If you have HBO and are willing to put up with a little blood, I highly recommend you watch The Wire. The new (second) season has just started and although having watched the first season makes the players and action a little bit easier to understand, don’t forgo this outstanding drama from one of the key writer/producers of Homicide: Life on the Streets and a little-noticed HBO miniseries called The Corner, David Simon. This week’s episode is only the second of the season and the first few minutes give the key points of last week’s premiere.
The Wire is a busy and deep show, far denser than most other series on TV and willing to spend time to build characters. Not to surprising to me since I’ve felt for awhile that Homicide was one of the best, if most neglected, shows ever made. This one is filled with a lot of the same attitudes, still set in Baltimore, using offbeat language like murder police. Not always easy to follow but worth the effort when you see the payoff in relationships that go up, down, and sideways around the power structures involved.
Most copepisodic dramatic TV series tend to follow the main plot/subplot structure, where the ‘B’ plot provides a mirror to ‘A’ and the time is split 60/40 or so, everything wrapped up in one or at most two episodes; Star Trek: The Next Generation is a prime example but NYPD Blue and even Simon’s Homicide follow the same floorplan. When a series dares to deviate, with longer arcs (Wiseguy and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine in the years of the Dominion War) the payoff can be terrific without dropping into soap opera territory. And that’s just what Simon is giving us here, taking a whole season to build a really serious puzzle and then tie it up in a neat package. Sopranos sort of does this, though there is a tendency to have plots that wrap in three or fewer shows; what, for example, ever happened to the Russian Christopher and Paulie lost in the terrific Pine Barrens episode?
Last year focused on a set of cops, mostly misfits and rejects, thrown together to go after some huge but out of the blue drug dealer. In the end, the cops won, sort of, but paid a real price for the victory. This season we start off by seeing that price and how they’re dealing with it–a couple, for instance, seem to be saying screw this and giving in to the system or just getting out–but the others are finding ways to jimmy the system. And Simon has created a whole new setting for good and evil and an associated group of new characters that have their own strengths, weaknesses, and relationships. Can’t wait to see them all come together as the various plot threads merge!
A show made for the intelligent viewer.
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