While waiting impatiently for episode 39 of The Wire I finally decided to watch the predecessor miniseries The Corner via HBO OD. Also set on the streets of Baltimore and created and written by the team of David Simon and Ed Burns, this six hour production is a docudrama focusing on a father, mother and son caught up in the drug trade but–in contrast to The Wire and Homicide: Life on the Streets–tells the story mainly from the junkies’ perspective.
T.K. Carter, Khandi Alexander and Sean Nelson portray these very real people. In fact at the very last we get a postscript where Charles Dutton interviews the (surviving) real people from the series, to see where they are as production finished in 1999 since Simon/Burns source book (“The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood”) was written in 1993, and I was pretty close to tears listening to them.
Since this is, nearly, a documentary Dutton (who directed) had interviewed a number of the characters on screen, two or three per hour for two or three minutes each time and the postscript built off the accumulation to just deliver a pow, right cross to the jaw.
If you’ve been watching The Wire you may recall the supporting character Bubbles, about the only significant junky character. Here its the police and, mostly, the dealers who are peripheral. Over the course of six hours we slow understand how drugs invidiously weasel their way into nearly everyone’s veins and that once in, they never really leave. More than any other movie or TV show, The Corner makes this sad truth clear.
Many of the actors also appear in the other two Simon/Burns series.
- Clarke Peters and Lance Reddick, who play Det. Lester Freeman and Lt. Daniels on The Wire, play serious junkies here; Peters, especially, stands out as a real oldtimer, who was some kind of slick gangster 20 or 25 years before but got caught up in heroin just the same.
- Clayton LeBouef plays Alexander’s brother, the one sibling able to escape from the life, and was Col. Barnfather, the despised overboss on Homicide, and Orlando Blocker, who ran the Barksdale strip club for most of the first season of The Wire.
- Reg Cathey is another older addict; he joined The Wire this season as a top aide to mayoral candidate Tommy Carcetti.
- Delaney Williams does a minor bit here as a metal salvage dealer but has significant recurring role in charge of the Homicide unit on The Wire and made one small appearance on Homicide.
- Corey Parker Robinson is a banger in Sean Nelson’s crew and a lesser member of Daniels’ Major Crimes unit.
- Maria Broom is Alexander’s junkie sister and Daniels’ (now ex-)wife/city council candidate.
Nelson and Alexander are both excellent in very demanding roles, Carter just a shade less so. Dutton, Simon, Burns and co-executive producer David Mills–who can tell exactly where the credit goes?–do a terrific job in pacing and presenting the different perspectives, without ever falling victim to any kind of beautiful loser myth or junkies as society’s victims Finlandization.
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