The Wire

My sister knows me. She knows me very well even though we're not as close as we used to be. She told me I had to watch "THE WIRE" - HBO's cop show. Eh... I thought - another 'Hill Street Blues' or CSI or Law & Order or The Shield --- I wasn't that enthused. She insisted.
So I started with the first episodes from Netflix. That was months ago.

Tonight I watched the last episode. I watched the 'extra behind the scenes' stuff on the DVD too. I thought about watching the last episode again. There were five seasons of the show, and I watched them all (in chronological order, of course - because I'm obsessive about stuff like that). I laughed out loud. I shed a few tears. I felt outrage, shame, empathy, shock, sadness, loss, and I came to care about the characters. The 'good guys' (?) were the cops, usually, or sometimes. There were good cops, teachers, newspaper people, social services, soup kitchen, AA leaders, just ordinary everyday people trying to be 'good' more than they were 'bad.' And the bad guys. I cared just as much for them - their damaged souls - some unrepentently bad to the core, but most just trying to survive in their world.

The one constant, ever-changing character was Baltimore. The show made me want to move to the city. A big-city, small town. THE WIRE went to the `hoods, to city hall, to the blue-collar docks and union halls, to newspaper rooms, classrooms, churches, jails, barely habitable slums and tenements stealing electricity from another building through an extension cord hanging across an alley.

I think the brilliance of the show was in the writing and characters. The characters all had redeeming traits. The cold-blooded killer reserved his most fierce murder on a child molester. I really rooted for the addict trying to stay clean. I cheered when the lone wolf gunman stole from the cruel drug dealer. I shook my head at the cops doing the wrong thing to achieve the right results. I laughed at the small-time hood glad to go to jail to get away from his nagging girlfriend. I gasped in shock when a main character was gunned down - drug deal gone bad, I thought. One night I shouted at the TV: "NO! You can't kill him!" But they did. Never a dull moment. You're never able to walk away from the show - you WILL miss something.

If you haven't seen THE WIRE, there is nothing better out there. I doubt there will ever be a television program that combined gritty truth of life with outstanding performances and the best writing ever. I know it took me a long time to watch, but I always knew there was more WIRE coming. Something to look forward to. Now what?

Thanks to HBO for allowing the show to go the places it went to - good, bad and often very ugly. Thanks to THE WIRE people for doing such a great job. Thanks to my sister for insisting. She was right.