The Wire: Season 2

One of the signature themes of David Simon's TV series The Wire is the idea that where you come from matters, that class and race are, to a large degree, destiny. The first season mostly framed this idea in terms of race, with black drug dealers from the projects often lamenting the fact that being born into this life gives them so few options. The second season drives home that the real issue is class, by translating this theme to the mostly white, mostly Polish working class guys of the Baltimore dockworkers' union.

In one key scene, union president Frank Sobotka (Chris Bauer) confronts his hired lobbyist Bruce DiBiago (Keith Flippen), contrasting DiBiago's big-money comfort against Frank's own desperation: DiBiago sends his son to Princeton, and says that now the kid can do anything he wants after graduating, a stark contrast against the pathetic life and constant failures of Frank's son Ziggy (James Ransone). DiBiago counters that his own family came from similarly limited circumstances, that his great-grandfather was a struggling working man who wanted more for his own kids, so he made sure they were educated and propelled them towards the better life that has resulted in DiBiago's current success. Frank's not interested in history, though, and he's not interested in thinking so long-term that his great-grandsons might make something of themselves. He wants security — and the dignity of work — for his own kid, something tangible he can see while he's still around.

Frank's story is at the center of this season because he so fully embodies the message that Simon is sending here. Frank is a member of a declining union, working in a harbor that's seeing less and less traffic and thus less and less work for the union members. Repeated scenes throughout the season emphasize how the men of the union come to work everyday not sure if they'll have a job for the day or not. This is particularly true for the younger men, like Ziggy and Frank's nephew Nick (Pablo Schreiber), who are continually passed over for what few jobs there are. They're mostly left to hang around and drink, glowering at the old union hands who tell raucous stories of the good old days. This is a story about obsolescence, about this union — once a powerful political and social force — struggling to survive in a modern political and economic environment that no longer has any respect for the old ways cultivated by the union culture. Frank is trying to adapt — he hires his lobbyist and feeds politicians dirty money he earns by working with the dockside smuggling operation of "the Greek" (Bill Raymond) — but the scene where he tries to charm politicians at a fundraiser demonstrates just how ill-suited the gruff, blunt-force Frank is to the subtleties of modern politics.


Indeed, it's Frank's failure to understand such niceties that more or less kicks off the season's plot. In one of the bitter ironies that runs unstated through the season, Frank comes under investigation not so much because of his genuinely illegal activity but because he dares to purchase a stained glass window at a local church on behalf of his union. It's a point of pride for him, but it's also a point of pride for the high-ranking police major Valchek (Al Brown), who had wanted to donate his own window to the church. Frank's refusal to give in to the politically connected Valchek causes the major to open an investigation into Frank, a frivolous and mean-spirited smear operation that eventually winds up exposing the full and rather surprising extent of Frank's connections to drugs, prostitution and smuggling in the city. Unaware of the investigation, Frank responds to Valchek's harassment by stealing a police surveillance van from Valchek's unit and shipping it around the world, updating the major with Polaroids of the van in various ports. It's the kind of old-school practical joke that Frank and his union buddies might have played in the old days, a silly and stupid prank that here has dire consequences.

At this point, as Valchek gets Lieutenant Daniels (Lance Reddick) to assemble a new squad to investigate Frank, the show flirts with formula as most of the first season's cops return to work with Daniels, dually investigating Frank and the deaths of a cargo container full of European women who had been shipped through Frank's port for the sex trade. The assembling-the-team segments early in the season come off as a warped mirror of the first season, though, since they're not getting together for the high-stakes drug operation of the first season but for what amounts to a personal vendetta. The fact that the operation eventually exposes some very shady activity only reinforces the bitter irony at the core of the show: it's only at the impetus of a petty and insecure asshole that some real policework gets done in the city, almost accidentally, and certainly incidentally for Valchek, who gets more and more annoyed the more his squad discovers large webs of crime around Frank rather than focusing solely on the object of Valchek's wrath.


As in the first season, Simon, along with co-writer and ex-cop Ed Burns and a regular stable of HBO directors, weaves together all these different plots and characters to provide a portrait of the ways in which cops and criminals act as part of an overarching social structure. The drug plot from the first season continues to percolate in the background, too, with the machinations of Stringer Bell, Avon, Omar and others eventually tied into the main plot by the end of the season. As in the first season, things that seem innocuous or small-scale turn out to be connected in surprising ways to much deeper societal currents. In the post-9/11 world, the Greek and his international criminal organization are even connected to the FBI, exchanging information and tips for official favors. Part of Simon's vision here is that in the zeal to fight terrorism, the modern national police infrastructure is proving willing to overlook greater and greater domestic evils to win some small victories against foreign evils. Witness the glee of an FBI counter-terrorism agent when he discovers a cache of Colombian drugs on the Greek's tipoff — is this relatively minor coup worth the information he feeds to the Greek, which allows the mysterious kingpin to kill with impunity, and at one point even gives him key information that leads directly to the death of an informer.

More locally, the criminal malaise of the docks is a reflection of economic changes that have these dockworkers teetering on the brink of irrelevancy. Frank is fighting desperately to get new projects started at the docks, but it seems to be a doomed battle right from the start. The politicians smile and take his money, and so does the lobbyist, but it never really seems plausible that Frank is going to get what he wants, and only he doesn't seem to realize it. Others want to build luxury condos in the area, further shrinking the extent of the formerly solid industrial/labor zone, and it's hard to imagine that the big real estate companies won't ultimately have more sway than Frank's declining union, even with all the ill-gotten money he's throwing around. At one point, Frank goes to an informational presentation about new technology that seems like it will largely make dock work an almost human-free occupation. The presenter makes a virtue of the fact that the new setup will reduce injuries, but Frank grasps the unspoken subtext: no one will get injured because almost no one will even be working there.


That's the flipside of the unceasing ethic of "progress" driving this society: there's a constant drive to move forward, with no thought for those inevitably left behind, the Sobotkas of the world. The show portrays the docks as a wasteland in the making, poised between the old way, as represented by Frank's hard-working, hard-drinking generation, and a new way where there's little room for much human presence at all, and certainly not for unskilled laborers like Nick and Ziggy. The dehumanized, mechanized docks of the future are contrasted against the fun-loving older generation, who are always at the bar telling alternately hilarious and harrowing tales of the old days. Their camaraderie and bonhomie in the face of the danger of their profession recalls Howard Hawks' Only Angels Have Wings, except that now all their male bonding and tough guy posturing takes place in a context where it's clear that this familial, tight-knit spirit belongs exclusively to the past. There will be less danger in the future — no more accidents like the one that crushes one man's leg — but also no more of that closeness and humor, no more of the touching togetherness that's displayed when the entire union shows solidarity for their injured brother, who faces his fate with courage and humor. The younger generation replaces that bold, positive attitude with the bitterness and hopelessness of Nick and Ziggy, the latter of whom is a heartbreaking fuck-up who responds to the obvious desolation of his prospects with a casual nihilism, embracing his status as a living punchline.

Frank sees that the next generation, including his own son and his beloved nephew, is not going to have anything waiting for them, which is why Nick still lives in his parents' basement and is forced to steal in order to have any hope of starting a life with his girlfriend. In a different way from the drug dealers of the first season, Nick has been born into a life that doesn't hold much in the way of prospects for him. He could've gotten out of there, gone to college, tried to find work elsewhere, but that seems like as much a dream to him as it had to the first season project drug dealers. He doesn't have any examples of that happening; the American Dream of bettering oneself always seems so remote and abstract from the vantage point of lower-class and working-class characters like Nick.


The situation of this season perhaps pointedly recalls the Marlon Brando classic On the Waterfront, which was similarly about corruption and crime on the docks, as well as the day-by-day struggle of working men fighting for a limited number of jobs. But there's no romantically redeemed Brando character here, no one who actively fights the corruption. And the conclusion is similarly hopeless. As in the first season, the last episode ends with a montage that shows everything continuing as before, the whole unstoppable cycle churning on despite the few minor bumps in the road presented by the police investigation and subsequent tumult.

These endings are perhaps the key to the show's brilliance. Even more than in the first season, when at least most of the major drug players had to pay some cost, there's no tidy wrap-up here, no moralistic coda, no satisfying dispensation of justice. Instead, the drugs continue to flow, new boatloads of impoverished women are smuggled into the country to pleasure rich men, while the men in charge evaporate from view and those few who were arrested are replaced almost immediately by new faces. Most poignantly, this montage speeds up towards the end with whiplash-quick visits to various dockside locales, all devoid of people, crusted in rust, as though the area has already been depopulated, turned into the ghost town it's destined to become.

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The Wire: Season 1

David Simon's The Wire is quite possibly the most acclaimed and respected TV show of all time. After watching the first season in the condensed period of a week, I'm starting to understand why. The show's first season is a sweeping chronicle of a Baltimore police drug investigation that expands far beyond its original scope and begins digging into the corruption and evil at the deepest levels of city politics — and life itself. The show's genius is the way it starts with a very specific incident — drug dealer D'Angelo Barksdale (Lawrence Gilliard, Jr.) beats a murder charge and attracts the ire of crusading cop Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West), who more or less accidentally triggers an epic investigation into D'Angelo's uncle, the kingpin Avon Barksdale (Wood Harris) — and keeps spreading out from there. Tendrils eventually worm into the higher levels of the police department, into the political system, and especially into the communities where the drug dealers ply their trades.

This is a tight, complex show where plot threads slowly unfurl over time, reflecting the careful plotting of showrunner Simon, who co-wrote every episode (most with ex-cop Ed Burns, working from real events and real people) and planned out the season-long arc. This meticulous aesthetic pays off both in the big picture and in the details, as the season's overall story continually returns to the same themes and ideas. This is a story about endemic corruption that invades society at every level, and as a result there are no perfect characters here, only fluctuating levels of morality and ethics that sometimes prove to be only temporary. For instance, a judge kicks off the entire case by holding a stubborn moral high ground against a police department that's reluctant to go beyond basic duty in pursuing drug kingpins like Barksdale — but the judge's moral indignation more or less evaporates when the furor stirred up by the case threatens his judicial career in an upcoming election. Virtually all the charcters on the "good" side have similar limitations, whether it's the shady past of Lieutenant Cedric Daniels (Lance Reddick) or the casual graft of low-level officers like Herc (Domenick Lombardozzi) and Carver (Seth Gilliam), whose ironic arc involving missing drug money underscores how little it matters if you do good or bad, how right and wrong count less than if you get caught.


McNulty is arguably the moral center of this story and the one cop who consistently frames things in terms of right and wrong rather than thinking of policework, as his superiors do, in terms of statistics, where a closed case is a good one even if the real offender has escaped justice. The police department as envisioned here is a bureaucracy dedicated to getting good closed-case stats, and anything else — like McNulty's insistence on looking beyond the immediate case to deeply ingrained conspiracies and long-term investigations — is just a distraction. Still, McNulty is another compromised and flawed figure in a city that seems to be overflowing with them. Late in the season, he admits that what drove him into this investigation was not so much morality as his own pride, his desire to show off his own intellectual superiority in a culture where thinking outside the box is not exactly valued. Even more telling is the scene in which McNulty, without even hesitating, enlists his two young sons in a potentially tragic "game" of surveillance when by chance he spots Barksdale's right-hand man Stringer Bell (Idris Elba) at a grocery store. McNulty's a man obsessed, and though he's driven by basically good impulses — including a desire to do good at a deeper level than the usual shallow "case closed" police due diligence — he's not exempted from the series' depiction of a society in which doing good is, as often as not, punished rather than rewarded.

As if there was any doubt, Detective Lester Freamon (Clarke Peters) provides a perfect example of the future awaiting McNulty, a premonition of the end of the season. Freamon, though he's stuck shuffling papers in the property unit, is obviously an efficient and intelligent cop, and his back story parallels McNulty's: he pushed too hard on an investigation, disobeying orders from a superior, digging where he wasn't supposed to, and as a result he was sent to exactly the kind of boring, insubstantial assignment he didn't want, where he has languished ever since. The show is all about the consequences of pushing against boundaries like this: these characters are tightly constricted, locked into career arcs, unable to do anything to change things. There are rigid rules for what can be done and what can't be, to keep everything moving smoothly and the status quo firmly in place: the drug dealers deal, the cops hassle and arrest them but can never break up the business, and behind it all the politicians are deeply intwined with both sides of this drug war, with drug money flowing freely through the city into commerce and politics.


On the drug dealers' side, there are also those who seek to push against the status quo, to change things if possible, with equally disastrous though bloodier results. Throughout the season, D'Angelo struggles with his own burgeoning morality about the evils of his family business. As the season starts, D'Angelo's close brush with prison has caused him to be demoted from a higher level position that evidently kept him somewhat aloof from the worst of the street drug trade. Confronted with addicts and offhand violence day after day as he takes over a small operation in a project courtyard, he's increasingly conflicted about where his life has brought him. Not that he sees much choice; he was born into this, as the introduction of his scheming, tough-hearted mother late in the season makes clear, and he doesn't have a whole lot in the way of options. He wonders aloud why this business has to be so violent, why everyone around him seems so bloodthirsty when he just wants to be anywhere else. He tries to fit in only because he has to, telling a gory tale that later turns out to be the story of another man's cold-blooded murder.

Even more affecting is the arc of the young dealer Wallace (Michael B. Jordan), who works in D'Angelo's crew. Wallace is one of the most poignant characters over the course of the season, as set up in an intimate sequence where the kid, who seems to care for a tribe of even younger brothers and sisters in an abandoned apartment with stolen electricity, goes about his morning ritual of brushing his teeth and dispensing juice boxes to the other kids as they head off to school. He heads off to the courtyard, though, as the provider of the family, but he's too sensitive for the job. When his tip-off alerts Stringer Bell to the location of a rival, an associate of the colorful thug Omar (Michael Kenneth Williams), the criminal's bruised and burnt body (dumped in the projects to serve as a warning message) upsets Wallace so much that he withdraws into his room for weeks and turns to doing drugs instead of dealing them.

Wallace, even more than D'Angelo, is not cut out for this life. D'Angelo can adapt, dealing with the death and ugliness all around him, but Wallace shuts down when he encounters it close up. Of course, his decency and sensitivity — he's most at home, most natural and comfortable, when he's caring for and joking with the younger kids — are only weaknesses in this environment. He has no escape, no possibility of another life; he mentions going to school, but only once, as though he doesn't actually believe that's a real option for someone like him. His fate is inevitable but no less affecting; his final scene is the season's most jaw-dropping moment, made even more shattering by the realization that he was abandoned and forgotten by the cops who were eager to use him to build their case.


Wallace's death is a pivotal event because it begins the process of setting up the season's absolutely brilliant ending, which enforces the show's emphasis on stasis and entrenchment. The season ends the way it started, despite multiple shake-ups; there's a sense of circularity here, developing the idea that some things cannot be changed. The investigation which takes up the entire 13 episodes of this first season results in arrests and deaths, but the finale communicates the impression that nothing is really changing in any meaningful way, that there are simply new cogs taking the place of the old ones in a huge and powerful machine that is not going to stop running no matter what. D'Angelo's underlings take over for him in the courtyard without missing a beat, utilizing some of the street strategy that he introduced in the early episodes, but ignoring his sentimentality and self-doubt, which are simply dangerous traits in this "game." The images of the drug trade kicking back into motion after the close of the investigation have a mechanical precision that only reinforces that this is a perpetual motion machine: certain gestures and interactions are repeated over and over again, ritualized and carved in stone, unable to change in any real way.

The brilliance of The Wire is the way that Simon, along with his co-writers and directors, inscribes these themes at every level of the story, in the littlest details and character arcs as well as at the macro level. So few characters here can really break out of the confines of their past, their upbringing, their situations to create a different life: drug addicts may kick the habit for days or weeks but are pushed back into it by circumstances and official indifference, dealers yearn for a less violent life but see no way to grab it, cops try to do good and wind up screwing up their own lives and accomplishing so little that their efforts seem to melt away as soon as they're done. There are hints of progression and change, notably in the characters of Freamon and Prez (Jim True-Frost), who get rare second chances that are all the more moving for how deeply stuck everyone else seems. Change seems like an abstraction at times, as when Carver tells a drug dealer that he had once been a lower-class projects kid, too. If Carver is telling the truth, he represents someone who escaped a miserable and confining background to make something of himself, but the route from the projects to a detective's badge seems so abstract and remote that it might as well be a fantasy, for all the good it does most of the people living with this squalor and violence.


The enduring impression of this season is a portrait of a fucked-up world where it's all too easy for the bad to get traction and dig in its heels, and all too difficult for anything good to try to root it out. This is apparent in even the smallest details. The minimal budgets and filthy sub-basements of the Baltimore police are contrasted against the high-tech modernism of the FBI (who, post-9/11, only get interested in a crime if it can somehow be traced back to Bin Laden) when McNulty goes to visit an agent there, but the point is driven home again in a later scene when he meets the agent in a parking lot. The agent drives up in a shiny new car and automatically rolls down the windows, while McNulty has to lean over and laboriously crank his own window open. It's a subtle and subtly funny mise en scène gag that reinforces just how limited the local institutions are in their ability to do anything large-scale and important.

That's an indication of just how rich this series is. Its thematic focus is very intense, and it's an almost unrelentingly grim depiction of societal malaise, but it still crackles with vitality, humor and intelligence that leaven what could otherwise have been an oppressive atmosphere. The show is consistently entertaining, with witty, slang-splattered dialogue and subtly grimy images of its sprawling urban warzone. Even the seemingly "small" characters who weave sporadically through the background crackle with life and wit — like a corpulent desk sergeant who can't seem to resist laughing with every line he says, no matter what he's talking about, but who shows some startling fortitude and intelligence when it comes to getting his hands dirty with policework. Simon's sprawling drug epic is equally brilliant whether one considers its big picture depiction of a society trapped in a self-renewing downward spiral, or its more intimate character stories.

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