there ain’t no back in the day. ain’t no nostalgia.

By Season 5, we’ve assembled quite a cast. We’ve got the cops - street level, detectives and command - all angling for position. We’ve got the dealers, all the way from the twelve-year-olds counting the stash to the masterminds dealing with supply. We’ve got politicians. We’ve got folks we picked up along the way, from the ports and the schools. It’s no longer just a TV show - it’s a real live city we’ve assembled.

Let’s start tearing it down, one brick at a time.

you want it to be one way. but it’s the other way.

Season Four was the hardest for me. I think it’s fantastic television - the writers, actors and directors are all at the top of their game - but S4’s like a wound I don’t want to touch. You can tolerate folks on the street rising and falling; it’s all in the Game, after all. But the kids didn’t make this world. They got born into it. And the absolute failure of public schools to save kids from the Game kills me.

well, get on with it, motherf–

Season Three’s my favorite of the entire run. We meet a broad cast of new and interesting characters. We return to the same setting of Season One. We have just enough history on all of these characters that we can start fucking with expectations. And, interestingly enough, the show begins to engage in a sort of meta-dialogue with the audience, which I’ll elaborate on beneath the cut.

If S1 was about losing the War on Drugs, S3 is about counting the casualties.

it’s all in the game, though

Season Two

In Season Two, The Wire proves that its success wasn’t a flash in the pan. The show broadens its scope from the decay of America’s inner cities to the decay of America’s industries - in this case, the port of Baltimore. S2 also follows some of the original cast of S1, proving that the writers create original and organic characters, not just stock types in dramatic situations.

all the pieces matter

If The Wire, the greatest show which the medium of television has yet to produce, was ever just about the War on Drugs, that moment’s past. The Wire is about the power of institutions to destroy human lives. In Season One, it was “the game” - cops chasing dealers, dealers chasing each other. But that focus changed over time, to American industry (S2), city politics (S3), public schools (S4) and print media (S5). We never lost anyone along the way, either - faces from the early seasons keep popping up in the late ones, if you know where to look. But in all this time we never had any real villains. That’s because an institution doesn’t need a villain to make it a terror. An institution is not one thousand people all conspiring to do evil. An institution is one million people with no incentive to do good.

Short of a documentary, there has never been a more real look at the American urban landscape than in this series. The writers aren’t just residents of Baltimore or experts on it - they’re beat cops and ex-reporters who know the city inside and out. Many of the cast come direct from the streets themselves. The show avoids tidy resolutions, pigeonholing and - to a surprising extent - moralizing.

There is no quick fix. People routinely find themselves at the head of the table with nothing to serve - they have the power they’ve craved for so long and find themselves powerless. One scapegoat or kingpin gets taken down, only for his subordinates to begin scheming at his wake. The City, and the infrastructure that prop it up, are bigger than any one person.

While you can’t tie all of it back to the War on Drugs, most of it springs from that hole. The rise in paramilitary tactics in urban police work. The illegal economy that takes over the lives of black and Hispanic youth. The corresponding rise in violence. We’re now seeing multi-generational cycles of poverty, where crack addicts give birth to poor children who end up hustling, slinging or robbing to survive. Like the generation of young men killed in Europe during the World Wars, we have two to four generations of men and women who will never get out of the trap of crime, drugs and death.

And this is my city it’s happening to. This is my city that got destroyed by the War on Drugs. Take the casualties you see in a given season of The Wire - not just the bodies, but the folks who succumb to cynicism and start shooting up, or cutting corners, or lying to shine themselves up - and multiply that by ten thousand. That’s my home town. And odds are, if you live on one of the coasts of the U.S., that it’s your city, too. And there’s no way to fix it.

This week is a special The Wire retrospective here at Periscope Depth. Every day I’ll give my thoughts on one of the five seasons, starting with Season One. Spoilers below the cut.

don’t give heed to temptation

I’m offering points off this media blow, but only if you give me your corners:

The Plot Against America: An odd little novel. Roth gives an excellent depiction of a country’s slow descent into fascism, starting with an alternate history where Charles Lindbergh is elected President in 1940. He keeps America out of the war in Europe and implements a plan to integrate America’s Jews into mainstream culture. Nothing radical, nothing extreme. Just, y’know, sending Jewish boys between the ages of nine and thirteen to farms out in the South and Midwest so they can get a sense of American culture. Just providing tax breaks to companies that will relocate Jewish employees to offices in the middle of the country, breaking up Jewish ghettos on the East Coast. Little things. Harmless things.

The book does such a monumental job showing how gradual and soothing the descent into nationalism can be that it’s frankly disappointing when Roth abandons that style in the last hundred pages for a half-baked conspiracy theory. Suddenly the villains of the piece are no longer well-meaning bigots or rationalizing fellow travelers, but out and out comic book tyrants. And as a piece of alternate history I think it could stand a little more rigor. Apparently, the landslide election of a nationalist and racist to the Presidency changes none of the history that follows it - America still goes to Vietnam in the 70s, Bobby Kennedy still gets shot in ‘68, etc.

Roth’s style of jumping back and forth in the narrative timeline (”three days before von Ribbentrop came to the White House, I was on the playground at school …”) and of introducing characters just in time for their first important scene, rather than laying the groundwork earlier, threw me a little. It’s not bad writing but it’s a little artless.

The Wire: So I had a plan with Trisha L. to only watch S3 with her, so as to prolong the duration of this limited commodity. However, temptation overtook me and I watched the last two hours of S3 on Sunday night. Then I watched the first two hours of S4. And I just watched another hour just now. Yeah, I’m binging, but with everyone in the world having seen S5 to completion except me, I’d rather get up to speed. Watching a generational show like The Wire has a social aspect (chatting it up with like-minded friends) and a personal aspect (the effect it has on you alone), and right now the former outweighs the latter for me.

Observations on S3 in the cut. Don’t click if you don’t want anything spoiled: