WireSeasonOne

The Wire Season 1

My roommate often teases me because I go through phases with what I watch and read. One month it’ll be anime and manga, another month it’ll be British television and back issues of 2000 AD, and the next month it’ll obscure 80’s sci-fi and the books that go along with that. One of the phases he ‘enjoyed’ the most was my recent desire to watch police procedurals, mainly The Wire and the book that spawned it, Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets. He’s eagerly anticipating the day he comes home and I’m watching Murder…She Wrote on Netflix, and I can’t say that it’s not entirely out of the realm of possibility.

The Wire was suggested to me several months ago by a dear friend of mine and at the time I watched the first five or six episodes from the first season, and while I couldn’t really find fault with it, it didn’t click with me the way it did this most recent go-around. But that was my own fault. When I watch television I’m not invested 100% in, my attention span goes toward other things, like messing around with Facebook on my phone or listening to my upstairs neighbor scream newly invented curse words at her children. You can’t do that with The Wire. You’ve got to give it all or nothing.

The viewer’s main point of focus is homicide detective Jimmy McNulty, a hard-drinking, womanizing, Irish cop who wants to prove how smart he is, and isn’t above spitting in the eyes of his superiors to do it. But this isn’t your typical ‘He’s a cop who plays by his own rules’ kind of story. I suppose, in a very broad sense, Jimmy is that kind of cop, but instead of kicking ass and taking names, he bucks the internal system of police department politics and finds himself on a detail that’s supposed to nab a few drug convictions and ultimately lead nowhere significant.

Personally, I find it difficult to call Jimmy McNulty the main character of the series, when it’s really more of an ensemble cast without people you’d immediately recognize. The rest of the detail Jimmy works with are each their own very human characters, who are sometimes likeable, sometimes dishonest, and portrayed in such a way that chances are you can see flashes of someone you actually know in each one.

The same can be said of the criminals of the first season, who get as much screen time as the cops. D’Angelo Barksdale, nephew of drug kingpin Avon Barksdale, is the focal point from the opposite end of the spectrum. Like Jimmy, D’Angelo has been busted down from doing what he wants to do to overseeing the drug deals in the projects’ courtyards after barely escaping a prison sentence for murder.

I find that my biggest enjoyment from the show comes from not the law enforcement perspective, but the criminal one. The different set of rules they play by and the characters that have adapted into that environment and not only survived, but thrived. Like Omar, for example. He’s a shotgun wielding sociopath that robs drug dealers, but eventually becomes an informant for the cops over a personal vendetta.

The Wire is a very slow, deliberately paced show. Where most television police dramas would conclude a case in one forty-two minute episode, The Wire slows things down to a crawl and one investigation is the basis of the entire season. It asks a lot of the viewer; to pay attention to every line, remember characters that in other shows wouldn’t get a second mention, and to forget the typical conventions of every other police drama you’ve ever watched. If you can manage to do that, it’ll be a captivating experience, and a rewarding one at that.

3 out of 4

reviewed by Seth Moore