TV Review: The Wire

In the season finale of The Wire, former gang-banger Cutty Wise (Chad L. Coleman), knee-capped in the previous ep for unsuccessfully attempting to pull a kid away from the Corner, lies in a Baltimore hospital bed while his roommate watches Deadwood on his set. Cutty, who's in as an ER patient without insurance, doesn't get HBO on his half of the room; no insurance means he only gets to watch four channels – whatever, one presumes, can get pulled in by antenna. It's not HBO, it's just teevee.

The ironic ref to Deadwood, another critically lauded but ratings challenged cable series, is apt; like David Milch's western, The Wire concerns itself with a large and dangerous community. Both shows are as focused on life in the streets as they are the backrooms inhabited by the people in power. But while Deadwood wraps its drama and its ironies in calculatedly artificial dialog, David Simon's police procedural aims for – and achieves – a more naturalistic tone.

Each of The Wire's four seasons has had one overriding plotline; this year's centered on the Baltimore school system where former screw-up cop Prez (Jim True-Frost) has found his vocation as a math teacher. Through Prez (hopeless as a cop, decent as a teacher), we meet a group of young "hoppers," 21st century Dead End Kids who struggle to survive the neighborhood and only incidentally think of school. The primary quartet – Namond, Michael, Randy and Duquan (a.k.a. "Dukie," which is frequently pronounced "Dookey") – wind up connecting with the adult police who we've seen from the series' beginning. But it's not always to their benefit. When Randy (Maestro Harrell), for instance, gets labeled a "snitch bitch" for inadvertently talking to a cop, the repercussions prove catastrophic for both him and his foster mother.

Another series regular, junkie real snitch Bubbles (Andre Royo) also ties into the "schooling" plotline with even more heartbreaking results. Dedicated to taking a boy under his wing to teach him the tricks of surviving on the streets, he pushes his latest "student" Sherrod (Rashad Orange) into re-enrolling in school so the boy can pick up the math skills necessary to street peddling. But his plan falls apart when Sherrod falls victim to his mentor's junkie scheme to poison a thug who's been victimizing Bub's. The look of torment on the remarkable Royo's face in the season's climax as he comes to grips with what he's done is some of the rawest emotional television ever lensed.

Inextricable from the school-set plotlines – which prove to be a more despairing updating of Up the Down Staircase (a book and movie once used to pump student teachers with vim and vigor as they headed out to urban schools) – is the usual host of dealers, druggies, cops, and politicians all making their living, in one way or another, off the decaying urban setting. Foremost among the cops are homicide detectives Freamon (Clarke Peters) and Moreland (Wendell Pierce) who make things uncomfortable for the boys downtown when they discover that the city's lower homicide stats have resulted from the diligent efforts of two gang enforcers who've been dumping their bodies in boarded-up buildings. For their efforts, they're reviled more than lauded until someone in the city's new administration realizes that the bad stats can be stuck on the outgoing administration.

Article Author: Bill Sherman

Bill Sherman is the Comics & Graphic Novels review editor for Blogcritics. With his lovely wife Rebecca Fox, he has recently co-authored a sudsy size acceptance novel entitled Measure By Measure.

Visit Bill Sherman's author page — Bill Sherman's Blog