is the armed robbery of drug supplies from gangs.

If you missed The Wire this year, and if you are interested at all in the inner life of cities (Watson this means you), I highly recommend catching the season via HBO on Demand.