Usually I am consumed by what is wrong with US media, but this time around, I thought it might be appropriate to celebrate what is occasionally right with the media here, especially television.
On most, well all, American TV police dramas, there is a set formula: for one, the case is always closed in the 59th minute. That is the way it works on top-rated network shows like CSI, Law and Order, and even the defunct NYPD Blue. As Tim Goodman, who writes about television for the San Francisco Chronicle puts it: “There’s a crime, there’s a perp, he’s chased and caught, he’s brought to justice. All in less than an hour. That’s your standard network television show.” Well, not HBO’s The Wire.
The Wire consists of five or so complicated storylines playing out simultaneously over 12 weeks, sometimes carried over into the next season. At times it even changes stories altogether, challenging viewers to keep up: in the second season it left the neighbourhoods of West Baltimore to focus on the decline of the shipping industry in the city’s harbour.
There is no single lead character. Cops and robbers are given equal time.
The show’s politics, for American TV, are also remarkably palpable, if sometimes morally ambiguous and complicated. Its publicity material invokes the failed drug policy of the US government, “the de-industrialisation of America” and the “death of the American working class”.
On most TV shows, ethnic characters are there for colour and humour. Again, not in The Wire. Not only are the bulk of the lead characters black, but it has central storylines on immigrant groups (with subtitles), something totally at odds with standard prime-time television fare.
And it has gained influential fans for its Sunday night 9pm showing. Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner, whose work includes the phenomenal Angels in America (also produced for television by HBO) comments that: “The TV cop show has a long, ignoble history of propagating reprehensible, simpleminded and dangerous fantasies about law and crime in America, exploiting the fear of urban public spaces, and offering up America’s cities as proving grounds for reactionary concepts of human nature and human society. The Wire is not an exception, it’s a complete subversion and redefinition of the form, from which the form’s traditions will never, or at least should never, recover.”
How did such a thing even get made and shown on American TV?
The people behind The Wire constitute a partial explanation. The principal creators are the novelists David Simon and the legendary Richard Price. They oversee most of the scripts and have hired other novelists as screenwriters and treat the series as a “novel” with “chapters”. Simon, formerly a newspaper reporter, turned his journalism on the Baltimore police into the award-winning TV series Homicide: Life on the Streets. Price wrote the novel Clockers, which was turned into a feature film by Spike Lee.
The rest of the explanation has to do with “premium cable” channel HBO (think the Mail & Guardian arts section fatter and edited better). The channel is also behind the success of The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, Sex and the City and of course Kushner’s Angels in America. As Simon told fans recently in an online chat, “a broadcast network would not have the patience for this show”.
HBO has stuck with the show even though its ratings have been only modest-to-respectable. Still, there are limits, even for the daring cable channel. When the third season ran its course in late December 2004, HBO had not announced whether it would go ahead with a new series, and the rumours are not encouraging.
But Simon doesn’t some about to compromise. “We are not selling hope, or audience gratification, or cheap victories with this show. The Wire is making an argument about what institutions – bureaucracies, criminal enterprises, the cultures of addiction, raw capitalism even – do to individuals. It is not designed purely as an entertainment. It is, I’m afraid, a somewhat angry show.”
Now that’s good TV.
Sean Jacobs is The Media’s correspondent in New York.