Vest The Wire, Deadwood, Homocide

All the Pieces Matter: David Simon's The Wire

The Wire (2002-2008) is a stunning achievement for David Simon, for HBO, and for television drama. This series offers one of the most comprehensive, authentic, and detailed fictional portraits of an Ameri­can city ever captured on film, testifying to Simon's talents as a writer, producer, and social realist. The Wire, by dramatizing the lives of resi­dents across the social, cultural, economic, political, and criminal strata of Baltimore, Maryland, forms a fascinating counterpoint and bookend to David Milch's Deadwood. Whereas Deadwood depicts the origins of American political and economic dominance in 19th-century brutality, theft, racism, and entrepreneurship, The Wire reveals the exhaustion of American confidence in 21st-century bureaucracies that demean, diminish, and degrade the lives of average citizens. Deadwood's char­acters struggle to construct a viable community from the basest forms of avarice, repression, and murder to secure a better future, while The Wire's characters struggle to survive the decline of their community's economic, political, and democratic potency in an environment where hope seems ever more distant. Simon's program, therefore, refuses an optimistic, bright, and happy vision of American life to offer its audience a darker, more cynical, and more troubling view of the un­restrained capitalism that Deadwood depicts in its infancy. Both series, however, share an unrelenting skepticism about bureaucratic institu­tions that, to casual viewers, verges on civic nihilism.

The Wire, indeed, has ambitions beyond the status of mere enter­tainment that Simon's writing, DVD commentaries, behind-the­scenes documentaries, and press interviews dismiss as network television's fundamental goal. Simon, in his long introduction to Ra­fael Alvarez's "The Wire"; Truth Be Told (the 2004 book that chronicles 172 The Wire, Deadwood, Homicide, and NYPD Blue the program's genesis, development, background, and influences), states that while "the best crime shows-Homicide and NYPD Blue, or their predecessors Dragnet and Police Story-were essentially about good and evil," The Wire's creators "are bored with good and evil. We renounce the theme."l Differentiating his HBO series from the NBC cop show on which Simon first worked as a television writer and producer allows Simon to declare that he and The Wire's creative team "are not only trying to tell a good story or two. We are trying, in our own way, to pick a fight." 2 This fight not only opposes the crime dramas and cop shows that fill network television's programming landscape but also enacts Simon's belief that network television is indifferent to the forgotten people, places, and aspects of American life that have become, in the 21st century's postindustrial economy, superfluous. "The Wire," Simon states in a supremely confident yet revealing passage of his introduction to Alvarez's book, "is most cer­tainly not about what has been salvaged or exalted in America. It is, instead, about what we have left behind in our cities, and at what cost we have done so. It is, in its larger themes, a television show about politics and sociology and, at the risk of boring viewers with the very notion, macroeconomics. And frankly, it is an angry show." 3

This anger forces The Wire's viewer Ul_to an occasionally awkward relationship with the program's narrative. Simon's argumentative in­tentions may lead viewers to believe that they will encounter the televi­sion equivalent of a mediocre thesis (or problem) play, in which radical politics unveils contemporary society's terrible conditions before pro­posing preachy, pretentious, and unpalatable solutions. The Wire's au­dience, in other words, may prefer crime dramas and cop shows to the dreary, depressing, and downtrodden program that Simon's com­ments seem to promise. Such drama risks becoming not only dull but also irrelevant in its zeal to promote social justice over the merits of well-told stories that capture the viewer's narrative, rather than politi­cal, interest.

That The Wire exposes the challenging, upsetting, and negative as­pects of 21st-century urban American life without degenerating into maudlin sloganeering testifies to the storytelling talents of Simon and his production staff. The Wire becomes, during its five seasons, an elegy for "the other America," Simon's term for the working-class and underclass citizens whom he defines as "ex-steelworkers and ex­longshoremen; street dealers and street addicts, and an army of young men hired to chase the dealers and addicts; whores and johns and men to nm the whores and coerce the johns-and all of them unnecessary and apart from a New Millennium economy that long ago declared them irrelevant." 4 This concern for dramatizing the complicated lives of people trapped in the terrible economic, political, and bureaucratic nightmare that The Wire constructs for its characters demonstrates how Simon finds bourgeois attitudes, assumptions, and outlooks to be dis­tasteful, if not contemptible.

The Wire's sympathy for individuals who try to preserve their dig­nity in systems that betray them places Simon's program in a tradition of protest fiction that seeks not only to reveal the connections among society's political, economic, educational, media, legal, and criminal el­ements but also to uncover the hollow rhetoric at the core of America's civic life. Simon notes that "The Wire and its stories are rooted in the logic and ethos of a second-tier city, of a forgotten rust-belt America," but does not suggest that this ethos transforms The Wire's writers into social activists who walk the streets promoting urban-renewal projects:

"It would be a fraud to claim that those of us spinning these stories are perfectly proletarian. We are professional writers and paid as such, and it is one thing to echo the voices of longshoremen and addicts, de­tectives and dealers, quite another to clain those voices as your own." 5 This awareness dilutes the narcissism implied by what Margaret Tal­bot, in "Steallilg Life" (her long New Yorker profile of Simon), refers to as Simon's formidable belief in The Wire, a faith that "leads him into some ostentatious comparisons that he sometimes laughs at himself for and sometimes does not." 6 These comparisons typically cite Greek tragedy as The Wire's most important forerunner, with Simon telling Talbot that his program "[rips] off the Greeks: Sophocles, Aeschylus, Euripides. Not funny boy-not Aristophanes. We've basically taken the idea of Greek tragedy and applied it to the modern city-state." Rather than portraying indifferent, venal, and selfish Olympian gods toying with "fated and doomed people,"Simon says that The Wire de­picts "postmodern institutions [as] the indifferent gods." 7

Such assertions, when juxtaposed against Simon's biting criticisms of other crime dramas and cops shows, illustrate not only his unshak­able confidence but also his blinkered view of the genres to which The Wire owes its dramatic existence. Arguing that The Wire is, in fact, "about The City/' Simon begins Truth Be Told's introduction by declar­ing, "Swear to God, it isn't a cop show. Really, it isn't. And though there be cops and gangsters aplenty, it isn't actually a crime show, though the spine of every season is certain to be a police investigation in Baltimore, Maryland." 8 Separating The Wire from its generic roots, . however, is as lnisguided as claiming that Deadwood is not a Western.

Simon, like David Milch, seems so invested in prono^unci1.g his series more sophisticated, capaciouS, and provocative than its generic fore­bears that he loses sight of the narrative conventions that define those earlier programs (conventions that The Wire reproduces even while revising them). Although critical viewers may partly ascribe this ten­dency to Simon's need to promote his program's singular qualities, Simon's repeated references to Greek tragedy, 19th-century novelists such as Charles Dickens, and contemporary crime novelists such as Dermis Lehane (Mystic River), George P. Pelecanos (The Sweet For­ever), and Richard Price (Clockcers)-all three of whom served as Wire scriptwriters-expose his prejudices against network-television drama as a valuable, relevant, and artistic medium.

Jane Gibb and Roger Sabin, in their fine essay "Who Loves Ya,

David Simon? Notes toward Placing The Wire's Depiction of African­Americans in the Context of American TV Crime Drama," challenge Simon's monolithic appraisal of crime shows and cop dramas (which are, in Simon's opi1.ion, unrealistically tidy narratives that reaffirm their audiences' faith in truth and justice) by analyzing how Kojak (1973-1978), Hill Street Blues (1981-1987), Miam.i Vice (1984-1989), NYPD Blue (1993-2005), and Homicide: Life on the Street (1993-1999) are more important (and immediate) precursors to The Wire than Oedipus Rex or Medea. Gibb and Sabin, while admiring The Wire's complex ap­proach to racial identities and politics, nevertheless place the program within a definable tradition of televised American crime drama that Simon frequently denies. "Both Simon and Ed Burns" -the former Baltimore homicide detective and middle-school teacher who became Simon's produci1.g-and-writing partner for The Wire-"have claimed they never wanted The Wire to be a cop show. You get the impression they want The Wire to be something else. They want it to be art." 9 Gibb and Sabin, however, recognize the critical myopia of Simon's and

Burns's devaluation of earlier cop dramas:

The problem with this claim-good as The Wire may be-is that it takes a narrow view of what genre might be capable of. It may even imply a number of prejudices against TV (low culture, com­mercial, etc.) and crime drama more specifically (formularized, politically conservative, etc.), without takilg into account how malleable and dynamic this forum can be. For, as we have seen, 175

it was never one, fixed entity: just as Hill Street was a long way from Kojak, so The Wire is a long way from Hill Street. And in ten, twenty years time, The Wire will look as creaky as those shows appear today.l0

This analysis properly credits the generic conventions that form The Wire. Even if Simon thinks his program deconstructs network crime drama's most common narrative devices, The Wire still obeys many cop-show staples, including the buck-the-system mentality of Detec· tive Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West), whom Elayne Rapping, in Lau and Justice as Seen on TV; describes as "another rogue cop who doesn' let the policies or politics of the police department stop him fran doing what he personally feels necessary to catch 'bad guys.' "11 Mc Nulty, careful observers might add, resembles many crime-fiction an( cop-show characters from Ed McBain's 87th Precinct novels, Cheste Himes's Harlem detective thrillers, Naked City, and NYPD Blue, mal< ing McNulty one in a long line of self-absorbed, alcoholic, and promis cuous police detectives who risk their careers to pursue criminals.

The Wire, in other words, does not diverge from earlier crime dra mas as stridently as Simon claims, making his harsh criticism of othe cop shows unreasonable. Simon, for instance, in a June 27, 2001, lette to HBO executives Chris Albrecht and Carolyn Strauss, recommend beginning production on The Wire so that HBO may confront wha Simon perceives as network television's unrealistic approach to co shows: "No one who sees HBO's take all. the culture of crime an crime fighting can watch anything like CSI, or NYPD Blue, or Law, Order again without knowing that every p1.nch was pulled on thos shOWS." 12 This self-promoting analysis (the primary objective I Simon's memo, after all, is to convince Albrecht and Strauss to al thorize filming of The Wire's first season) is a particularly misbegc ten evaluation of NYPD Blue and Law & Order, two programs who approach to criminal justice is more mature than Simon allows. Tl only false note in Gibb and Sabin's analysis, indeed, is their belief th Kojak and Hill Street Blues look creaky 30 or 40 years after their i1.it) broadcasts. Kojak tackles departmental corruption and institutior lassitude in several episodes, while Hill Street Blues retains its dl matic urgency, narrative sophistication, and visual power. The Wi it seems, will age just as well as its predecessors because, despite: mon's excessive claims, his program remains a superlatively writte acted, and filmed television series.

The Wire, however, pioneers an explicit critique of postindustrial capitalism that powers each season's narrative disenchantment with institutional bureaucracy. Gibb and Sabin, for instance, state that" on a more sophisticated level, we can see that The Wire's claim to originality lies in its openly class-based politics,"13 a point supported by Simon's contention, first made during his June 18,2008, address to London, England's National Film Theatre and repeated during his July 15, 2008, interview with Lauren Laverne on BBC's The Culture Show, that The Wire is "a political tract masquerading asa cop ShOW." 14 Such com­ments have spurred Marxist and neo-Marxist readings of The Wire that i1.terrogate the program's deconstruction (if not destruction) of neo­liberal capitalism (the economic philosophy that seeks to transfer fis­cal, industrial, and commercial control from the public to the private sector, resulting in the dominant multinational capitalism that Fredric Jameson famously equates with postmodernity in his influential1991 book Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism). Alberto Toscano and Jeff Kinkle's 'iBaltinore as World and Representation:

Cognitive Mapping and Capitalism in The Wire" may be the finest ex­ploration of The Wire's socioeconomic concerns and contradictions yet published. As Toscano and Kinkle note, "The lack of any proletarian revolutionary subject and the depiction of the working class that con­tinues to exist after its supposed disappearance is the frame through which the series ... approaches the dynamics of the world system." 15 Here, system refers to international means of production, trade, com­munication, and consumption that compose the infi1.itely complicated "free market" that economists, journalists, and pundits routinely define as globalization.

Simon, beyond commenting that The Wire's writers are not perfectly proletarian, agrees that members of America's working class and underclass no longer revolt against their diminished economic cir­cumstances but instead find themselves compromised by the massive institutional bureaucracies that corporate capitalism creates. Simon's introduction to "The Wire": Truth Be Told minces no words on this sub­ject, stating that "The Wire begins a story wedged between two com­peting American myths." 16 The first myth, that the most intelligent, talented, and visionary people can become wealthy "by virtue of basic free-market processes[,] ... happens to be true." A countervailing myth, Simon continues, "serves as national ballast against the raw, unen­cumbered capitalism that asserts for individual achievement and the amassed fortune of the wise and the fortunate," namely, that average people who work diligently while fulfilling their civic responsibilities not only will find a place in American society but also "will not be betrayed." Simon, however, finds this promise incompatible with 21st­century urban America: "And in Baltimore, it is no longer possible to describe this as myth. It is no longer possible even to remain polite on the subject. It is, in a word, a lie."

This pessimistic (yet probing) analysis gives The Wire its reputation, burnished by Simon at every available opportunity, for confronting uncomfortable truths about American politics, economy, and culture. "Unencumbered capitalism," in Simon's memorable phrase, leaves behind factory workers, longshoremen, and other blue-collar em­ployees who find few places in an information-and-services economy that no longer values their skills. "These are the excess Americans,"17 Simon declares in a Truth Be Told passage that expresses his anger, dismay, and regret at the broken social compact that The Wire chroni­cles. His program not only dramatizes but also empathizes with those people who, excluded from American prosperity's overt trappings, struggle to remain relevant in a nation that regards them as unnec­essary. The institutional bureaucracies that The Wire so witheringly portrays become symptoms of a systemic refusal to create equality of political, economic, and social opportunity for individuals whose lives go unacknowledged by their better-off peers.

This antibourgeois attitude transforms The Wire into a television crime drama that, in its inaugural season, creates a fractured, frac­tious, and unfair criminal-justice system that parallels inner-city Baltimore's drug trade. This conceit avoids the good-and-evil themE decried by Simon to embrace ambivalent cynicism about the tactical, philosophical, and ethical similarities between the Baltimore POliCE Department and the drug organization run by Avon Barksdale (Wood Harris) that McNulty begins tracking after observing Barksdale's nephew D'Angelo (Larry Gilliard Jr.) avoid a murder conviction ir the pilot episode, "The Target" (1.1). A key witness in the case agains D' Angelo, security guard Nakeisha Lyles (Ingrid Cornell), refuses tc identify D'Angelo as the killer in a fatal project shooting while tes tifying in Judge Daniel Phelan's (Peter Gerety) courtroom. McNulty realizes that Barksdale's right-hand man, Russell "Stringer" Bell (Idris Elba), who sits in the courtroom's gallery during Lyles's testimony has either pressured or paid the woman to perjure herself. McNulty rather than decrying this development as a miscarriage of justice, in forms Phelan while chatting in the judge'S chambers that Bell and Barksdale not only run West Baltimore's drug trade but also rou­nely outmaneuver the legal system. Phelan then contacts the police epartment's top officials to complain about the Barksdale organiza­on, causing Deputy Commissioner for Operations Ervin H. Burrell Frankie R. Faison), the department's second-in-command, to autho­ze a surveillance detail to which McNulty is assigned. McNulty, y speaking to Phelan, deliberately ignores the police department's hain-of-command rules just as Bell and Barksdale ignore the court's ue-process protections to manipulate the situation for personal dvantage. McNulty, Bell, and Barksdale, therefore, resist the insti­uti anal authorities that seek to limit their actions even though each nan, within his specific role (as police detective or as drug kingpin), unctions as an authority figure.

This paradoxical portrait underscores The Wire's contribution to television crime and cop drama. Although programs in both styles Ie stabilize the boundaries between crime and justice (including Hill Street Blues, NYPD Blue, and Homicide), The Wire so thoroughly blurs hese lines that the viewer cannot comfortably classify characters is good or bad depending on their occupation. Bell, for instance, at­:ends college business and management courses, reads Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, and, in the third season, conducts meeti1.gs of his drug lieutenants according to Robert's Rules of Order. McNulty's self-destructive tendencies mark him as a damaged soul who cares little for the problems that he creates for fellow officers, while his al­coholic philandering alienates his ex-wife, Elena (Callie Thorne); his occasional lover, Assistant State's Attorney Rhonda Pearlman (Deir­dre Lovejoy); and Beatrice "Beadie" Russell (Amy Ryan), the Port Authority cop who becomes integral to the second season's story line about corruption in the local longshoreman's union and who enters what she believes is a monogamous relationship with McNulty in the third season. The Wire, as Simon's comments in Truth Be Told indicate, sees these individuals trapped within postindustrial bureaucratic in­stitutions that seek to mollify, control, and punish their own workers, resulting in a morally tangled social system that can neither sustain nor fulfill those employees.

The Wire, therefore, unapologetically demolishes audience expectations about good triumphing over evil because these dichotomous concepts cannot accurately capture, describe, or explain 21st-century America, requiring Simon's program to become, in his words, a "vi­sual novel"18 that fulfills Tom Wolfe's formulation, propounded in an important (albeit controversial) essay, "Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast: A Literary Manifesto for the New Social Novel," of "a novel of the city, in the sense that Balzac and Zola had written novels of Paris and Dickens and Thackeray had written novels of London, with the city always in the foreground, exerting its relentless pressure on the souls of its inhabitants." 19 The Wire's openly class-based politics-variously characterized as liberal, liberalist, libertarian, socialist, social demo­cratic, Communist, and anti-American by scholars, sociologists, and passionate visitors to HBO's official Wire Web site-mark, for Simon, a return to the type of large, detailed, and ambitious novel that Wolfe, in his essay and his book The New Journalism, asserts must be "based on reporti1.g" so that its realism "would portray the individual in in­timate and inextricable relation to the society around him." 2o Wolfe's approach to social realism agrees with Simon's attitude about what The Wire (and all relevant television drama) should be. Simon's success in imagining Baltimore as alive, vivid, and whole as he does in The Wire leads Mark Bowden, in "The Angriest Man in Television" (Bowden's Atlantic Monthly profile of Simon), to doubt that Wolfe "imagi1.ed that one of the best responses to this call [to revive social realism] would be a TV program, but the boxed sets blend nicely on a bookshelf with the great novels of American history." 21

This statement's truth confronts any first-time Wire viewer. The ini­tial scene of the pilot episode (and the program), for instance, exem­plifies The Wire's narrative approach to the intricate social, racial, and economic codes that, in their Baltimorean preCision, signify impor­tant observations about 21st-century America. The episode's opening shot tracks blood trails on pavement as flashing blue-and-red police lights bathe the scene in familiar crime-drama colorS.22 The camera sees both a bullet and the corpse of a young African American man lying in the street before finding McNulty, who sits on the stoop of a boarded-up ghetto rowhouse next to the only witness, an unnamed African American man. Their dialogue emblematizes The Wire's evoc­ative storytelling, particularly when the witness says that the victim's name was Snot (short for Snotboogie).

MCNULTY. He like the name?

WITNESS. What?

MCNULTY. Snotboogie. (Witness says nothing.) This kid, whose mama went to the trouble of christening him Omar Isaiah Betts? You know, he forgets his jacket, and so his nose starts running, and some asshole, instead of giving him a Kleenex, he calls him Snot.

WITNESS. Huh.

MCNULTY. So he's Snot forever. Doesn't seem fair.

WITNESS. Life just be that way, I guess.

MCNULTY. So, who shot Snot?

Snotboogie's name, for McNulty, reveals the casual unfairness of "the other America" that The Wire, from its opening moments, addre­sses. This initial exchange may remind viewers of Homicide: Life on the Street's passages of elliptical dialogue in which characters comment on seemingly unimportant details that acknowledge their environment's idiosyncrasies. The witness's comment that "life just be that way" in­dicates how nonchalant ghetto living can be about matters of identity, even in moments of great tragedy.

The witness, however, finds the manner of Snotboogie's death more objectionable than his unusual name.

WITNESS. Motherfucker ain't have to put no cap in him, though.

MCNULTY. Definitely not.

WITNESS. He could've just whipped his ass like we always whip his ass.

MCNULTY. I agree with you.

WITNESS. He gonna kill Snot. Snot been doing the same shit since I don't know how long. (McNulty says nothing.) Kill a man over some bullshit. (McNulty says nothing.) I'm saying, every Friday night, we in the alley behind the cut-rate, we roll­ing bones, you know? I mean, all the boys from 'round the way. We roll till late.

MCNULTY. Alley crap game, right?

WITNESS. And like every time, Snot, he would fade a few shoot-

ers. Play it out until the pot's deep. Then he'd snatch and run.

MCNULTY. What, every time? WITNESS. Couldn't help hisself.

MCNULTY. Let me understand you. Every Friday night, you and your boys would shoot crap, right? (Witness nods.) And every Friday night, your pal Snotboogie, he'd wait till there was cash all. the ground, then he would grab the money and run away? (Witness nods.) You let him do that?

WITNESS. We catch him and beat his ass, but ain't nobody never go past that. MCNULT Y. 1 gotta asK you, It every time SnOtbOogle WOula grab the money and run away, why'd you even let him in the game?

WITNESS. What?

MCNULTY. If Snotboogie always stole the money, why'd you let him play?

WITNESS. Got to. This America, man.

This scene reproduces, nearly verbatim, a passage from Simon's book Homicide; A Year on the Killing Streets in which Baltimore Detective Terry McLarney tells "the parable of Snot Boogie" to Detective Dave Brown.23 Identifying this anecdote as a parable hints at its symbolic power because Snotboogie's story becomes a perfect microcosm of the program's attitude toward law, justice, equality, and economic op­portunity. The unfairness that McNulty notes about Snotboogie's-or Omar Betts's-name represents the larger inequity that leads the man, living in economically depressed West Baltimore, to steal compul­sively from his friends, who tolerate his behavior because they under­stand that Snotboogie cannot control the impulse to snatch what lies before him. Seizing opportunity, in other circumstances, would be a praiseworthy accomplishment that helps Snotboogie get ahead, but, in this instance, it proves a fatal violation of the neighborhood's shadow economy. Street gambling, like drug dealing, may be risky, but loyalty to one's friends, the witness indicates, should overrule even the quest for profit.

Murdering Snotboogie, however, is an unnecessary response be­cause an inevitable beating reclaims the money for a game of chance that serves as metaphor for both the uncertain lives of the men who play it and for the disenchantment that, according to Talbot, illustrates "how some dollar-store, off-brand version of American capitalism could trickle down, with melancholy effect, into the most forsaken cor­ners of American society." 24 The scene allows The Wire's viewer, rather than taking umbrage at Snotboogie's robbery, to understand that the man's behavior may be a rational response to the economic disloca­tion that he, his friends, and his neighborhood experience. The wit­ness's final line expresses his sense that America is (or should be) a place of inclusion, even for a back-alley thief who creates opportunity where none exists. Snotboogie's willingness to take the beatings pro­voked by his thievery bespeaks a personal integrity that the witness mourns, explaining why Snotboogie's murder is "bullshit" rather than a predictable response to robbery. Snotboogie, the viewer recognizes, accepts responsibility for his actions by enduring weekly beatings that are sufficient punishment for his crime.

This perspective highlights McNulty's atypical presence in the scene. Rather than pursuing the confrontational questioning that viewers might expect from a television cop drama (particularly one created by the writer who inspired Homicide; Life on the Street, famous for its artfully intense interrogations), McNulty prompts the witness to talk by endorsing the man's feelings, asking simple questions, and, most important, remaining silent. The scene's visual composition en­courages this reading: Longer shots frame McNulty and the witness as equal participants, while close-ups are evenly divided between them. McNulty and the witness, therefore, share a more equitable relation­ship than the conventional power dynamiC (between dominant detec­tive and passive information giver) that cop shows routinely indulge. Talbot writes that this approach demonstrates "how the police and the policed [can], at moments, share the same jaundiced view of the world,"25 with McNulty and the witness resigning themselves to Snot­boogie's unjust murder in a scene whose gallows humor mitigates its jaded outlook. Proclaiming the virtues of American inclusion, after all, means little when confronted by the fact of Snotboogie's death and the expression of surprised betrayal on the corpse's face, making the wit­ness's final comment a eulogy for the diminished opportunities that urban America offers its excess citizens. Freedom in the 21st-century's inaugural decade, The Wire's opening scene suggests, promises less than it once did, with "This America, man" ironically reversing the optimism implied by its patriotic rhetoric.

The pilot episode's first scene also underscores the tragic moral­ism that Blake D. Ethridge sees as The Wire's primary narrative effect. The program's creator, Ethridge writes in "Baltimore on The Wire: The Tragic Moralism of David Simon," "is as much interested in accurately and caringly depicting the character and difficulties of his city as he is in projecting a criticism of the ideas and myths of America,"26 leading The Wire to create characters (like Snotboogie's friend) who earnestly cling to American ideals of inclusion, equality, and fairness despite the social, political, and institutional betrayal of those ideals that the pro­gram dramatizes. Perhaps The Wire's signature innovation is its refusal to privilege law enforcement's cop-shop perspective over the view­points of criminals, addicts, and average citizens. The series, indeed, hybridizes Simon's massive books Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets and The Corner; A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood (as we] as their television adaptations) into a crime drama that avoids middle class judgments about how law-enforcement personnel are ethically morally and civically superior to the people they police. This attitud, dismisses the single standard of justice that typifies cop dramas t embrace, in Sophie Fuggle's words, "multiple and conflicting truths' that blur boundaries between right and wrong while undercutting "the division, so clearly maintained in other crime dramas, between those who break the law and those who maintain it." 27 This division evaporates in the pilot episode's opening scene to portray McNulty and the witness as fellow travelers in an urban pageant that prevents its participants from realizing the American dream.

Ethridge argues that the witness's "This America, man" line has deeper significance, for "Snot and his friend are part of the urbar underclass shunned by and segregated from the rest of the country,"28 but this observation does not go far enough. Simon's audio commen­tary for "The Target," however, recognizes how the parable of Snot­boogie is a "wonderful metaphor for what is going on in the American city, that those who are excluded from the legitimate economy make their own world. And we're trying to depict the world that they've created upon being excluded from the rest of America. "29 This com­ment recognizes the agency that excess Americans develop when they cannot participate in legitimate social institutions, occupations, and opportunities. The Wire, rather than offering a pitiless portrait of doomed people who passively accept their destinies, dramatizes how they survive an uncaring postindustrial economy that ignores their potential contributions. The series is less a Greek tragedy than a story of stifled dreams, broken promises, and bleak futures that nonethe­less places faith in individual action (even if that action frequently seems futile).

This approach, as Amanda Ann Klein recognizes, places The Wire squarely in the tradition of American melodrama. Klein, in her insight­ful essay '''The Dickensian Aspect': Melodrama, Viewer Engagement, and the Socially Conscious Text," argues that melodrama, despite its checkered reputation, is a genre as valuable as tragedy because melo­drama seeks "to uncover some ostensible truth about a social ill and to explain its existence and consequences to the audience. "30 Klein claims that The Wire is less tragic than David Simon believes, while its melo­dramatic aspects connect it with other crime dramas and cop shows that may be less accomplished and less ambitious but that do tackle lIes of poverty, addiction, and abuse to illustrate their causes and effects.

The Wire's stately tempo, however, differentiates it from many other me dramas and cop shows-particularly programs like Law & der, CSI; Crime Scene Investigation, and The Shield-to evoke the nar­ive rhythms of long novels and stage drama. While these other con­lporaneous series feature staccato pacing that cuts quickly among ents (and that rarely includes scenes more than 2.5 minutes long), : Wire unveils scenes that, lasting 4 or more minutes, feature ex­ided passages of dialogue or-in the case of Baltimore City Council­ln (later Mayor) Thomas "Tommy" Carcetti's (Aidan Gillen) political eeches-of monologue that comment on the narrative's action even they build character and advance plot. Carcetti's passionate ad­ess to Police Commissioner Burrell and Deputy Commissioner for perations (later Commissioner) William Rawls (John Doman) at a )Committee meeting during the third-season finale, "Mission Ac­nplished" (3.12), about that season's major story line-Western lice District Commander Major Howard "Bunny" Colvin's (Robert sdom) de facto decriminalization of illegal narcotics by establishing 'ee "free zones" where drugs may be sold without police interference plan that causes his district's crime to plummet)-demonstrates The re's talent for fusing multiple sub texts into scenes that move more wly and more spontaneously than in other crime dramas.³¹ Carcetti's speech, unlike the articulate closing arguments that nclude most Law & Order episodes or the rapid-fire banter that oifies The Shield, is no mere response to a single issue (Colvin's con­versial decision to suspend drug enforcement) or to a single plot velopment (Burrell and Rawls's attempt to salvage the police de­rtment's battered public image) but is instead an unbridled lament ; sociological analysis of, and lecture about his city's urban decline:

We can forgive Major Colvin who, out of his frustration and despail; found himself condoning something which can't possi­bly be condoned. We can do that much. But, gentlemen, what we can't forgive, what I can't forgive, ever, is how we-you, me, this administration [of Baltimore Mayor Clarence V. Royce], all of us-how we turned away from those streets in West Baltimore, the poor, the sick, the swollen underclass of our city trapped in the wreckage of neighborhoods which were once so prized, commu­nities which we've failed to defend, which we have surrendered to the horrors ot the drug trade, and It thIS disaster demands any­thing of us as a city, it demands that we say "enough."

Enough to the despair which makes policemen even think about surrender. Enough to the fact that these neighborhoods are not saved or are beyond the saving. Enough to this administra­tion's indecisiveness and lethargy, to the garbage which goes un­collected, the lots and rowhouses which stay vacant, the addicts who go untreated, the working men and women who every day are denied a chance at economic freedom. Enough to the crime, which every day chokes more and more of the life from our city.

And the thing of it is, if we don't take responsibility and step up, not just for the mistakes and the miscues, but for whether or not we're going to win this battle for our streets, if that doesn't happen, we're going to lose these neighborhoods and ultimately this city forever if we don't have the courage and the conviction to fight this war the way it should be fought, the way it needs to be fought, using every weapon that we can possibly muster. If that doesn't happen, well, then we're staring at defeat. And that defeat should not and cannot and will not be forgiven.

Carcetti, in a deft performance by Gillen, expresses the outrage that drives The Wire's response to the American city's decline. The re­ligious language of forgiveness frames Carcetti's militaristic rhetoric about fighting the entrenched problems that consign overwhelmingly black Baltimore neighborhoods to permanent marginalization, that provoke politically unpalatable solutions to those difficulties, and that seem intractable in their scope, complexity, and power. This speech also allows Carcetti to announce unofficially his mayoral candidacy. An earlier scene finds political consultant Theresa D' Agosti,o (Brandy Burre) urging the ambitious Carcetti to confront the issue of Colvin's free zones, but Carcetti does not intend to grandstand quite as much as he does. Carcetti's passionate lecture, however, causes the assembled audience (apart from Burrell and Rawls) to offer a standing ovation while drawing the approval of Maryland State Assembly Delegate Odell Watkins (Frederick Strother). Watkins is a powerful African American leader whose support of the Caucasian Carcetti's campaign during The Wire's fourth season helps Carcetti win the mayoralty of what he, D' Agostino, and Norman Wilson (Reg E. Cathey)-Carcetti's wry and intelligent African American campaign manager-frequently call a majority-black city.

Carcetti's address, however, reproduces the religiously combative toric of George W. Bush's presidential administration (rhetoric that 'cetti, in other scenes, disdains) to underscore The Wire's skepticism ,ut all politicians and to underline the program's subtle yet pro­cted criticisms of Bush's policies, positions, and posturing. Carcetti, endorsing the bellicose war-on-drugs mentality that Colvin's drug­e zones reject, shows his political opinions to be as constrained, con­ed, and craven as the ineffective crime-control policies of Mayor yce's (Glynn Turman) administration (policies that Carcetti relent­,ly questions during Season Four). Carcetti astutely identifies as spair Colvin's response to the decades-long decline of Baltimore's stern District (Colvin legalizes drugs to pilot what he considers ra­nal drug-enforcement policies reminiscent of Amsterdam, Hoiland), t misunderstands how much "Hamsterdam" (the largest free zone's :kname) liberates Colvin's officers from pursuing quick narcotics ests that supplement his district's crime-enforcement statistics but nothing to diminish the drug trade. The war all. drugs, from CoI-

l'S perspective, is an abject failure. In "All Due Respect" (3.2), for stance, he tells Deacon (Melvin Williams), a local religious leader, it "the city is worse than when I first came 011." 32 as a cop nearly 30 ars earlier because the drug war destroys a police officer's proper )rk: getting to know the residents of economically challenged neigh­rhoods rather than disrupting their lives with violent drug busts lt transform law-enforcement personnel from trusted community rtners into an uncaring government's enemy agents. Colvin creates lmsterdam to push the drug trade into three deserted areas so that e rest of the Western District's residents may live in relative peace, fety, and dignity.

Carcetti, suitably impressed by the improvements to daily life while uring the Western District with Colvin in "Middle Ground" (3.11), ecomes saddened, shocked, and intrigued by Hamsterdam.³³ Colvin lls Carcetti that he (Colvin) cannot claim victory with Hamsterdam It that he is glad to have pursued its unorthodox strategy due to le benefits experienced by the entire community. Colvin, just before king Carcetti to Hamsterdam, says, "Look, I done showed you the )od. Come on, let me show you the ugly" to reflect his clear-eyed lew of the free zones' terrible cost. The sequence in which Carcetti lutely walks through Hamsterdam is heartbreaking due to the human misery and ruin all. display, with addicts scrambling to buy drugs, ghting among themselves, and succumbing to sicknesses that not even the university health and drug-care workers on hand can heal. The Hamsterdam story line, according to Bowden, reflects The Wire's narrative sophistication and political cynicism, since Mayor Royce must close the free zones when media attention makes their existence public knowledge:

It's a tribute to the depth of Simon's imagination that this experi­ment isn't presented as a cure-all. He doesn't minimize the moral compromise inherent in Hamsterdam. Many addicts see their severe health problems worsen, and the drug-dealing zone be­comes a haven for vice of all kinds. Decent people in the commu­nity are horrified by the officially sanctioned criminality and the tolerance of destructive addiction. The experiment ends ignobly when news of the unauthorized experiment Teaches the ears of a Sun reporter. City Hall reacts to the story with predictable horror, scurrying and spinming to escape blame. Colvin loses his job, and the city goes back to the old war, which is useless but politically acceptable.³⁴

Bowden notes that Royce closes Hamsterdam when threatened by federal officials with the loss of millions of dollars but misses impor­tant nuances of how intelligently The Wire handles Hamsterdam. Col­vin's decision to create the free zones fictionally extrapolates former Baltimore Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke's drug-decriminalization prefer­ences, views that garnered Schmoke (Baltimore's first elected Afri­can American mayor) praise from some quarters but heavy criticism from others. Both Simon and George Pelecanos say in third-season DVD audio commentaries that Schmoke, who plays Baltimore's public-health commissioner in "Middle Ground" and "Mission Ac­complished," was "crucified" for advocating a courageous yet un­tenable policy that ended the man's political career.35 Mayor Royce, however, in both "Middle Ground" and "Mission Accomplished," calls in academic, health, and political advisors (including Dele­gate Watkins) to consider the city's options. Royce, impressed by the crime reduction that Hamsterdam produces, seems genuinely interested in the free zones' success, both for his own political fu­ture (he will, after all, face reelection the following year) and for the prospect of ending the city's destructive, hopeless, and (in Bowden's term) useless drug war. Royce, in other words, tries to rescue Ham­sterdam's benefits by taking seriously the suggestions of academic and public-health officials who tell him that, in addition to lowering crime, the free zones concentrate drug addicts in smaller areas that offer unprecedented access to at-risk populations who rarely seek medical assistance until they visit hospital emergency rooms.

Royce, for days after he learns about Hamsterdam, appears to favor allowing the free zones to remain open until he can calculate their so­cial, fiscal, and political costs. Carcetti's lecture swiftly dismisses as indecisiveness and lethargy Royce's willingness to consider a new policy that may improve Baltimore's civic life. Ridding the city of the drug war appeals to Royce until federal officials-representatives of the Bush administration that Carcetti dislikes-pressure the mayor to renounce Colvin's radical solution to drug violence. Carcetti, who is elected governor of Maryland in The Wire's series finale, "_30_" (5.10), by making crime his signature issue, begins his political ascent by re­jecting Colvin's promising initiative. This development is one of The Wire's most lacerating criticisms of the political hypocrisy that pre­vents American democracy from making social progress.

The Wire's third season, to its credit, presents this outcome as an ambivalent tragedy. Burrell and Rawls reduce Colvin's rank to lieu­tenant before forcing him to retire, while the neighborhood corners that came back to life while the free zones operated (with residents living in peace and security) revert to fear, suspicion, and violence as the drug trade resumes. Although addicts no longer congregate in concentrated areas, their lives do not improve, while the police return to the statistics-driven, run-and-gun enforcement strategies that The Wire depicts as failed crime-prevention strategies. The third season's final scene, indeed, finds Colvin standing amid the rubble of Ham­sterdam-bulldozed by Rawls, who plays Richard Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries" over a loudspeaker (in an homage to Francis Ford Cop­pola's Apocalypse Now) as the free zone's buildings are demolished-to contemplate the promise that Hamsterdam held for putting the city on a more enlightened path. The forlorn image of Colvin walking away from mountainous piles of debris authorizes Ethridge's declaration that "Colvin is a tragic reformer" because he "tries to work within the system ... but his potential improvements are repeatedly destroyed be­cause, although they might solve a problem, they become problematic for ... particular institutions" by proposing radical solutions that, no matter how sensible, challenge conventional thinking.36 The dilapi­dated buildings visible in the background of Hamsterdam's ruin tes­tify to Simon's belief that "the American war on drugs has mutated into a brutal war against the underclass." 37 The camera lingers on this pessimistic image until "Mission Accomplished" -undiluted by hap­piness, optimism, or hope-fades to black.

The Wire's third season, particularly Carcetti's misguided yet com­plicated political opportunism (the man, indeed, honestly wishes to restore Baltimore's civic virtues), even more "graphically depicts," in Brian G. Rose's words, "the fury and futility of the city's drug war" than the first two seasons.38 The series, therefore, may seem insuffer­ably gloomy, but, in fact, it becomes riveting because its sociologi­cal dissection of urban America occurs within a compelling serialized narrative populated by vibrant, intriguing, and nuanced characters. David Simon, Ed Burns, executive producer Nina K. Noble, and producer Karen L. Thorson agree in DVD commentaries, behind-the­scenes documentaries, and press interviews that The Wire's affection for all its characters-even venal authority figures like Burrell, Rawls, Carcetti, Royce, and Maryland State Senator R. Clayton "Clay" Davis (Isiah Whitlock Jr.)-makes the program far less cynical than it ap­pears. This perspective is essentially correct, although, as Gibb and Sabin comment, The Wire's "commitment to portraying individuals as compromised by the institutions they are committed to" results in a "diminishing depth of characterization which occurs whenever the action shifts upward to the higher echelons of power." 39 Gibb and Sabin believe that Commissioner Burrell, Mayor Royce, and State Senator Davis "lack 'that extra layer of complexity' that bell hooks has alluded to in her discussion of 'common representations of black people'" to become African American characters who, if they "still have the power to engage us it is because whether in the guise of politicians (Davis and Royce) or the pragmatic tactician (Burrell) they know how to hold an audience [that makes them] function in The Wire ... purely as satire," with an "implied social critique in their abil­ity to self consciously exploit what Charles Burnett has referred to as the perennial re-assuring stereotypical 'image that suggests that black people are first and foremost entertainers."' 40 This heady anal­ysis suggests that The Wire's black leaders may be far more sophis­ticated characters than the shucking-and-jiving African Americans found in 19th- and 20th-century American minstrel shows but that Burrell, Royce, and Davis nonetheless bear faint minstrel traces. Gibb and Sabin also insinuate that each man subtly reproduces stereotypes about selfish, arrogant, and corrupt black politicians who manipulate racial tensions and fears to advance their own careers. Burrell, Royce, id Davis, therefore, may unintentionally embody the conservative 'omide that, after Martin Luther King Jr.'s death, the "black com­unity" lacks selfless leaders who put their people's interests before eir own political welfare (a sentiment that not even Barack Obama's residential ascendancy could stem).

Gibb and Sabin's charge gains credence when one notes the scant tention that The Wire pays to Burrell's, Royce'S, and Davis's private ves during its five seasons. Photos of Burrell's family are occasionally sible in his office. Royce's wife rarely appears, although the mayor's fair with his administrative assistant (Tamieka Chavis) is revealed . "Soft Eyes" (4.2) when Sergeant Thomas "Herc" Hauk (Domenick ombardozzi), a member of Royce's security detail, accidentally walks nto the mayor's office to find the assistant fellating Royce. Davis's sole exual dalliance comes in "Clarifications" (5.8), when Detective Lester reamon (Clarke Peters) asks Davis's attractive female companion to ave before threatening to expose an illegalloan that the senator has eceived if Davis refuses to provide information about a courthouse nployee who leaked grand-jury documents to Baltimore drug law­ers. Carcetti's wife, children, and home, by contrast, appear in several nird- and fourth-season episodes while he mounts his improbable, yet nally successful, campaign against Royce.

Gibb and Sabin's concern about imbalances between The Wire's lack and white leaders, however, overlooks notable exceptions. The Caucasian Rawls's home life, despite his wedding band and family hotos, remains as mysterious as Burrell's, Royce's, and Davis's, while le image of Rawls patronizing a gay bar in "Reformation" (3.10) re­eals a significant aspect of his character that The Wire fails to explore n any later episode. Cedric Daniels (Lance Reddick)-the African American lieutenant who supervises the surveillance detail formed ) investigate the Barksdale drug organization in Season One and the ongshoreman's union in Season Two, who rises to the rank of major 1 Season Three, and whom Carcetti appoints as commissioner of the ,altimore Police Department in Season Five-enjoys a rich personal .Ie. He begins the series married to an intelligent and ambitious Afri­an American woman, Marla Daniels (Maria Broom), from whom he ecomes estranged when he chooses, in Season Two, to remain with ne police department rather than retiring to work as a lawyer, as he promises her in "Collateral Damage" (2.2). Daniels becomes romanti­ally involved with Rhonda Pearlman in "All Due Respect" when she pursues him after realizing that he is living in the surveillance detail's office. Their relationshlp taces Challenges during Seasons Ihree and Four when Daniels appears at several public events as Marla's happy husband to support her bid to join the Baltimore City Council. Daniels tells Pearlman in "Homecoming" (3.6) that Marla supported his police career for so many years that he will aid her political aspirations in any way possible, meaning that he and Pearlman cannot openly announce their interracial relationship for fear of harming Marla's image.

These counterexamples illustrate not only The Wire's variegated approach to characterization but also the program's complex under­standing of race, racism, and bigotry. Simon claims in Truth Be Told that "it's more about class than race" and, at a July 30, 2008, panel discus­sion at Manhattan's Times Center titled "Making The Wire," asserted that The Wire "really wasn't about race. It was about how money and power route themselves, or fail to properly route themselves." 41 He nonetheless includes more African American characters in his series than any previous American crime drama does, even Homicide: Life on the Street. This development fictionally acknowledges Baltimore's status as a majority-black city, or what Frank Pembleton, in the Homi­cide episode "Valentine's Day" (5.16), calls a "brown town,"42 while the diverse black characters who demonstrate Simon's commitment to dramatizing the multifaceted backgrounds, experiences, and per­sonalities of The Wire's African American roles (just as he does in The Corner) include police officers Detective Shakima "Kima" Greggs (Sonja Sohn), Detective William "Bunk" Moreland (Wendell Pierce), Sergeant Ellis Carver (Seth Gilliam), Detective Leander Sydnor (Corey Parker Robinson), Freamon, Burrell, Daniels, and Colvin; drug deal­ers Barksdale, Stringer Bell, D'Angelo Barksdale, Preston "Bodie" Broadus (J. D. Williams), Roland "Wee-Bey" Brice (Hassan Johnson), Joseph "Proposition Joe" Stewart (Robert F. Chew), Marlo Stanfield (Jamie Hector), Chris Partlow (Gbenga Akinnagbe), and Snoop Pear­son (Felicia Pearson); elected officials Royce, Davis, and Watkins; po­litical operatives Norman Wilson and Royce's Chief of Staff Coleman Parker (Cleo Reginald Pizana); schoolchildren Namond Brice (Julito McCullum), Randy Wagstaff (Maestro Harrell), Michael Lee (Tristan Wilds), and Duquan "Dukie" Weems (Jermaine Crawford); drug ad­dict Reginald "Bubbles" Cousins (Andre Royo); and master stickup artist Omar Little (Michael K. Williams).

This large, sprawling, and unprecedented black cast, however, creates strange effects. First, the nearly constant presence of African American faces, voices, and bodies disrupts the racial tokenism that haunts other television crime dramas (even those programs that fea­ture multiracial casts) to normalize blackness. James McDaniel, the actor who played Lieutenant Arthur Fancy during NYPD Blue's first eight seasons, for instance, once told S. Epatha Merkerson (the actress who played Law & Order's Lieutenant Anita Van Buren) that "I'm the highest-paid extra on television"43 to illustrate how his character re­mains subSidiary to the detectives he supervises, particularly Andy Sipowicz (Dennis Franz), despite Fancy's position of authority. The Wire, however, upends this idea not only by including numerous Af­rican American characters who populate all levels of legitimate and illegitimate Baltimorean society but also by showing their experiences to be as varied, contradictory, and fragmented as those of their white counterparts. The program, therefore, dislodges Caucasian characters as its normative focus, defining them against and alongside African American characters who exceed the limited and/ or stereotypical roles to which television crime drama has traditionally assigned them.

Even so, The Wire's major protagonist, particularly in its first, sec­ond, and fifth seasons, is the Caucasian McNulty, who instigates all but Season Four's protracted wiretap investigations by opposing, contravening, or defying his police department and City Hall supe­riors. McNulty's fight-the-system mentality marks him as a flawed hero, while English actor Dominic West receives top billing in the opening credits (even during the fourth season, when McNulty's role was reduced to accommodate West's desire to spend more time with his daughter in London). West's October 26, 2008, interview with An­thony Andrew claims that this casting was deliberate: "It was always accepted that you had to have a white lead, otherwise no one would watch it. I felt a bit uncomfortable about that, or more uncomfortable than I did being a Brit stealing an American job." 44 This revelation may demonstrate that Simon remained beholden to the same casting biases as network executives, who have historically assumed (often without evidence) that American television's predominantly white and middle-class audience prefers to see protagonists of its own racial and socioeconomic group. Simon, offering a more prosaic explanation for McNulty's race, says that because two-thirds of the detectives that he (Simon) observed during his year-long sojourn with the Baltimore Homicide Unit were white, "McNulty was written as white." 45 This statement suggests that, despite repeated reminders of Baltimore's dominant African American demographic, The Wire illustrates how the traditional white power system holds sway in the city's police department, if not in 2002 when The Wire begins, then in the late 1980s when Simon shadowed the Homicide Unit.

Lisa W. Kelly proposes that McNulty is "a sort of stand-in for the show's creator," or a dramatic device "offered to white viewers as a 'way in' to this black world" that reflects the paradoxical reality that African American characters, even in a program largely devoted to their experiences, remain marginal because a Caucasian character must provide the window into their professional and personallives.46 The Wire complicates McNulty's primary position, however, by cast­ing him as a pariah whom Rawls, Daniels, Pearlman, Burrell, and, during the fifth season, even his partner Moreland reject. McNulty, despite narcissistic faith in his own investigative talents, is not the best detective within The Wire's fictional world, an honor that be­longs to the intelligent, secure, and wise Lester Freamon. McNulty's personal problems, similarly, are not unique. Shakima Greggs grows distant from her lesbian lover Cheryl (Melanie Nicholls-King) after recovering from gunshot injuries sustained in "The Cost" (1.10), re­luctantly agrees to raise a child that Cheryl conceives through in-vitro fertilization in Season Two, and begins sleeping with other women after the baby is born in Season Three. Greggs's troubles mirror Mc­Nulty'S personal difficulties to dramatize how committed police work disrupts a detective's emotional equilibrium and family life. Greggs's character, therefore, is as detailed as McNulty'S, making The Wire's portrait of black Baltimore more complex than Kelly asserts when she writes that "viewers are never provided with an insight into Freamon and Moreland's private lives, as, for the most part, their storylines are restricted to their roles within the force. With McNulty, however, we are introduced to his complicated private life from the outset. ... Thus, viewers are indeed encouraged to identify with McNulty through­out the series." 47 Viewers, indeed, identify with multiple characters throughout The Wire's five seasons, particularly people living all. the social margins like Reginald "Bubbles" Cousins and Omar Little. McNulty may be the program's initial viewpoint character, but this status quickly changes when the first season adopts a dual perspective that parallels the entrenched bureaucracies of the police department and the Barksdale drug organization. The four remaining seasons enhance The Wire's narrative sophistication by focusing on other ele­ments of Baltimore's civic life, including the ports, City Hall, the pub­lic schools, the Baltimore Sun, and the competing factions within the police department and the city's drug crews.

elevision drama. The Wire, he says during a 2007 interview with nov­list Nick Hornby (About a Boy), "isn't really structured as episodic elevision and it instead pursues the form of the modern, multi-POV ovel." 48 Although other television dramas (such as Hill Street Blues, Murder One, and 24) pursue similar narrative strategies, The Wire es­hews easily classifiable protagonists and antagonists by creating haracters that defy conventional expectations about how they should behave. Police detectives fake evidence (McNulty, in the fifth season, reates the illusion that a serial killer preys on homeless men) and nake mistakes that imperil innocent witnesses (Hauk, in the fourth eason, accidentally identifies Randy Wagstaff as a police informant, eading members of Marlo Stanfield's crew to firebomb the home of Randy's stepmother), while drug lords attempt to better themselves Bell not only attends college courses but also unsuccessfully attempts a become a real-estate developer) and improve the community (Barks­lale, in the third season, donates $15,000 for a boxing gym that will offer free training to West Baltimore boys). This novelistic approach, oy dramatizing the intricate experiences of so many African American characters (even minor ones), alters the program's treatment of race, racism, and bigotry not merely by normalizing blackness but also by lepicting a wider range of black lives than any previous crime drama and, in truth, any previous American television drama).

The two characters that best exemplify this trend are Reginald 'Bubbles" Cousins and Omar Little. Bubbles, as everyone calls him, s a heroin and cocaine addict who spends every day of his life in­Tenting schemes to acquire enough money to sustain his drug habit thereby resembling The Corner's Gary McCullough). Bubbles steals scrap metal from vacant houses and active construction sites; runs counterfeit scams that pass off photocopied money as actual legal ten­:ler; sells T-shirts, detergent, batteries, and other household items from 1 battered shopping cart; and works as a paid police informant who helps Greggs and McNulty make cases against the Barksdale and Stan­field drug crews. These activities, in other crime dramas, would mark Bubbles as a low-life hustler whom the police use for their own pur­poSes. The Wire, however, presents Bubbles as an honorable man who iS deeply disturbed by the violence that he observes (or experiences) and who uses his police contacts to settle scores against drug soldiers that mistreat Bubbles and his friends. The pilot episode, "The Target," shows Bubbles tutoring a white drug addict named Johnny Weeks and vengeful instincts. Bubbles has Johnny photocopy a 10-dollar bill, then crumples and pours coffee onto the copies before placing a real bill over them. Bubbles, as a result, can, for 10 dollars, buy 30 dollars worth of drugs from a Barksdale runner in a scam that is not detected until Bubbles and Johllny leave. Bubbles, in a later scene, recommends that Johnny pace his drug use rather than slamming a speedball, telling the younger man, "Yo, man, I'm trying, I'm trying to give you a little game, man, but you want, you want to pretend like you know some­thing." When Johnny says that he knows enough, Bubbles affection­ately replies, "Naw, naw, you green. I'm trying to get you, I'm trying to get you brown, man, but you still green." Johnny nonetheless receives permission from Bubbles to run the scam alone, but he gets caught by Bodie Broadus the next day when Broadus notices the photocopied bills. Broadus and other members of D'Angelo Barksdale's drug crew beat Johnny so severely that he must be hospitalized and then undergo weeks of physical therapy. One of the pilot episode's final scenes finds Greggs called to the Johns Hopkins emergency room, where Bubbles­Greggs's best narcotics informant-despondently watches Johnny's unconscious form. Bubbles tells Greggs that he wants to help her ar­rest the men who injured Johnny, renewing a professional relationship that sees Bubbles not only secure valuable street intelligence for the surveillance detail but also earn the respect of McNulty, Carver, Frea­moll., and Daniels.

Bubbles assists the police for many reasons: protecting his friend, taking revenge on Johnny's attackers, and earning money. Bubbles is an effective informant due to his unassuming appearance, his intimate uunderstanding of the drug trade's street codes, and his race. Although rarely mentioned by McNulty or Greggs, Bubbles could never succeed in collecting information about the Barksdale and Stanfield organiza­tions if he were white. Simon's script for "The Target" indirectly al­ludes to this reality by noting Johnny's demeanor when he arrives to conduct the failed counterfeit scam: "White boy JOHNNY cruises up, trying to look as casual as a white boy in the projects can." 49 Greggs is no racist for employing Bubbles as her informant, but her decision ac­knowledges the largely African American racial composition of West Baltimore's projects (even if a few Caucasians like Johnny are visible in most project scenes). Bubbles manifests no clear racial allegiances, expressi1.g his concern for Johnny out of friendship and his dislike of Broadus out of anger at the man's violence against Johnny. Joking that

cial realities of Baltimore's drug trade (according to Simon, statistics compiled by city, state, and federal authorities reveal that as many as 30 percent of Baltimore's drug addicts are African American).

Bubbles is also a man who, with the help of his Narcotics Anony­no us sponsor Walon (Steve Earle), spends years trying to kick his drug habit. Several half-hearted efforts alienate Bubbles's sister Rae Eisa Davis), who, in Season Five, allows Bubbles to live in her base­nent while he attempts recovery. This process involves Bubbles com­ng to terms with the deaths of Johnny, who expires of an overdose in Hamsterdam during Season Three, and of Sherrod (Rashad Orange), 1 homeless teenager whom Bubbles befriends in Season Four after earning that the boy's addict mother has died. Bubbles instructs Sher­od in the ways of the street, allows the boy to live in the small shack hat Bubbles calls home, and enrolls Sherrod in middle school. This 'elationship becomes the most important in Bubbles's life but ends ragically when Sherrod, who routinely skips school to deal drugs, lies from accidentally taking a "hot shot" (a vial of heroin mixed with sodium cyanide) that Bubbles prepares for the vagrant who laily steals money from Bubbles's shopping-cart business (after beat­ng Bubbles into submission). When Bubbles finds Sherrod's corpse n the fourth season's penultimate episode, "That's Got His Own" 4.12), inconsolable grief prompts him to turn himself in to Homicide sergeant Jay Landsman (Delaney Williams) for murder in the fourth­eason finale, "Final Grades" (4.13). Bubbles attempts to hang himself when left alone in the interrogation room, so Landsman chooses not o charge Bubbles with a crime, instead sending him to mandatory rug rehabilitation. When Walon arrives at the detox center, Bubbles ries uncontrollably. His sobriety, in one of The Wire's most tragic tatements about the drug trade, comes at the cost of Sherrod's life. ubbles, despite Walon's prompting, refuses to talk about the boy at Narcotics Anonymous meetings until, one year after Sherrod's death, ubbles speaks publicly about it in the episode "Late Editions" (5.9).

Bubbles's journey is troubling, maddening, funny, and touching. He l one of The Wire's most fully realized characters, thanks to excellent writing and Andre Royo's beautifully textured performance. Royo is ) authentic as Bubbles that director Clark Johnson, during his DVD ommentary track for "The Detail" (1.2), states, "I could have sworn tat Andre ... went out and took on a heroin addiction just so he could lay this role." 50 Royo, in "The Wire": Truth Be Told, reveals that, one

day du.1nlg Ule .l.1.li:>l Seasonl, vve wwere r.lll.lLlllg U.ll Ule Street, .1 vvas liL

makeup but away from the cameras. This guy comes up to me and handed me some drugs. He said, 'Here, man, you need a fix more than I do.' That was my street Oscar. "51 The Wire's ability to make the viewer care for this troubled street addict-a character rarely given more than a few lines in other crime dramas-illuminates not only Simon's ter­rific writing and Royo's marvelous acting but also The Wire's careful, precise, and compassionate representation of black characters. The vil­lainy conventionally associated with addicts does not apply to Bubbles, who emerges as fully alive within the difficult, hopeful, challenging, and optimistic world that he inhabits. The final glimpse of Bubbles in the series finale, "-30-" (5.10), sees him walking upstairs from his sis­ter's basement to join Rae and her daughter at the dinner table. Since Rae has never before allowed Bubbles access to the house, fearing that he will steal her belongings to sell for drug money, the stair imagery reflects the long road that Bubbles takes out of addiction. This small moment is a large victory for Bubbles, who, throughout The Wire's five seasons, remains a triumph of African American characterization.

So, too, is Omar Little, the gay stickup artist who follows a strict, if unorthodox code: He robs only drug dealers (or, in his vernacular, people "in the game"), carries a shotgun that strikes terror in nearly everyone who sees him, conducts raids on stash houses that some­times result in injury and death, detests profanity, never takes drugs, gives money to down-on-their-luck neighborhood residents, and takes his grandmother to church every Sunday morning. These ap­parent contradictions, however, make Omar (as everyone calls him) The Wire's most fascinating, complex, and unconventional charac­ter. Although a composite of several Baltimore stickup artists that Burns knew and/ or arrested while working as a cop (just as Bubbles is based on an actual informant known as Possum), Omar is wholly original in his motivations, dress, and speech.s2 His intelligence is also matched by his patience: He surreptitiously observes the drug crews he plans to rob for longer periods than even the narcotics detectives and surveillance teams assigned to follow those same crews.⁵³

Omar's complex morality distinguishes him from many other characters, including McNulty. This development permits Michael K. Williams to deliver a finely wrought performance that, like Royo's, embodies Todd Fraley's judgment that, in The Wire, "color is no lon­ger invisible but racial representations are presented in the context of class and culture to create parallels between worlds and identities boundaries between the legitimate world of law enforcement and the llegitimate world of drug dealing to unseat the cultural codes that define the former occupation as socially acceptable and the latter as socially deviant. He becomes an unlikely symbol of (and spokesman or) personal integrity, responsibility, and honor that dislodges all ste­·eotypes about homosexual African American criminals. The Wire, in short, succeeds in showing Omar's full humanity even if his charac­erization raises troubling questions about television drama's racial discourses. Two scenes in particular illustrate this notion. Omar, in he first, testifies against a Barksdale drug enforcer named Marquis 'Bird" Hamilton (Fredro Starr) in "All Prologue" (2.6) to implicate Hamiltonin the shooting death of William Gant (Larry Hull), the wit­less who not only identifies D'Angelo Barksdale as a murderer in 'The Target" (1.1) but also dies by the end of that episode.⁵⁵ Omar claims that he saw Hamilton kill Gant even though McNulty and prosecutor Ilene Nathan (Susan Rome) cannot determine whether or lot Omar actually witnessed the shooting. Omar, however, makes a compelling witness, charming the jury with honest confessions about lis own life and crimes. When Nathan asks Omar-who wears an oversized white tie over his street clothes-about his occupation, he eplies, "I robs drug dealers," provoking laughter, not derision, from he jurors and the judge.

Hamilton's defense lawyer, Barksdale house counsel Maurice 'Maury" Levy (Michael Kostroff), attacks Omar's credibility during ross-examination, but Omar remains calm, secure, and forthright in lis answers, using his testimony to reject Levy's condescending sug­gestions that Omar poses a threat to the larger community. Saying that le has never turned his shotgun on a "citizen" (Omar's term for peo­ple not involved in the drug trade), Omar nods when Levy says, "You \Talk the streets of Baltimore with a gun, taking what you want when 'ou want it, willing to use violence when your demands aren't met." 'et Omar responds to Levy's statement, "You are feeding off the vio­ence and the despair of the drug trade. You're stealing from those who hemselves are stealing the lifeblood from our city. You are a parasite who leeches off the culture of drugs" by saying, "Just like you, man." Omar smiles when an outraged Levy asks, "Excuse me?" prompting Omar to comment, "I got the shotgun. You got the briefcase. It's all in he game, though, right?" This response silences Levy while placating he jury, Nathan, and McNulty (who observes Omar's testimony with just as much (if not more) than Omar, who, in his telling, performs a twisted community service for Baltimore's tax-paying citizens.

This scene not only contests a stereotypical presentation of Omar as a degenerate black criminal but also accentuates the institutional con­straints that try, but fail, to define his identity. Nathan and McNulty suspect that Omar will make an excellent witness but cannot predict his intellectual, logical, and verbal besting of Levy. This victory, how­ever, results from the likelihood that Omar lies (about seeing Hamil­ton murder Gant) as retribution for the part that Hamilton, in "The Pager" (1.5), plays in torturing and murdering Omar's lover, Brandon Wright (Michael Kevin Darnall). Omar, therefore, uses the court sys­tem to achieve the vigilante justice that he could not dispense on the street (commenting at another point that, had he encountered Hamil­ton before the man was arrested, no arrest or trial would be necessary). Omar's moral sensibility calls out for blood, but rather than disregard­ing the criminal-justice system's structures and strictures (as he does when assaulting his victims), he participates in legal proceedings against Hamilton to manipulate that system to his own ends. Omar's testimony is one of the few instances in The Wire of total victory over bureaucratic power that co-opts two institutions-the police depart­ment and the court system-to serve a personal agenda. That Omar accomplishes this goal by lying only extends The Wire's subversion of conventional morality and bourgeois ethics.

Omar's testimony, therefore, is a narrative strategy that, as Herman Gray might argue, "destabilize[s] and decenter[s] simple and easy condemnations of media images and representations [of blackness] as evidence of secure and unified ideologies." 56 Gray's book Watching Race: Television and the Struggle for Blackness-one of the best studies ever written about how American commercial television constructs, represents, and dramatizes African American identity-suggests that "contemporary images of African Americans are anchored by three kinds of discursive practices" defined as "assimilationist (invisibil­ity), pluralist (separate but equal), and multiculturalist (diversity)." 57 The courtroom scene in "All Prologue," in a remarkable rhetorical display, moves through all three discourses: Nathan's nonjudgmen­tal questioning provokes pluralist responses from Omar that stress his separate-but-equal relationship to jurors who have no experience of living in the projects but who nonetheless appreciate Omar's suc­cess in surviving (and even mastering) his downscale environment.

Levy's patronizing attitude is assimilationist insofar as it attempts to "erase the histories of ... power inequalities, conflicts, and struggles for justice and equality" by foregrounding "the individual ego as the site of social change and transformation"58 to emphasize Omar's will­ingness to prey on parasitic drug dealers. And Omar's artful char­acterization of Levy as an equally opportunistic leech is perversely multiculturalist by stressing how a white Jewish lawyer and a black urban thief occupy similar social positions despite their divergent occupations.

Omar's facility with language, logic, and humor during his testi­mony, however, threatens to reduce him to another racial stereotype, that of the self-serving black hustler-clown who evades responsibility for his own actions by selling out a fellow African American (in this case, Hamilton). Omar's character development in The Wire's previous 18 episodes may seem to inoculate him from this charge, but Simon, in his DVD audio commentary for "Dead Soldiers" (3.3), says that, as early as the first season, Omar's mythic elements had transformed him into" a sort of iconoclastic hero figure" to many viewers, particularly younger audience members.59 "We realized something ugly was hap­pening, which was Omar was becoming utterly heroic," Simon con­tinues, crediting Pelecanos with spotting this trend early in The Wire's broadcast life. Simon and the writing staff, therefore, incorporate this development into the show's third season in "Dead Soldiers," by hav­ing Omar' s squad raid a Barksdale stash house, which provokes a street firefight that kills Tosha Mitchell (Edwina Findley), one of Omar's squad members. Omar and his two surviving partners leave Mitchell's corpse lying in the street while escaping the scene. Bunk Moreland arrives to investigate Mitchell's death but appears sickened when he sees five neighborhood children vying to play the role of Omar while enthusiastically reenacting the shootout.

Moreland, after finding an eyewitness who promises to implicate Omar in the firefight, locates the stickup artist in "Homecoming" (3.6) but listens in dismay as Omar explains why the witness, whom Omar has convinced to keep quiet, will provide no useful information.6o Mo­reland's response is remarkable in its raw anger.

OMAR. Y' all gonna have to call this one of them, urn, cost­of-doing-business things y' all police be talking about all the time. You feel me? No taxpayers. Shoot, the way y'alllook all. things, ain't no victim to even speak on.

MORELAND. Bullshit, boy. No victim? I just came from Tosha's people, remember? All this death, you don't think that ripples out? You don't even know what the fuck I'm talking about. (Moreland stands and looms over Omar.) I was a few years ahead of you at Edmondson, but I know you remember the neigh­borhood, how it was. (Omar remains silent.) We had some bad boys for real. Wasn't about guns so much as knowing what you do with your hands. Those boys could really rack. (More­land fakes punching Omar, who does not flinch.)

My father had me all. the straight, but like any young man, I wanted to be hard, too. So 1'd turn up at all the house parties where the tough boys hung. Shit, they knew I wasn't one of them. Them hard cases would come up to me and say, "Go home, schoolboy, you don't belong here." Didn't realize at the time what they were doing for me.

As rough as that neighborhood could be, we had us a com­munity. Nobody, no victim, who didn't matter. And now all we got is bodies and predatory motherfuckers like you. And out where that girl fell, I saw kids acting like Omar. Calling you by name, glorifying your ass. Makes me sick, motherfucker, how far we done fell.

Omar says nothing during the detective's rant, but he spits when Moreland walks away, as if rejecting his words. The remorse on Omar' s face, however, reflects his guilt over Mitchell's death and his neighbor­hood's decline. This reaction acknowledges Moreland's ambivalent nostalgia for earlier days that, while imperfect, were better because they emphasized communal values in which even "bad boys" and "tough boys" looked out for soft "schoolboys" who could not handle their fists well enough to protect themselves from the neighborhood's "hard cases." Moreland does not romanticize the past so much as he mourns its passing to suggest that black Baltimore has suffered egre­giously from the drug trade, becoming so atomized and balkanized that thieves like Omar prey on their own people.

This scene, unlike Omar' s testimony in "All Prologue," transforms him into the silent receiver of Moreland's history lesson, not a per­former who glibly employs assimilationist, pluralistic, and multi­cultural rhetoric to sidestep accountability for participating in his city's deterioration. Moreland's monologue, rather than embracing a false vision of Baltimore's utopian past, stresses Omar's agency to provoke the man to question his social position more deeply than he ever has. Omar, in Moreland's mind, chooses to act as a predator who destroys (or at least weakens) the community they once shared. Race may seem only a background element in Moreland's lament, since the detective never explicitly identifies his neighborhood or school as Af­rican American, but it pervades the monologue's sub text to reproduce what Phillip Brian Harper identifies as the paradoxical approach to black life that American television encounters when "the insistence that television faithfully represent a set of social conditions ... com­posing a Singular and unitary phenomenon known as 'the Black ex­perience' runs smack up against a simultaneous demand that it both recognize and help constitute the diversity of African American society." 61 Moreland's monologue distills and transcends this tension by recalling a past that, while flawed, was not as selfish as the present. The diversity implicit in Moreland's childhood recollection includes his youthful desire to assume a role he was ill equipped to play, his father's concern that he take a straight path, and the generosity of urban toughs who in their own way counseled Moreland to follow his father's advice. The stereotypical notion that "the black experience" comprises despair, resentment, economic disadvantage, and racial ex­clusion gives way to a broader image of black communities inhabited by people with different interests, dispositions, and goals.

Moreland's regret at "how far we done fell," therefore, is no con­servative elegy for better days but instead acknowledges the respon­sibility that he and Omar bear for their community'S social problems. The reasons for Baltimore's urban decline may be intricate, but this complexity does not allow residents to evade their civic duties. More­land's monologue frontally assaults Omar's belief that robbing drug dealers is more righteous than robbing citizens, and it so upsets Omar that, in the following episode, "Back Burners" (3.7), he tells his friend and moneyman Butchie (S. Robert Morgan), "that fat man gave me a itch I can't scratch." 62 Omar decides to assist Moreland by paying $1,500 to purchase and return a police revolver stolen from Officer Kenneth Dozerman (Rick Otto) after Dozerman was shot while at­tempting an undercover drug buy in "All Due Respect" (3.2). This act of conscience, however, does not stop Omar from raiding Barksdale and Stanfield stash houses, an occupation he quits only after acquir­ing $400,000 from a large drug-supply robbery in "That's Got His Own." This windfall permits Omar to retire to San Juan, Puerto Rico, with his boyfriend, Renaldo (Ramon Rodriguez). Omar also murders Bell at the end of "Middle Ground" (3.11) to avenge Brandons dCClUl after learning that Bell ordered the killing. The doubt that Moreland induces in Omar may seem short lived, but the detective's mono­logue, skillfully performed by Pierce, deepens both his and Omar's personalities to demonstrate how nuanced The Wire's African American characters are.

Elements such as Omar's testimony, Moreland's monologue, Bub-

bles's struggle with addiction, Baltimore's dysfunctional institutions, the program's complicated attitude toward race, and the human de­cency displayed by so many characters explain why Jacob Weisberg, in a now-famous column titled "The Wire on Fire: Analyzing the Best

Show on Television," writes that

The Wire ... is surely the best TV show ever broadcast in America. This claim isn't based on my having seen all the possible rivals for the title, but on the premise that no other program has ever done anything remotely like what this one does, namely to por­tray the social, political, and economic life of an American city with the scope, observational precision, and moral vision of great

literature.⁶³

This compliment, out of the dozens bestowed by critics, editorialists, and commentators during the show's broadcast run, most strongly endorses The Wire's literary ambitions. Rose summarizes the pro­gram's superlative standing by writing that The Wire attracted a "small, but intensely devoted audience, composed of critics (who, when not comparing it to the work of Charles Dickens or James Joyce, or Greek tragedy, continually cite it as the best program on TV); actively engaged viewers willing to work hard to follow its intricate plotlines; and, as Simon fondly notes, a strong following among both cops and criminals." 64 Rose also notes that Simon's series, although never as popular as The Sopranos, Six feet Under, or Sex and the City, became a prestigious program for HBO that extended the cable channel's repu­tation for innovation and risk-taking (or what J. M. Tyree calls "the kind of critically acclaimed 'loss leader' that generates respect for the

entire brand"65).

Simon certainly understands this reality, telling Bill Moyers in an April 17, 2009, interview that, no matter how much respect his pro­gram receives, "it's not like everybody's rushing to make ... more Wires. I mean, you know ... I've pretty much demonstrated how not to make a hit show, you know? I make a show that gets me on Bill Moy­ers. But ... I don't get a show that, you know, makes a lot of money for a network." 66 This attitude criticizes television drama for over­looking the uncomfortable realities of American society that The Wire confronts, with Simon telling Moyers that, of the 749 different dramas and comedies "on television right now 748 of them are about the America that I inhabit, that you inhabit, that most of the viewing

public, I guess, inhabits." The Wire's literary aspirations, in this con­text, may be laudable but do little to change what Simon regards as network television's bourgeois assumptions, attitudes, and outlooks.

Simon's opinions about network television, as previously dis­cussed, not only stereotype other programs as less serious than The Wire but also reduce them to mere entertainments that avoid chal­lenging, provoking, or upsetting their audiences. This reductionism accepts HBO's network slogan that its programming is "not TV" to imply that The Wire (like HBO's other series) occupies a higher, more substantive, and more sophisticated realm than network dramas. Si­mon's perspective is as limited as his problematic comments about cop and crime dramas for, as Gibb and Sabin argue, Simon's narrow view misrepresents the power, the value, and the effects of genre fic­tion (particularly network-television drama).

Ethridge highlights an additional complication of The Wire's po­litical argument against the institutional indifference and stultifying bureaucracies produced by American capitalism: "The problem with this moral appeal made in an entertainment television medium is that it lacks an articulation of an affirmative political project. View­ers are then just as likely to be iloculated from working to change the circumstances of the tragic characters of The Wire." 67 Ethridge feels that Simon's vision may convince The Wire's audience that post­modern institutions so circumscribe urban American life that "there is nothing to be done. This form of political and cultural agitation can lead to the support of established institutions just as much as tra­ditional police procedurals." 68 Bowden similarly argues that, "like Dickens's London, Simon's Baltimore is a richly imagined caricature of its real-life counterpart, not a carbon copy." 69 The Wire's coher­ence-no matter how astonishingly it creates a living simulacrum of Baltimore-avoids "the infuriati1.g unfinishedness of the real world," which remains "infinitely complex and ever changing." 7o The Wire, for Bowden, is a marvelous work of art that, despite its authentic­ity, should not be mistaken for reality. This truth may apply to all artistic pieces (whether literature, television, film, painting, or music), but it points the viewer's attention to The Wire's status as fiction, not documentary journalism. The program, indeed, employs realistic and naturalistic narrative strategies to argue passionately for its personal, probing, and pessimistic view of 21st-century America.

Such a view is substantially correct in its perspective, passion, and scope whether or not it moves The Wire's viewers to political action. Ethridge recognizes that such criticism "places too much responsibility all. Simon, and the creative staff of The Wire, to both agitate for change as well as to also direct that agitation" because the shoW'S belief that America should end the war all. drugs must "be joined by thoughtful arguments, articulated by others, about what that would look like and how the epidemic of drugs would be dealt with." 71 The Wire, however, provides a compelling fictional portrait of the drug war's conclusion ill the third season's plotline about Hamsterdam, making Weisberg's lavish praise-written in response to the fourth season's vivid depic­tion of inner-city Baltimore's public schools-less melodramatic thar it might seem. No single American television show may deserve thE title of best program, but The Wire is one of the finest dramas ever can ceived, created, and broadcast in the United States. Its carefully drawn characters, shrewd political analysis, complex unfolding story lines insistent social realism, handsome production values, and gallow humor-out of many other attributes-qualify The Wire as a work of genius.

This statement does not ignore The Wire's flaws or Simon's over

heated declarations about the program's singular achievements. Th Wire, indeed, charmingly incorporates cheerful profanity; abidin faith in individual action and personal redemption despite the inst tutional, social, and racial restrictions placed on its characters; an gentle satire of its own critical praise (especially comparisons to th novels of Charles Dickens). In the fifth season, for instance, Baltimo Sun Executive Editor James c. Whiti1.g III (Sam Freed) repeated recommends that the newspaper's stories include "the Dickensia aspect" in coverage that addresses difficult social issues, but then n sists recommendations that the Sun investigate racism at the UniVE sity of Maryland's campus in order to protect the reputation of t university'S dean of journalism (an old friend of Whiting's), there¹ making a mockery of Dickens's concern with the uncomfortable (aJ even ugly) aspects of urban life. This season's sixth episode bears t title "The Dickensian Aspect" (5.6) to drive home how citing DickE quickly becomes an impoverished method of convincing readers (and viewers) that aspirations toward social realism and social conscience equal careful, contextual, and scrupulous understanding of social problems.

Bodie Broadus transforms Dickens into a sexual euphemism in the episode "Home Rooms" (4.3) by lamenting, "I'm standing here like a asshole holding my Charles Dickens." 72 This memorable line both punctures and authorizes The Wire's similarities to Dickens's 19th­century fiction by engaging the bawdy humor, bleak attitude, and understated anger found throughout Dickens's novels. Broadus's im­mediate problem is maintaining a drug corner after Bell's death and Barksdale's imprisonment, but his sense of impotence speaks to The Wire's larger themes about an America left behind by the 21st-century's postindustrial economy, about the difficulties of surviving this harsh reality, and about comedy's redemptive capacities. The Wire is rife with ironic humor that saves it from becoming a callous, bitter, and unwatchable program. The series instead emerges as a remarkable, if improbable, testament to the American spirit.

Simon, during his interview with Moyers, says, "The Wire was actu­ally a love letter to Baltimore." This formulation is accurate no mat­ter how pessimistic the program appears. The Wire reveals not only Simon's cynicism about America's socioeconomic, political, and racial hypocrisies but also his tremendous compassion for individual Amer­icans who struggle against the daily inequities of 21st-century life. The series finale ends with McNulty leaning against his car to observe Baltimore as a breathtaking montage of The Wire's many characters and the city's polyglot residents, accompanied by the Blind Boys of Alabama's version of Tom Waits's song "Way Down in the Hole," ac­celerates in pace until the camera returns to McNulty, who gets into his car and drives away. The camera, however, holds on Baltimore for 20 seconds before cutting to the end credits. This poetic conclusion demonstrates in one 4-minute sequence Simon's considerable talents as a writer, producer, and social realist. The Wire, thanks to his care, becomes an extraordinary valentine to urban America, a signature contribution to television drama, and a staggering achievement for American popular art.

Conclusion: The Two Davids:

Television Auteurs

Wyatt Mason's March 15, 2010, article in the New York Times A zine (devoted to David Simon's newest television series, Treme) 1 the suggestive title "The HBO Auteur."l Mason recounts the deve ment and production of Simon's return to weekly television dl after The Wire's March 10, 2008, conclusion and after adapting ( Ed Burns) Evan Wright's book Generation Kill into an Emmy Aw winning, seven-hour HBO miniseries broadcast during July and gust 2008. Treme-set in New Orleans, Louisiana, three months Hurricane Katrina's August 2005 landfall-explores the music, eantry, and culture of a city rebuilding itself in the wake of widesp devastation. Simon receives credit as Treme's driving creative force ( though he cocreated Treme with Eric Overmyer, the writer-prod who worked with him on Homicide; Life on the Street, joined The w writing staff during that program's fourth season, and has wri scripts for Close to Home (2005-2007), Gideon's Crossing (2000-20 Law & Order (1990-2010) Law & Order; Criminal Intent (2001-prese and New Amsterdam (2008). This development, beyond downplay Overmyer's importance to the program's narrative life, signals an proved stature for television authors of Simon's caliber.

Some television writers and producers do not deserve the title teur, but this study argues that David Milch and David Simon Each man's body of work constitutes the distinctly personal s that French New Wave film critics (particularly Francois Truffa lauded when employing auteur to describe moviemakers sud Jean Cocteau, Jean Renoinr, and Alfred Hitchcock. James M. Vest

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