Until I watched HBO's five-season series The Wire (2002-08), I had believed that I knew what a gritty urban crime-drama was. Plenty of other shows have claimed to be that, and I'd been perfectly content to think they were, but apparently they weren't even in the ballpark. Now, however, I understand perfectly - those other shows (even acclaimed ones like The Shield) were just plain old entertainment. The Wire, however, is not only definitive, but an epic journey of discovery that is as real to human nature as it is to political reality, and also amazingly educational for a story so spellbinding. You do not understand American cities until you have watched this series.
The series is set in Baltimore, Maryland - a city I had known nothing about beyond obsolete impressions from Barry Levinson films set in the 1950s (i.e., Diner, Avalon, Tin Men, and Liberty Heights). I knew that Baltimore is in Maryland, and that Maryland is on the East Coast; I knew it has the Orioles; and I knew that it's a city of some magnitude, but hardly a titan. After watching all five seasons of The Wire, I probably know more about Baltimore than if I'd physically lived there for months - an education its creator, Davis Simon, had always intended to be a central theme of the show.
But at the same time, in showing us Baltimore from the highest to the lowest, the best to the worst, and all places between, certain things about politics and society in general begin to make a lot more sense. The Wire, in other words, is not set in a fictional Baltimore in a fictional America - not some fabrication stitched around half-assed impressions from a distance - it is set in the real Baltimore, in the real America, and the "characters" are human beings who live in their lives and evolve as real people do. Justice is not assured, and when it does occur, satisfaction is not guaranteed.
Despite initial appearances, the viewer discovers that there are no heroes, villains, or even the contrived moral ambiguities of an antihero - it's just a whole lot of people from different backgrounds, with different personalities, responding and changing as time goes on. There is not much of a traditional plot - just a vast, sprawling, and (I realize I've said this before) epic field of developments, and they're all the more capable of surprising because of how true they are to life without being banal or tedious.
One learns pretty quickly that episodes of The Wire were not born in the kind of screenwriter bullshit sessions that spawn most television: They were clearly not aiming to manipulate and push buttons, either on the part of the audience or critics. Many times an anxiety-inducing circumstance resolves on a depressing anticlimax simply because that's how it should be, gratifying neither the viewer nor the dramatist who would prefer milking the plot further. And yet every time a cheap button is not pushed (neither directly or by going the opposite way), the show's credibility and realism increases; audience involvement in its events becomes deeper; and the impact of truly profound developments is much more powerful. Stereotypes are nonexistent, and the sort of defensive anti-stereotypes that often show up in TV are just as absent.
Basically, the core of the series is a group of detectives in the Baltimore Police Department of varying ranks, attitudes, and priorities. They are the (more or less) constant foreground juxtaposed with an initially bewildering (but ultimately very rewarding) array of street criminals, organized crime figures, politicians, departmental authorities, and what constitutes Average Joes in various walks of life (e.g., street cops, dock workers, kids, drug addicts, etc).
What is so dizzying about this at first is that none of these characters are mere plot elements, they are almost all treated as people even when they're marginal - they all respond autonomously to events, not according to dramatic puppet strings or the audience's expectations. And yet their decisions make sense in context, even when they fly in the face of literary convention. As a result, the world of The Wire is huge, complex, and routinely surprising because of its honesty rather than at its expense. Real Baltimore police are used to occupy the smaller police roles; real Baltimore dock workers play background dock worker characters; and apparently some of the murdering drug dealers in the show were really murdering drug dealers, at least in their past. It's also shot on location in Baltimore, so it's quite a tightly-knit package.
The truly mesmerizing thing is the true-to-life, up-close look at social and political problems that are almost always represented superficially rather than methodically in dramatic work. Corruption, crime, political unaccountability, broken families, destroyed lives - these things don't just happen out of nowhere, they occur from the dynamic interplay of a person and their social environment over time, as do their solutions. You don't know anything about these people or their motives just by knowing their roles in the plot, nor do you know their future - but it isn't a cheap dice-throw either. What happens, makes sense in retrospect, same as in life.
We see how idealism becomes cynicism, and not through any extreme tragedy - just a mundane process of faulty decisions and compromised motives piling up until they're unmanageable. We see how the system becomes corrupted, how reformers fail, and how difficult-bordering-on-impossible it is to make radical change without damaging everyone and everything around you. When ethical compromises are made, they are made because there is no practical alternative, not because the people making them are just scumbags (though some are). By the end of the series, the main characters have committed multiple felonies in the course of their police work, but not because they're "rogue cops" who don't care about the rights of defendants; and not because they're "maverick heroes" bringing justice in the face of bureaucratic resistance; but because they don't know what else to do.
The consequences of decisions are never downplayed - they always ripple outward. The guy who in a standard cop show would be the swaggering Capt. Kirk character (Jimmy McNulty) bravely battling careerist superiors by flouting politics is revealed as a reckless, neurotic, irresponsible idiot who can't stop himself from hurting everyone around him. His alcoholism is not an amusing piece of character color to make him seem more hard-boiled - he gets drunk because he can't handle shit, and although he's shown on the cover of the DVDs like he's the main character, by the end of the series he's little more than a desperate engine of problem-creation who gets by on the sufferance of his friends.
But even leaving the characters aside - and my God, they are amazing - the show actually goes into depth about social experiments. In Season Three, a police Major sick of business as usual "goes off the reservation" one day and, on his own authority without the brass knowing about it, effectively legalizes drugs in his part of Baltimore. He tells the dealers and addicts they will not be bothered if they keep their business within areas of the city otherwise vacant of residents, stations his patrolmen at the borders of those areas, and does his best to deal dynamically with the complex consequences both for the city, the police command, and the people who now occupy the drug zone - a place dubbed "Hamsterdam" by the dealers.
In Season Four, we're taken into the world of an inner-city school and watch a group of adolescent boys develop according to who they are rather than stereotypes or appearances. Here too we're given a glimpse of a social experiment - a special class for kids who are already behaviorally gearing up to become street thugs and prison inmates. It's not what you think - not some Scared Straight program, and not some Stand And Deliver cliche - the audience doesn't really begin to understand what the whole thing is about until later, which is the case because the people responsible for the program are discovering what it's about as they go along: They're not walking into it pretending to know everything. That the fate of such a program is predictable doesn't at all detract from the shock that a crime-drama TV show is having a serious, non-preachy, and interesting discussion about social policy.
Before watching this series, I knew nothing about city politics beyond the vague understanding that it's grimy and corrupt - but now I actually know what that means, and how it arises from everyday human imperfection. I knew nothing about poverty and street crime beyond the vague understanding that they're related, but now I begin to see what street culture is, the social functions it performs in the absence of civic engagement or family, and what it is about police culture that tends to make it ineffective at dealing with the streets.
Only by understanding the complexity of these things can we begin to address them, and The Wire goes a long way in providing that in a way that no other crime-drama show ever has. On the one hand it's often depressing, seeing the colossal obstacles to progress played out in front of you, but on the other it's quite inspiring: Individual actions against the status quo - even those based on spur-of-the-moment sparks of courage, madness, or just stupidity - snowball into tremendous uproars, even if in the vast majority of cases The System shuts them down with little or nothing to show for it. But change is always out there in the streets and in the minds of individual officials tired of business as usual, always bubbling up around the edges, and the effect of a good idea is nonzero. It is not pointless.
Fictional worlds of easy answers and guaranteed victories may not be designed to demoralize us when confronted with reality, but that is their net effect: We are inspired by fiction, then disappointed by reality, and finally reduced into a cynical retreat. And yet The Wire, in never taking the easy way out or failing to show us something of value, inspires far more hope than it does cynicism - it shows us something true about the problems our society faces, and how they tend to tag-team with each other against anyone who tries to come at them piecemeal.
It shows why otherwise good people in authority do the things they do, when it seems from a distance to be inexcusable. And every moment of it resounds with the illustrated (not preached) message that all change and all progress begins and ends, succeeds or fails with you and what you're doing right now, not in what you advocate doing, plan to do, or have done in the past. Despite repeated disappointments, the characters who take this to heart enliven their environment and make a difference, however small or transitory. And even surrounded by wealth and power, the characters who adopt a fatalistic attitude are already dead - but always just on the cusp of the choice to live. For this and the other reasons already stated, The Wire is mandatory viewing for progressives.