The Wire: HBO’s Best & Most Important Series; Why the Press Doesn’t Know it Exists

With The Sopranos 1999 opening season, a television renaissance spawned – most exclusively on HBO. HBO led the way then and continues to push the creative envelop now, redefining not only the standards of television programming, but enlivening traditional genre content with its original programming. Most notably, in urban comedy (Sex and the City), organized crime (The Sopranos), historical drama (Deadwood, Rome), domestic drama (Six Feet Under), the 30-minute sitcom (Entourage), off-the-cuff comedy (Curb Your Enthusiasm) and the crime drama (The Wire).

The Wire now enters its fourth season, thriving in a low-key profile mirroring that of its beautifully constructed inner-city drug dealing characters. However, unlike the clandestine nature its characters strive to maintain as means of survival, the show itself is struggling to shed sunlight on its very existence. It’s amazing that a program that has achieved such cinematic excellence as The Wire has remained as obscure to the television viewership. It seems that gritty, raw, complex characters that challenge the stereotypes associated to each role have a hard time making their way into mainstream consciousness, especially in the crime genre.

The sad truth is it’s not only the audience that has missed out on the show (I didn’t watch it until this summer on On Demand), but the critics have neglected it as well. Maybe there’s something about the images The Wire gives us; littered urban streets, boarded windows, fluorescent lit police stations, that sub-consciously blocks our attention. If we’ll venture outside our known experience, we’re more inclined to venture into one of more rewarding fantasy, like Sex and the City – where people are beautiful and have cozy lives. The ghetto? Tough sell. The Times ran a story a few weeks ago about the finale of the hit series, Entourage. In the article the writer, Bill Carter, runs a list of HBO’s up-coming schedule and gives a general overview of the network’s health. (View article here: subscription needed) The Wire was not even mentioned. This is a show now in its fourth season and people who have actually seen it all agree it’s the best show ever to touch television. How can a source of The Times importance miss this? It’s mind-boggling to people who have actually seen the show. David Simon, the show’s creator has attributed this to several issues, one being that it’s too complex to follow for people who don’t keep up with it. This corroborates with people whom I’ve tried to evangelize. I always get the same response, “I’ve heard great things about it, but its already the fourth season.”

Today, The Times, tried to correct their previous failure to publicize the show with a medium-sized piece talking about the fourth season’s in-depth look at the education system of inner city Baltimore. (Read here: subscription needed) Writer, Virginia Heffernan, commences with the declaration: “This season of ‘The Wire’ will knock the breath out of you.” From there we’re given an overview of the season’s new characters, all middle-school juveniles struggling not to slip into the cracks of their environment’s realities. The education system is the new institution The Wire faces off with, continuing its thread of dissecting the realities of class and power in “the game.” Each character the show has written in the three previous seasons has been a multi-sided human being. In the network’s documentary about the new season, they compare it to a Greek tragedy, where some characters are destined to live out their path, never with a chance to make it out while living in a life dynamic of obscure higher powers and shadowy social class divisions.

The Times article is titled, “Higher Learning in the Drug Trade for Four Baltimore Students,” and beyond the first sentence’s declaration of brilliance, nothing much follows to illustrate a fluid closeness with the series at large. It comes across that Heffernan was given a writing assignment (most probably a token of HBO’s internal marketing team’s push for the new season’s premiere tomorrow night at 10pm EST), along with a tape of the season and some background information and clips on the previous seasons and evolving storylines. It’s great that the show is getting some press but no major newspaper or mainstream periodical has given the show the same juice as many of the networks previous and continuing shows. This is sad because a great majority of the people who get turned on to the show now have lost three seasons of impeccable acting, writing and cinema in part because of the negligence in publicity. The critics at places like The Times need to take a serious look at the entire series and start writing winning and thorough reviews of this gem in order to sway the types of viewers who need a paid invitation in order to attend an event. Unfortunately, this is the majority.

The Wire is the best show on television and you’d do yourself a great favor to rent the first season and then catch the rest on On Demand. Season two is perhaps my favorite thus far, with no feelings but excitement and fascination for the others. Most innovations are initially met with resistance. The Wire is certainly an innovation in network story telling. With time, some of the worthiest innovations make it inside the public domain of knowledge. A television program relies on this for success. Let’s see if The Wire can do what its predecessors have already accomplished, but this time the critics need to help.

The Common Act to Judge What One Does Not Know; or, Why I Have Not Seen Snakes On a Plane

Maybe it was the title, but no, that falls short of the entire truth. It’s what the title is symptom of: the marketing machine selling beef jerky as filet mignon. There’s already buzz that this film is a cult-classic. The only thing cult I can see is the cult of personality. A cult classic cannot be a self-conscious attempt at being such, it’s a bizarre creation, an original creation – it’s not a template; Eraserhead, Rocky Horror Picture Show, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Jodorowsky’s “El Topo” – to name a few.

Snakes On a Plane? Come on now… I can see the nearest hipster run into the “café” and intellectualize the phenomena of what is now known as Snakes On a Plane. I just want to repeat the title as many times as I can, because, there is genius to it… it’s something you love to pronounce and even enjoy hearing about as much as Samuel L Jackson’s scream. I mean, does Hollywood have any shame? Mr. Jackson’s career mirrors this film’s tragic flaw – you know what will happen before you see it.

The world came to love and admire Samuel L. Jackson’s authoritative persona after his Pulp Fiction performance, but all Hollywood seems to want from him is to relive the intensity of his famous Ezekiel 25:17 speech, “…the path of the righteous man is beset on all sides by the inequities of …“ I bet many of you can fill in the blanks… music to any admirer’s ears. Hollywood loves to find a moment that hits the jackpot and then squeeze it over and over again until it has as much juice as fire wood.

Snakes On a Plane? Name it “Marry Lou Died on a Plane” and let the zaniness of giant snakes surprise and bewilder our rationale that people get paid millions to think of this shit. But please do not bring on the marketing squad to mind-fuck us into believing something is a cult classic that has been out for 1 week. You find cult classics on the video shelf of the strange kid in high school who often obsessed himself in Goth literature or in the prized collection of a film buff, but never in the possession of the mass market. So…I’m sorry to be so cynical, but let us decide what is cult, please don’t step on that authenticity in the same breadth that Samuel’s has: turning original art into a parody of itself. I’ll give Mr. Jackson the benefit of the doubt, because I still remember him robbing McDowell’s in Coming to America – I know he worked his ass off before he made that speech for Quentin Tarantino. I also know Hollywood has also worked its ass-off to get the cinematic dominance it now enjoys, but the world is bursting for something new from film and right now, there isn’t a CGI snake in sight who can recite Ezekiel 25:17 the way Samual Jackson could pre-stardom.