Since it premiered on HBO in 2002, "The Wire" has often been likened to Charles Dickens's fiction, even by the show's creator, David Simon. And, with a vast cast sprawling across economic levels, a damning view of Baltimore's institutions, and intertwining serial plot lines, "The Wire" certainly is Dickensian.
The kids manning the drug corners of West Baltimore are like Fagin's boys, drawn from home stoops into a life of crime, innately ready to artfully dodge the law and other crooks.
But "The Wire," which begins its fifth and final season tonight at 9, lacks a key feature of Dickens's fiction, one that has been the foundation of Dickens's popularity. Throughout its four extraordinary seasons, "The Wire" has steadfastly avoided any hints of a happy ending. If "The Wire" is a visual novel, as Simon has suggested, it is a novel that has stubbornly refused to be a crowd-pleaser. It may be Dickensian, and at times quite comic, but the show, a continual ratings disappointment, does not truck in dated Dickensian sentiment and neat finishes.
It's a piece of angry social criticism built for a time when order and happy endings are just another form of denial.
This unwillingness to soothe and pander to viewers is visible at every level of "The Wire," from its jagged and dense narrative style to the coded language that its street characters use. The show fights against TV's habit of making the viewer's experience easy, so that we can track a story line without concentrating, or so that we can go to bed feeling that the war against hard drugs is gaining ground. This is a show that is so very good - and so very real at a time when reality TV is fake - precisely because it runs completely contrary to viewers' taste for escapism. "The Wire" takes the hard road into American urbania. We can follow it if we want, although most of us won't.
Yes, "The Wire" is the martyr of dramatic television, having traded in popularity and ratings for cold honesty. Like Simon's two other TV masterstrokes, NBC's "Homicide: Life on the Street" and HBO's miniseries "The Corner," the show's best qualities doom it to a small viewership. Last season, episodes drew between 1 million and 2 million viewers (not including On Demand viewing), compared to the 8 or so million who watched the last episodes of "The Sopranos."
The hardest thing about "The Wire" may be the way its plots unfold without guidance. "The Sopranos" and "Deadwood" delivered a story with similar concision, so that if we missed a twist we missed our only chance at hearing about it. But "The Wire" goes one step further, leaving us seemingly on our own to place the cops, the drug dealers, the local politicians, and the port workers in the master plan of Baltimore. The strategies of drug-trade insurgent Marlo Stanfield (Jamie Hector) or the investigation manipulations of renegade officer Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West) develop without explication. Even loyal viewers need to keep figuring it all out - who's who, how they're linked to one another, their positions in their respective organizations, and what their motives are.
Simon and his writers are reticent with serial TV's most common viewer come-ons, even cliffhangers. Big things happen almost willy-nilly on "The Wire," and central characters - which have included key drug-trade figures Bodie, D'Angelo, and Stringer Bell - die with no "TV event" self-consciousness.
Viewers get lost
The effects of this style of storytelling? The viewer's feeling of narrative anarchy mirrors life on the Baltimore streets, itself an anarchy of power plays among the faded Barksdale drug-dealing crew, Marlo's ascendant crew, Proposition Joe, freelance stick-up artist Omar Little, the cops, and the politicians. Simon and his writers want you to feel a little lost - even more so than the writers of the supernatural "Lost." They want you to feel the lack of control that comes with living inside institutions - a drug operation, the police department, the school system, City Hall.
And, unlike most shows, none of the "Wire" characters can be quickly categorized as a lead. It's as though all of them - Omar, McNulty, Bubbles (Andre Royo), a recovering addict and informant - are human cogs in Baltimore's social, economic, and legal machinery. Simon takes a generous approach to characterization, as each person is granted the dignity of not being a stereotype; but there are no obvious heroes whom viewers can immediately and unequivocally cozy up to. More than any other series on TV, "The Wire" portrays systems of people as much as if not more than individuals. The characters are psychologically twisty, but the show's point of view is truly sociological.
It fit perfectly with the institutional focus of "The Wire" when Proposition Joe helped to found an alliance of Baltimore dealers, the New Day Co-op. The meetings of the co-op played like a comic mirror reflection of the meetings at the police department and at City Hall.
The casting of "The Wire" also challenges TV viewers' expectations. Black and white audiences tend to assume that dramas - excepting, perhaps, those on BET, where "The Wire" airs in syndication - will be predominantly if not entirely white. Most ensemble shows contain one or two African-American detectives and a goodly share of villains-of-the-week of color. On "The Wire," there are a majority of regular black actors, and they are playing characters in every level of society and at every point on the moral spectrum. Surely that puts a large segment of white viewers outside of their comfort zone. If it didn't, you can be sure there would be more network efforts to make a successful primarily black drama - on the order of Steven Bochco's "City of Angels" in 2000.
And most of the "Wire" actors are unknown - how often does that happen? While watching "The Wire," we can't pull ourselves out of the stories and amuse ourselves with an awareness of the actors' personal lives, as with Katherine Heigl's nuptials or Kiefer Sutherland's prison record. The cast members are invisible, in a way, which adds power to the fiction. And they are painfully good actors - from the scene-dominating turns of Michael K. Williams, who has made Omar into one of the show's most memorable killers, to the dead stares of Jamie Hector as Marlo.
Network crime dramas tend to spoil us, and make it easier for us to use TV as an escape from the world. While such shows as "Criminal Minds" and "CSI" do give us grotesque urban ills, like "The Wire," they are nonetheless equipped with cardboard villains and a team of elite detectives who rarely fail to catch them. The stories unfold logically, the crimes are solved, the overall message is "You are safe." But on "The Wire," failure is the norm. The cops are inevitably foiled by their own system - by other cops, by budget cuts, by politics - as often as they are foiled by criminals.
The devil you know
The fifth season of "The Wire" promises to continue asking viewers to think while being entertained. Simon, a former crime reporter at the Baltimore Sun, will look at how newspapers can function in the same way as those network crime dramas, by turning street life into more easily readable stories. He will also show how newspaper budget cuts, like those at the police department, hinder truth-telling.
The season continues to follow Marlo's career as well as the investigation into the discovery of the 22 bodies, but it adds a story line set at a fictionalized Baltimore Sun. With a shrinking staff, as buyouts drive more experienced reporters away, the Sun editors are demoralized and hungry for kudos. The clueless executive editor only has his eye on winning prizes, while his favorite writer, the ambitious Scott Templeton (Tom McCarthy), has his eye on moving to the
As the news stories from the police department and City Hall make their way through the Sun's newsroom and into the paper, we can see how they get underplayed and overplayed - and how the young reporters simply get played. Simon's portrayal of this institution promises to be typically incisive, as well as readily understandable to first-time "Wire" viewers. Jumping into any series in its fifth season requires patience and catch-up work in terms of ongoing stories, but all of the Sun characters and plots are new.
Why watch "The Wire" if it's such tough-going - so difficult to follow and then, once followed, so pessimistic? Because it offers the kind of earned understanding that leads to progress. Don't ignore the devil, the show is saying; keep him "way down in the hole," as the theme song goes, and watch him closely.
Matthew Gilbert can be reached at gilbert@globe.com. For more on TV, visit boston.com/ae/tv/blog/.
