The world goin’ one way, people another
But if there was one show that exemplified the highest aspirations of TV-as-art, it was The Wire. Airing from 2002 to 2008, it was the single best show in the history of television, a (yes) Dickensian portrait of an entire city’s corruption. Show-runner David Simon was a classic aughts auteur: arrogant, grudge-bearing, with a bullheaded sense of artistic entitlement. The show he created never became a pop sensation like The Sopranos; it attracted a cult following. Yet despite the show’s tiny fan base, it symbolized what truly brilliant TV could be. A portrait of Baltimore in decay, the series built, over 60 episodes, a prismatic, mordantly funny, bleak, and enraging universe of drug dealers, cops, pier workers, teachers, politicians, journalists, and do-gooders. Animated by a slow-burn moral outrage, it was grounded in Simon’s experience as a crime reporter. And it featured an astonishingly diverse set of African-American male and female characters, often playing roles other crime series would have reduced to fungible thugs. (Standouts included Idris Elba’s stunning turn as business-student/kingpin Stringer Bell.) But the series’ sneakiest achievement may have been the way it elevated, shattered, and remade the format of the police procedural, spider-webbing that old scaffolding with numberless subplots, bits of crackling dialogue, sickening and subtle imagery. Over the seasons, The Wire generated a sheer narrative density that demanded and assumed an intelligent audience was out there, willing to interpret. No wonder critics kept reassuring readers that the show wasn’t homework: It was worth the devotion it required.
related { The Wire Files | What Do Real Thugs Think of The Wire? }
