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The Wire Season 4
I'd noticed various mentions by Charlie Brooker over the years of The Wire as the best tv show in the world .... evah, but didn't look closer becaufase it was on cable and I wasn't likely to catch it. Neither Channel 4 nor BBC picked it up, which is just as well because C4 would have shunted it off into the wee small hours (I assume they've decided not to bother with the remaining seasons of NYPD Blue) and BBC2 would have shown nightly episodes and then the remaining ones at random intervals (cf Seinfeld, which I think managed to see the later four seasons of despite their best attempts to avoid this, Larry Sanders, due South, Monk, Curb Your Enthusiasm...). It's almost as if they have shares in box set manufacturers.
All I really knew was that it was an HBO series, so adult themes, swearing and sex. HBO had also produced The Sopranos, a similarly crime-based multi-threaded narrative where the audience sympathies can lie on the wrong side of the law and where production values aspire to the feature film, at least in terms of mise en scene. Whereas The Sopranos seemed to win every award going, The Wire has gone largely unrecognised. Then someone gave me the first three seasons, and I was hooked - with a regular cast of thirty or more characters, and the West Wing like presumption that explanation is not necessary, it's as well to keep it all in short term memory. I should have kept notes.
The first season covered the establishment of a special unit trying to bring down the drug dealing king pin on an estate in Baltimore, using wiretaps and other surveillance equipment. The powers that be are not happy with this - in part because it shows up their incompetence and they want fast results (better 100 soldiers arrested than one general). And there is also the story told from the point of view of the drug dealers, plus Bubbles a homeless snitch and Omar an assassin of dealers. It's a complex, dense series, and in fact thirteen episodes is enough rather than the usual US run of 22/23.
The second season avoided simply repeating the first - whilst there was still action on the drugs front, the main focus was on the dockers' union and a people smuggling racket. As the "main character" (Jimmy McNulty, played by Brit Dominic West) was busted down to boat patrol, this helped the narrative along. The third season returned to drugs, but focused on beginning to follow the money (donations by the king pins to politicians) and an experiment of zero tolerance in some areas whilst legalising drugs in another - Hamsterdam. Inevitably the powers that be cannot tolerate either. The season also introduced Tommy Carcetti (Aiden Gillen, Stuart Jones from Queer as Folk and several West End Mamet productions) as an ambitious city councillor.
We've been talking at work about doing something on the series, and I realised that I hadn't actually seen Season Four. So I accidentally bought it.
There are two focuses here: Carcetti's campaign to become mayor as a white man in a predominately black city and an education experiment in which ten trouble makers are excluded from classes to be socialised. Curiously I thought that Carcetti was built up as more Machiavellian in the third season, but here he seems to be a decent chap, although with his eyes on bigger things.
The wiretap crew are dispersed, some into homicide, as Lester Freaman (Clarke Peters, channelling a paternal Morgan Freeman) sub poenas senior politicians and businessmen just before the election. Meanwhile McNulty's old partner Bunk Moreland (Wendell Pierce) is aware of Marlo Stanfield's (Jamie Hector) attempt to take over dealing spots once run by Barksdale's crew, but is curious about the lack of bodies - and some noted disappearances. His superiors do not want him to find any bodies as that would mean more crimes to solve.
Meanwhile Roland "Prez" Pryzbylewski (Jim True-Frost), least competent of the wiretap crew, has retrained to become a teacher, and is teaching some of the same children who are among the gangs on West Baltimore streets and at the school where Howard "Bunny" Colvin's (Robert Wisdom) educational experiment is carried out. As such he becomes the thread to link the scattered crime-fighting protagonists together. Initially he is a poor teacher, but he uses cards and dice to teach his pupils probability theory and is making progress until the SATs demand a return to a curriculum that leaves most of the students none the wiser. Equally Colvin's programme has broken through to some trouble makers - and aided the non-troubled makers by giving them space - but the students still have to do the SATs.
The street level narratives include the ongoing turf war between Stanfield and Barksdale, with a new generation being trained for the streets - as one character redeems himself and is rescued, so another yields to a life of crime. Stanfield's feud with Omar Little (Michael K. Williams) continues, with an attempt to frame the latter, but this backfires and Omar makes bigger fools of them.
Here we have a narrative with the ambition of Dickens or an Elliot, but with the subject matter of an Ellroy. However creator David Simon (ex-journalist) and main cowriter Ed Burns (ex-cop and ex-teacher) focus more on the criminals and their interaction than Ellroy tends to. They give as much attention to each criminal as Dickens did to the Artful Dodger, and in some cases make you care for them.
What the drug policing and SATs based education system have in common is an obsession numerical results - the police would rather not know about a murder than have an unsolved crime and the quantity of arrests (street dealers) are more important than quality (suppliers and launderers), the schools have to teach to the tests rather than offering useful education. Sounds all too familiar. One set of results does matter though - election results. But the cynics would note that sometimes the new leader is no different from the old.
(I noted that McNulty is not in several episodes - not since Blakes 7 (Taggart doesn't count) has a main character been so side-lined.)
As always there is the sense that nobody has won - some people are saved from destitution, but others disappear into the system and are fucked over by the system, still others disappear unpunished. Some end in despair, others in bed. I don't think I enjoyed this as much as earlier seasons (I love the dialogue of the interplay between the wiretap crew) but it's still superior drama.
Season five is out in mid-August. Torrents have already demonstrated themselves to be a waste of time (crashed at 98% of one episode), so... Clicky clicky.
All I really knew was that it was an HBO series, so adult themes, swearing and sex. HBO had also produced The Sopranos, a similarly crime-based multi-threaded narrative where the audience sympathies can lie on the wrong side of the law and where production values aspire to the feature film, at least in terms of mise en scene. Whereas The Sopranos seemed to win every award going, The Wire has gone largely unrecognised. Then someone gave me the first three seasons, and I was hooked - with a regular cast of thirty or more characters, and the West Wing like presumption that explanation is not necessary, it's as well to keep it all in short term memory. I should have kept notes.
The first season covered the establishment of a special unit trying to bring down the drug dealing king pin on an estate in Baltimore, using wiretaps and other surveillance equipment. The powers that be are not happy with this - in part because it shows up their incompetence and they want fast results (better 100 soldiers arrested than one general). And there is also the story told from the point of view of the drug dealers, plus Bubbles a homeless snitch and Omar an assassin of dealers. It's a complex, dense series, and in fact thirteen episodes is enough rather than the usual US run of 22/23.
The second season avoided simply repeating the first - whilst there was still action on the drugs front, the main focus was on the dockers' union and a people smuggling racket. As the "main character" (Jimmy McNulty, played by Brit Dominic West) was busted down to boat patrol, this helped the narrative along. The third season returned to drugs, but focused on beginning to follow the money (donations by the king pins to politicians) and an experiment of zero tolerance in some areas whilst legalising drugs in another - Hamsterdam. Inevitably the powers that be cannot tolerate either. The season also introduced Tommy Carcetti (Aiden Gillen, Stuart Jones from Queer as Folk and several West End Mamet productions) as an ambitious city councillor.
We've been talking at work about doing something on the series, and I realised that I hadn't actually seen Season Four. So I accidentally bought it.
There are two focuses here: Carcetti's campaign to become mayor as a white man in a predominately black city and an education experiment in which ten trouble makers are excluded from classes to be socialised. Curiously I thought that Carcetti was built up as more Machiavellian in the third season, but here he seems to be a decent chap, although with his eyes on bigger things.
The wiretap crew are dispersed, some into homicide, as Lester Freaman (Clarke Peters, channelling a paternal Morgan Freeman) sub poenas senior politicians and businessmen just before the election. Meanwhile McNulty's old partner Bunk Moreland (Wendell Pierce) is aware of Marlo Stanfield's (Jamie Hector) attempt to take over dealing spots once run by Barksdale's crew, but is curious about the lack of bodies - and some noted disappearances. His superiors do not want him to find any bodies as that would mean more crimes to solve.
Meanwhile Roland "Prez" Pryzbylewski (Jim True-Frost), least competent of the wiretap crew, has retrained to become a teacher, and is teaching some of the same children who are among the gangs on West Baltimore streets and at the school where Howard "Bunny" Colvin's (Robert Wisdom) educational experiment is carried out. As such he becomes the thread to link the scattered crime-fighting protagonists together. Initially he is a poor teacher, but he uses cards and dice to teach his pupils probability theory and is making progress until the SATs demand a return to a curriculum that leaves most of the students none the wiser. Equally Colvin's programme has broken through to some trouble makers - and aided the non-troubled makers by giving them space - but the students still have to do the SATs.
The street level narratives include the ongoing turf war between Stanfield and Barksdale, with a new generation being trained for the streets - as one character redeems himself and is rescued, so another yields to a life of crime. Stanfield's feud with Omar Little (Michael K. Williams) continues, with an attempt to frame the latter, but this backfires and Omar makes bigger fools of them.
Here we have a narrative with the ambition of Dickens or an Elliot, but with the subject matter of an Ellroy. However creator David Simon (ex-journalist) and main cowriter Ed Burns (ex-cop and ex-teacher) focus more on the criminals and their interaction than Ellroy tends to. They give as much attention to each criminal as Dickens did to the Artful Dodger, and in some cases make you care for them.
What the drug policing and SATs based education system have in common is an obsession numerical results - the police would rather not know about a murder than have an unsolved crime and the quantity of arrests (street dealers) are more important than quality (suppliers and launderers), the schools have to teach to the tests rather than offering useful education. Sounds all too familiar. One set of results does matter though - election results. But the cynics would note that sometimes the new leader is no different from the old.
(I noted that McNulty is not in several episodes - not since Blakes 7 (Taggart doesn't count) has a main character been so side-lined.)
As always there is the sense that nobody has won - some people are saved from destitution, but others disappear into the system and are fucked over by the system, still others disappear unpunished. Some end in despair, others in bed. I don't think I enjoyed this as much as earlier seasons (I love the dialogue of the interplay between the wiretap crew) but it's still superior drama.
Season five is out in mid-August. Torrents have already demonstrated themselves to be a waste of time (crashed at 98% of one episode), so... Clicky clicky.