School's Out for The Wire

The fourth season of The Wire is over, and it proved beyond a shadow of a doubt what I was already fairly certain of—that it’s far and away the best, most brilliant, most powerful dramatic series in the history of television. Calling something Shakespearean is kind of a joke, but if anything qualifies, this is it: the perfectly composed and executed narratives; the expert balance of pathos, humor, and suspense; the dialog, at once so natural, entertaining, and layered with hidden meaning; the sprawling cast of fascinatingly drawn characters. The show is hard to write about because I just end up spewing superlatives.

And, as Ezra Klein points out, it’s so good that pretty much everyone likes the show: Klein, of course, as well as fellow progressive Matt Yglesias, and folks on the other end of the size-of-government spectrum too. And it’s not just liberals and libertarians either: The Weekly Standard ran a positive review by Sonny Bunch at the beginning of this season, and I know it even has fans in the right’s paleocon wings.

Klein thinks this is a result of the show’s unrelenting dour outlook:

Nearly everyone likes the show. That's possibly because it's a masterful story, expertly told, and exquisitely acted. It may also be because it's little kinder to state intervention than personal initiative. While none of the problems would be solved by charter schools, the public schools aren't making progress either. Indeed, it may be the radical apocalypticism of The Wire's vision that makes it so palatable: By offering absolutely no hope, it evades arguments over solutions.

I’d agree. If anything, it doesn’t go far enough. The Wire doesn’t just “evade” arguments over solutions, it posits that no solutions actually exist. As Reason’s Radley Balko notes, the show constantly suggests that “even well-intentioned public policy tends to pervert incentives,” and yet it doesn’t hold much hope for individual achievement either. As Klein writes, “Every one of the kids who'd taken affirmative steps towards improving their lives had seen their efforts destroyed by circumstance.”

And yet, despite the show’s hardline defeatism, it offers a real respect for the dignity and humanity of its characters—every one of them. The cops, the manager/officer class, the politicians, the dealers, the teachers—some of them may come off as jerks or fools, but they all get a fair shake. Not once does the show simply give us a “bad person.” You can, of course, point to the pains the show has taken to get its audience to respect the dealers. But even on the other side, there are no simple bad guys. At the end of the first season, Rawls (a Major then, as I recall), a deft, scheming, manager-class cop who is one of the show’s most often unlikable characters, gives McNulty an amazing, bracing pep talk in the hospital lobby after Kima’s shooting. He is a scheming, self-centered game player, but he’s not without loyalty to his fellow cops, and you have to respect his drive to get things done, no matter what.

The Wire hates bureaucracy, and it hates the system, the man, the rules that pen people in and keep them down—no matter what form they take. But what really gives the show its emotional core is that it loves people, all people, even if they can be awful, and even if they’re part of the system, willingly or not, that it despises.