My brother-in-law and his philosopher/educator friends from the University of Chicago program blog at OriginalPositions about politics, philosophy, music, and culture, and I think Josh Brown has written an amazing (for a blog) 4-part series on the HBO program The Wire, which was partly what sparked my interest in the series.  Brown writes:

“The genius of The Wire resides primarily, I believe, in its refusal to engage in what has essentially become a cultural sine qua non - the immediate, and therefore ridiculous, emotional event. It’s ubiquitous - after 10 minutes of “knowing” someone on television (whether it be on The Real World, Deal or No Deal, or even “better” shows like The West Wing or Lost) - we see that person cry, moralize, pontificate or whatever, and we are asked to relate to them.

This behavior might be dismissed as “just television,” but I think it’s clear it has a political corollary - just think back over the Clinton and Bush administrations, and think how many times their emotional immediacy and availability played front and center - for Bill Clinton, there were the innumerable apologies, delivered always with cracking voice. For George Bush, it is the plain talkin’ - the aw-shucks-it’s-just-how-I-feel sensibility - deployed always for the ideological purpose of undermining the “complicated” arguments of the “liberal establishment.”

So against this cheap emotional availability, The Wire gives us restraint. Here, if you want to get to know somebody, you have to wait. There is a wide cast of characters, and though they all have private lives and they all have inner demons, those demons come out only as they really do in real life - in fits and starts, in ways that defy easy understanding, in ways that force the rest of us to be perceptive if we would know someone.

As you get closer to someone, you get a sense of how much you don’t know, and this show mirrors this reality perfectly: the further into the gangs and the crews and the chains of command you get, the more questions you come up with.”

I am only starting Season 2 right now, but just from Season 1 it is obvious this is not just another weekly cop show, where cases are (generally) raised and solved, the “bad guys” are caught by the “good guys”, and all is well.  It is hard to watch one single episode of The Wire in isolation, as one single case is pursued in detail over entire seasons, and it is hard to adopt the simplistic moralism of “good guys” vs. “bad guys” because the show presents you with the details of the life of all the major players in the investigations, from the drug dealers to the addicts to the gangsters who challenge them, the bureaucracy of the drug industry, the criminal justice system, and the police.  The characters reveal themselves through their various actions and interactions with the other players, and one comes to ‘know’ them only through careful observation and inference.  It aims to be a true crime story, perhaps as true as any on television can get.

See Brown’s four-part series:

The Real World Baltimore (Part 1)

Antigone in the Low Rises (Part 2)

Hamsterdam - Alternative Social Spaces on The Wire (Part 3)

Watching Carefully (Part 4)

- Peter Broady

Peter Broady is an irregular guy out of Wasilla, Alaska, who reads and writes in his free time.  He can be contacted here, at his website, or by email at pbroady@gmail.com.