March 16, 2008

‘The Wire’ Unravels

The institutional collapse of the modern American city drove Jimmy McNulty (and David Simon and Ed Burns and all the other writers) insane for five years—well, technically, more than five years. We just came in on the point where McNulty started to do something about it. To me, this has always been The Wire’s message: as the infrastructure collapses, the only way to succeed is to work the system before it works you. In the pilot, McNulty takes his complaint to a city judge who has the power McNulty lacks. In the finale, Sydnor—the quiet protégé of the Major Crimes unit, a detective who didn’t get much face time but showed marked improvement over the course of the series—takes a similar complaint to the same judge. Everything’s cyclical, and if there are more Sydnors and Carvers and fewer Hercs and Colicchios, more Danielses than Burrells, more…well, we never saw a good mayor on the show, but I guess you could say Haynes was better than Templeton, and I guess you could say the old-to-young baton passing went from Haynes to Alma and Fletcher.

I can’t articulate in words how great this show is. I’m amazed, because I’m kind of notorious for trashing HBO for glutting the airwaves with overrated crap (Sex and the City, The Sopranos) and abandoning its edgy, comedy-focused programming (The Larry Sanders Show, Mr. Show with Bob and David, both excellent series) to hype the shit out of shows that don’t deserve it. Don’t even try to tell me Sex and the City is daring or edgy in any way. Profanity, boobs, and frank sexual dialogue do not automatically make a show daring, edgy, or (in this case) funny. Sure, they can; they just don’t here. Stock sitcom plots + boobs = bad television. You need more.

Even The Wire and Deadwood—two great series that happened to hit HBO at a time when all the acclaim went to the vastly inferior The Sopranos and Six Feet Under—flew under the radar at the network know for hyping movie-quality production values and epic “It’s not TV—it’s HBO” storytelling. They didn’t get their due from their network or from audiences. Now that the backlash has caught up with HBO—for canceling the incomplete Deadwood to greenlight a mess like John from Cincinnati, spending tens of millions on a sprawling epic about Rome that’s about 5% history and 95% romance-novel histrionics, airing to ultra-depressing series about therapy back-to-back, and giving up top-notch series like Dexter and Mad Men to Showtime and AMC—it’s time to think about what The Wire means to television as an art form and television as a storytelling medium.

One reason I can’t figure out the popularity of a show like CSI (or even Sex and the City) is that if you force a person to pinpoint the primary reason they watch and enjoy a television show, week after week, it’ll come down to the characters. You want to spend time with these people, get to know them, get to understand them. How do you do that with characters who are one-dimensional and black-and-white? The Wire’s great strength is in treating its characters—even the ones we’re not supposed to like—like human beings. Everyone, on both sides of the law, is a victim of the decay surrounding them. They’re equals, and they’re given equal time, equal development, and equal humanity. Tommy Carcetti spent two seasons championing change in Baltimore before revealing himself as just another politician. Having spent that time getting to know him, it feels like a devastating betrayal to the audience—because it is. We think he really cares and wants to make a difference, but he chooses his career instead. If Gil Grissom decided to advance his career by ratting out coworkers, would it have the same effect?

The way the story unfolds is so intentionally novelistic that Simon and Burns brought in actual novelists—including George Pelecanos, Dennis Lehane, and Richard Price (whose novel Clockers was one of the main inspirations for The Wire’s storytelling style)—to craft the story. While many series have taken a somewhat “novelistic” approach, they often descend into confusing soap operatics because it’s clear the writers either haven’t planned in advance, or the real-world difficulties of producing a television series prevent the plan from coming to fruition. I couldn’t tell you if The Wire’s writers are simply better at adjusting to the practicalities—e.g., a certain story element that worked on the page doesn’t work on the screen, while something intended to be very minor reveals itself as having a great deal of potential—or if they plan so meticulously that they can plant a seed in the pilot that doesn’t sprout until the end of the third season. I honestly don’t know enough about their process; I just know, whatever the process, it worked better than anything seen on television.

It’s as if the writers followed their show’s own message, taking the medium of television and working within its trappings to say what they want to say, narratively and thematically, even if it’s not what people really want to hear. It’s bleak and cynical, but it’s not exactly wrong. I have a hard time watching police press conferences without thinking of the emphasis of statistics and “dope on the table” over good police work.

Is this an anomaly, or has it sparked a revolution? Two of TV’s best new series—Breaking Bad and Mad Men, both on AMC—show the spark of potential, but both are too new to know whether or not they’ll stick with an overarching, novelistic story or get lost in their own mythology (like Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan’s previous show, The X-Files). Hell, at this point, it’s hard to say whether or not Breaking Bad will even make it to a second season.

The closest network television has come to this—ignoring the “event” miniseries whose heyday has come and gone—is with ABC’s Lost. It’s had some uneven patches, but it’s reached a point where even episodes that felt like filler—like Hurley’s obsession with fixing the VW Bus last season—have come back in huge ways. Or, at least, moderately satisfying ways. Lost has, this season, returned to the high standards it set in the first season. Like The Wire, the writers having a deadline to end the story has, ironically, given them freedom. They can plan more meticulously, cast more effectively, and hope the audience reacts positively.

What does this mean? Should all series have a five-year shelf-life? Not in the ratings- and profit-driven business of television. If Law & Order and The Simpsons can continue to make money after nearly two decades on the air, the network will keep them on the air, to paraphrase Troy McClure, “until they become unprofitable.” I’m one of the biggest Simpsons fans around, and after a long (like, five years long) battle with low quality and weak episodes, it’s finally come back around to being decently funny. However, it still can’t come close to the Golden Age (seasons one through six, wall-to-wall genius unmatched by any comedy or animated series—ever).

Perhaps with shows that fit the “standalone” mold, which tend to be more popular (a consequence of America’s awesomely short attention span), can ignore the rule, but anything with a long-term storyline—something that requires audience attention for every episode—should have a cap. Five years, six years, whatever. In October, I suggested the struggling CW institute a policy of only picking up one-year “limited series” that they would only renew if the second-season story matched the quality of the first; they would commit fully to the entire season, allowing viewers to watch without fearing imminent cancellation, or even distant cancellation that would still cut a long-term storyline short. Perhaps the bigger networks could support their serialized shows—which means, among other things, advertising them—by testing the waters with a season-long story that’s fairly complete and satisfying, only moving into the more elaborate, five-year plan if it earns a renewal.

The flaw in this system comes from ever-fluctuating ratings; I contend that ratings go down when quality goes down, and quality most often goes down when writers have to stretch out a particular storyline to appease a network driven by keeping popular shows on the air long past their shelf lives—much more dangerous for a serial show than a standalone. You could cancel Law & Order tomorrow and not leave with a cliffhanger. What if ABC did that with Lost or Grey’s Anatomy? With a tighter focus and a clear ending in sight—even if it’s four or five years away—viewers would be less likely to stray.

Of course, the show also has to be good. The networks still seem to have a hard time solving that problem. Maybe they should take McNulty’s advice and work the broken system they have rather than trying—and failing—to effect real change.

D. B. Bates is a film critic and television viewer who has often shouted at fictional characters who probably wouldn’t listen to him even if they could hear him and existed in reality. Interested in explaining to D. B. the many ways he got it wrong? E-mail him.

Got a problem? E-mail us at filmmonthly@gmail.com