Season 2, The Wire

So, I intended to write a series of posts on season 1 of The Wire. I really did. And then I watched all of season 2. 

A few thoughts:

If any other show had abandoned its main storyline after the first season, they’d be screwed. They spend 13 hours developing these great characters, characters that you care about, and identify with, and fear for, and then consign them to the C plot. It was frustrating, even for me, and I knew that the rest would be great. If this was on its first airing, I’m not sure I would stick around. No scratch that, I would, but I’d be very very apprehensive. 

That said, it’s incredible that the writers were able to maintain such distinct storylines throughout the season. The threads that connect the storylines—Avon and D’Angelo in jail through Stringer, Stringer through Prop Joe, to the Greek, to Nick and the longshoremen, and finally to the cops. And we don’t even the Prop Joe connection until the last quarter of the season. It’s amazing that we’re getting 10 minutes(!) of the Barksdale organization a week, and we still tune in. Kudos to the writers and to David Simon for making us care enough to be patient.

The fact is, now that the second season is over, I’m glad they took the drug trade narrative off the front shelf. 

1.) I think it would have exhausted the characters, especially with Avon and D’Angelo in jail. We’ve all seen shows where the principal characters are stuck in one location (Kate/Sawyer in the cage, for example)  for too long, and we get sick of it. 
2.) If season 1 was about establishing the reality of the drug trade in Baltimore, then season 2 was about change. It’s about gentrification pushing out working families, it’s about longshoremen not getting enough hours, it’s about the concessions that drug dealers make to keep their business moving. It’s about how groups evolve when they’re threatened. It would have been hard to achieve that theme without changing the principal storyline.
3.) I think the Nick character was a necessary addition. I’ll get to that later.

lessons learned from The Wire: part 1

A lot of due has been paid to The Wire for representing both sides of the drug war. I think the praise has been warranted, but I haven’t seen a good analysis of how this symmetry is achieved. Why do we care as much about drug dealers as we do about detectives (and why are the despicable cops somehow fouler than the vilest criminal)? How are the magnificent yet subtle structures of this symmetry revealed? This is going to be the main theme of my Season 1: The Wire posts. First off…

1.) Parallel teams.

It’s such a simple thing, such an obviously important thing, but it goes unnoticed and unadvertised in the show: the two teams are perfectly matched.  In skills, in emotions, in mental facilities, in subconscious motivation, the detectives match the Barksdale organization.

The two main powers on the Barksdale side, Avon and Stringer Bell, are very different people. Avon is hot-headed, but shrewd. Stringer is cerebral, cold, cunning. The heart and the brain. This configuration is perfectly matched by McNulty and Lester. McNulty leads with his instincts, which have seemingly lead him to the case. We don’t know much about his previous case assignments, or even all that much about his personal life. He’s good in the field, talking to people, and learning. The personal things we do know from season 1 (divorced, cheated with ADA, loves kids, alcoholic) would have been disclosed in the first episode of any other crime drama. Lester, on the other hand, has been an unused brain for the past thirteen years. He doesn’t go out in the field. He talks, thinks, manipulates. He’s not a perfect analogue to Stringer (Stringer is too much muscle), but he performs the same role in the team.

D’Angelo and Greggs line up to a certain degree, but far less closely. They’re both ambitious, headstrong, hardworking, and secretly scared. They both feel forced to hide things from their associates: D hides his insecurity and his desire to leave the game, while Greggs hides her tenderness. They don’t quite perform the same role structurally, but they feel very similar. Maybe it’s just me, but they both have a “little sibling that just grew up and is trying to prove themselves” sort of personality.

More to come.

lessons learned from the wire: prologue

i’m almost done with season 1, and i’m planning a couple of thoughtful posts in conjunction with the milestone. there’s one particular point that i want to make now; there’ll be examples and comparisons later, but for now…

don’t give more backstory than is absolutely necessary. moreover, don’t follow your characters home more often than is absolutely necessary. more isn’t better. no show does this better than the wire.

we’ve followed greggs home just enough to care about her and to know her partner. they didn’t bludgeon us with her homosexuality (or at least, not as much as they could have), and we didn’t get any lady-cop-is-totally-scared-and-girly-when-not-in-uniform cliches. we got an accurate, adequate portrayal of her character through her life as it is involved with the story. not much more than that. we didn’t see the inside of greggs, because we don’t have to.

30 rock season 3 on netflix view instant

Thank god.

The constant stream of guest stars is a little irritating though. Megan Mullaly! Steve Martin! Jennifer Anistan! Goodness gracious!

The fact is, the regular characters, when they’re written well, are much funnier than the guest stars. And as much as I like having seeing Matthew Broderick on the small screen, it’s more a distraction than anything else. To put it lamely, we tune in to listen to Jack, Liz, et al., not Alan Alda.

The Upside

I can’t say that I’m not disappointed, but there are definitely ways to make the application process a worthwhile experience. “Civic Duty” was my first full episode—if I had been accepted into the program, I’d have no opportunity to dissect and analyze the decisions I made. Now, I have sufficient motivation (and all the time in the world) to pull the script apart, see where my mistakes are, identify them, and fix them.

I’m attaching a link to the script.

The disappointing fulfillments of Lost, cont'd

An example where the mystery box was well designed and cleverly dismantled:

1. the hatch. The discovery and speculation surrounding the hatch drove season 1. When we got into the hatch, it gave birth to another, equally compelling mystery box: the button, which drove season 2. These two plot lines allowed John Locke to rise and fall, and rise again, and fall again. The power struggle and the philosophical and personal underpinnings that defined his relationship with Jack never got boring. Well done.
2. the shark. We say one instance of the shark with the Dharma logo. As far as I know (up to episode 3.6), they never explicitly mentioned it. It wasn’t a mystery box all its own, but it’s a great clue.

When did it not (or will not) succeed:

1. the polar bear. Once we figured out that it was just a plain old giant super-aggressive polar bear, all the mystery was sapped out of it. I don’t really care why Dharma experimented with bears—it’s just another tangent, another branch, of the bigger mystery. I’d rather the polar bear remained an unexplained monster.