The Wire came out in 2002. Season 1 looks at a unit of police formed to look into a kingpin of the Baltimore drug trade that most of Baltimore doesn't know exists, including law enforcement. The first four episodes have been a study in how the bureaucracy, political and career considerations for law-enforcement make everyone work at odds. At the time, this was largely considered revelatory to the public, and the greatest achievement of The Wire beyond helping HBO's ratings was shining a light on how this works and how it prevents law-enforcement from doing anything but janitorial work.
The trick of the show to date (which I've never seen before) uses some familiar tropes along with things that would become tropes or more familiar to the public. We might have an occasional movie like Colors that focused on a critically @#$%ed situation, but one that was localized. Or we might have one that focused on an individual corrupt cop. We were still coming off broadcast and movie standards that more or less required law-enforcement winning the day to be part of the narrative. Although those standards hadn't been technically in place for years, the expectations for how we depicted police as basically good and heroic unless they were a bad apple were deeply baked into American media. We hadn't ever been shown how the system was riddled with incompetence, recklessness and indifference.
In 2002, we're only 9 years from the debut of "gritty" crime show NYPD Blue, mostly famous in early seasons for showing David Caruso's ass and melding soap opera dynamics with tough talking cop stuff. We're also only 12 years from the absolutely batshit experiment that was the unironically named, produced, performed and delivered Cop Rock. And if you aren't old enough to remember Cop Rock, I invite you to try to survive the pilot. (The show is also a phenomenal example of the casual racism built into the architecture of 1990's mass media). Both were produced by Steven Bochco.
The juggernaut that is the still-kicking Law & Order franchise started in 1990, and like The Wire, only occasionally touched on the personal lives of the leads, focusing instead on "procedural", replacing the booming baritone of The Naked City or Joe Friday with whatever the hell the L&O musical sting was. But it was squarely on the side of law. And order. And the belief that weasels weasel. This is not the quagmire of almost codependence that exists in The Wire (here in episode 4).
Of course the real predecessor was Homicide: Life on the Street, which ran only from 1993-1999. It's where David Simon got trained up on television, and it's arguably almost a draft version of The Wire. And it's the only one of these shows I'd watched at all aside from the occasional episode of L&O over the years, because you can't exist as a human and not have seen L&O.
In The Wire you can still see the DNA of crime fiction - it's still an entertainment, not journalism despite show-runner David Simon's journalistic bona fides. And they do have to tell a multi-angled story that is going to wind up having vibes of sprawling gangster movies, novels, etc... Arguably, it's still got a bit of one foot in how 90's media worked, but I'd say the weight is on the other foot that is trying to do something new, buyable and not feel like just one more soapish drama.
Anyway - it has it's moments of artifice that harken back to how TV was under Bochco or Wolf. Or speeches you expect in gangster movies. But it still feels like a quantum leap.
What's interesting is that it feels like there's been an evolutionary branching along the way. You can't throw a rock at a legacy network lineup and not hit a show that could have been on the air in the 1990s, from the entire line of Chicago-based cop, fire and ambulance programs, to The Rookie to the NCIS/ CSI line of shows. People love them. CBS is insane with the cop shows. Hawaii 5-0 is out there still, think.
L&O muddles on - and we should all send Mariska Hargitay a dollar for hanging in there for like 20 years.
But I'm not sure there's much like The Wire on right now. And maybe it's a weird time to put on a cop show that shows cops and law enforcement in less than a beneficent light. That's not to say cops need media boosterism, but that the events of the past fifteen years or so may have complicated what it means to put something on their air acknowledging cops fuck up a lot would no doubt be polarizing. I'm sure you're reading *something* into that sentence, and it's not meant to draw any specific conclusions, so you can see the problem.
Anyway. So far so good. Enjoying this first watch.
(this post by The Signal Watch)
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