Contributed by Ben Goldstein on 12/16/07

“Who the fuck would wanna be that if they could be anything else, De’Londa?”
-Wee-Bey

“Television – mother, teacher, secret lover.”
-Homer Simpson

There are very few truly rare things in this world: bars that play good music, politicians who aren’t hypocrites, athletes who aren’t taking some kind of drug. Another entry to that list is television programs that really have something to say. Oh, sure, there might be specific episodes, even series that may say something (and by that I mean, something meaningful) to a small, targeted group of people. But scan through the history of America’s favorite waste of time, and you’ll find frighteningly few influences. The one inarguable example is All in the Family, in which producer Norman Lear drew viewers in with comedy, and used that attention to shine a spotlight on the lingering bigotry that still affected much of working-class America. Archie Bunker wasn’t merely entertaining, he was a walking, shouting argument about the kind of thinking that still shaped American lives at the time of its airing. In fact, until recently, one could argue All in the Family was unique in that regard, the one possible exception being M*A*S*H, a cynical and popular comedy that showcased the travails of an American presence in a land war in Asia during the final three years of Vietnam.

Nonetheless, TV’s most popular and important shows tend to be safe; there may be a message in them (usually something along the lines of either “A family that stays together can overcome adversity,” or “Being a cop/doctor means a lot of hard decisions that pay off if you have faith.” Think about some of the most popular shows in, TV’s history: I Love Lucy, Happy Days, The Simpsons, LA Law, ER… there’s a long list that I don’t need to recite. Even more recent popular shows, such as The Sopranos, 24, and Grey’s Anatomy pretty much follow set formulas, albeit with twists. There is very little around that really challenges the viewer, engages them in a manner that is not merely entertaining, but a commentary on society.

All of which is to say that if you aren’t already, you need to watch HBO’s The Wire (it’s also being syndicated on BET). I can’t put it any simpler than that. No other show on TV, or indeed, that has been on TV in the past 20 years, comes within light years of its intelligent and entertaining commentary on contemporary American society.

The Wire is extremely entertaining from a purely narrative perspective, especially after the two or three episodes it takes to get a feel for the cast of characters. But at its heart, The Wire is not really telling a narrative about its characters; it’s telling a narrative about the fate of American inner cities and their denizens is the post-American Industrial era. It tells a story about what is happening to the poorest classes of American society, right now.

One of the most difficult questions for fans of the show to answer from the uninitiated is, “What is the show about?” At its most basic level, The Wire is a crime drama about the Baltimore drug scene. The Baltimore part is not incidental – the originators and lead writers are David Simon, a former crime writer for the Baltimore Sun, and Ed Burns, a former BPD officer and middle school teacher. Their familiarity with the city is obvious right from the start, and indeed, the city of Baltimore has largely embraced a show that would certainly never be said to be portraying it in a positive light. But even from within that description, fans compelled to add the first layer of complexity. See, almost all crime shows follow that basic formula: the cop is a put-upon good guy with a heart of gold, and the lawyer a flashy on-the-outside but caring-on-the-inside maverick. They work together, against all odds, and track down the bad guy – whether is be a drug dealer, murderer, arsonist or any form of criminal, they are almost invariably pure, unrepentant evil.

It’s not exactly that The Wire turns the formula on its head, so much as it doesn’t leave the story so simple. The first season (and each of the seasons adds another layer of characters to the show; there have been four seasons so far) introduces us to two main groups: the police (always, always pronounced in a Baltimore drawl as “POH-leece”), and a group of big-time drug dealers largely inhabiting a series of high-rise towers in West Baltimore. Sure, we meet the POH-leece, and indeed, some of them are good cops, some of them are bad cops, and some are extremely morally vague cops. Only, where The Wire departs from virtually every other crime show, we also start to meet the drug dealers. Not just the main guys, either – a whole neighborhood of people emerge, as we are introduced to kingpins, the muscle, the street-level dealers, the runners, the young kids just getting caught up, even the fiends. And not only do we meet them, we start to spend time with them. And a funny thing happens, once you are given insight into the world of drug dealers, junkies, and the like: you start to realize that all of them, each and every single one, is human.

It is not long through the first moment for most that you come across the first scene of epiphany; at some point, it’s almost inevitable. You’ll be watching one of the damned, be it a dealer or a junkie, do something stupid, illegal, something you would condemn as universally wrong. Only, this time, you’ll understand. You’ll get it. You’ll see it, a drug deal, a beating, a betrayal, maybe even a murder, and you’ll nod and think to yourself, “Well, that’s all he/she could really do.” And that’s the nexus of it, where everything that makes The Wire special, different, important derives its power from.

What does it mean to empathize with someone committing an action you know you should find despicable? Sure, maybe you’ll search for the out – review what you’ve seen, look for that little mistake, so you can say to yourself, “Well, I get it because that would never really happen.” But they aren’t there. A complex, ambitious narrative written overseen by two people who have been observing the goings-on of inner city Baltimore their entire adult lives, there aren’t holes in The Wire, easy ways out. You will find yourself understanding and agreeing with the actions of dealers, or killers, of genuinely bad people. And more than any other point, this, at least from this writer’s perspective, is what The Wire is attempting to show.

David Simon has publicly stated he feels the show is “more of a treatise about institutions and individuals than a straight cop show.” What The Wire encapsulates in a way that so many other shows have failed to is the complete and utter lack of options available to the denizens, both black and white, of America’s working class inner-cities. In places like Baltimore, like Detroit, like Newark, East St. Louis, Gary, Flint, and many others, one could make the argument that the “American Dream” has failed, that no real opportunity to advance in society exists. Simon and Burns do indeed make this argument, and they make it in a surprisingly realistic manner.

Certainly, The Wire reflects a world that has resonance in our own. There are easily identifiable characters here: the drunk cop, the bad-ass drug dealer, the strung-out junkie. Yet, as you continue to watch along, and watch many of the more seemingly degenerate characters develop, it’s hard not to be left with a sense of the humanity inherent in each of them. And from that point, it is a small leap to the knowledge that the same shred of humanity exists in the real drug dealers, the real pimps, the real junkies.

The morality on display is not one that anyone raised middle-class or above could likely cotton to; after all, this is a world where brutal violence is a fact of life, and distrust of the government isn’t something that reaches along party lines, but is rather instinctual. The Wire allows the viewer a peek into the world where it becomes understood that this skewed morality isn’t merely a choice, but a true essential of living in such a world, a third-world country surrounded by wealth on all sides.

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