The Wire

by Rafael Alvarez

  Trying to do right by Randy, Carver tells the Department of Social Services that he will sign up to be the boy’s foster parent if it will keep him out of a group home. No dice.

  Using the info from Lex’s mother for a warrant, Greggs and Bunk jack up Partlow and Snoop and have them cuffed and sitting on the curb while they search their car.

  No nail gun and not a trace of lime but Greggs knows the deadly duo would not be “riding tame” and feels around under the dash. She finds a wire, connects it to the ignition wire and voila!

  A drop box pops open, revealing a pistol.

  “Ain’t even our car,” says Snoop.

  A buffer between Marlo and Prop Joe, the Greek’s man in Baltimore – Spiros “Vondas” Vondopoulos – assures Stanfield that the stickup of the delivery was not a fraud.

  Marlo takes Vondas at his word (later telling Monk to put a tail on their supplier), assures Joe he’s good for $90k – his share in the stolen dope – and promises to hunt down Omar.

  When Monk shows up at Central Booking with a bail bondsman to spring Chris and Snoop on the gun charge, he sees Bodie leaving with McNulty (who has sprung him and offered lunch).

  Before they are released, Partlow and Snoop are forced to give blood and hair samples.

  Enjoying sandwiches and each other’s company in an arboretum – they are hardly strangers – Bodie tells McNulty that he’s no snitch but he’s fed up with his life as one of “them little bitches on the chessboard” – the pawns explained to him by D’Angelo in Season One.

  He is both frustrated and angry enough to be willing to do away with “Marlo and his kind.”

  “You’re a soldier,” says McNulty, back in the game. Once news of their pleasant afternoon gets back to Marlo, Bodie’s head is on the block.

  The last words of Preston “Bodie” Broadus before a Stanfield rookie named O-Dog puts a bullet in his skull: “This is my corner, I ain’t runnin’ nowhere.”

  Marlo visits Michael to tell him he’s been given Bodie’s corner – and another, unspecified assignment – and notices the fabled Old Face Andre’s ring around the boy’s neck.

  Asked where he got it, Michael replies – to Marlo’s obvious amusement and wonder – “Took it from a nigga.”

  Trying to salvage the University of Maryland pilot project at City Hall, Colvin – self-conscious about his rep as the cop who tried to legalize drugs – and Professor Parenti lay out their accomplishments.

  Told they must teach the curriculum or be responsible for leaving some students behind while others move on, Colvin snaps: “We leave ’em all behind, we just don’t admit it.”

  The meeting is abruptly adjourned and Colvin blames himself, telling Parenti: “Seems like every time I open my mouth in this town, I’m telling people what they don’t wanna know … when do the shit change?”

  When Wee-Bey tells De’Londa during a prison visit that he wants her to turn Namond over to Colvin, she balks until he reminds her that one word from him and she will wish she had done otherwise.

  Of Colvin, Wee-Bay says with pride: “Man came down here to say my son can be anything he damn please.”

  “Except a soldier,” says De’Londa, only to be told by Wee-Bey to take a good look around the visiting room.

  “Who the fuck would wanna be that if they could be anything else?”

  After Omar pays Butchie a share for “his pains” in helping out with the big heist, the blind man warns that when you steal as much as he did, “It ain’t over.”

  When a grieving McNulty catches up with Poot on the corner, he makes sure no one is watching and demands to know who killed Bodie.

  “Ya’ll did,” said Poot, referencing the lunch and – not wanting to be the next suspected snitch to take one in the head – tells McNulty to throw him off the corner like a proper police.

  Needing to work off his guilt and anger – not unlike Carver’s when Ellis delivered Randy to the group home – McNulty pleads his way back to the Major Crimes Unit.

  The golden rule?

  “Chain of command, Colonel,” he tells Daniels.

  In the gymnasium, the death count is up to 22. However, nothing connects any of the bodies to Partlow and Snoop, and, says Freamon, they’re in for the long haul.

  At detox, Bubbles is visited by Walon (Steve Earle) and falls into his recovery sponsor’s arms, hurting, ashamed and in tears.

  His first day on the job as the boss of his own corner, Michael puts a bullet in the head of an anonymous dope slinger and hops in Partlow’s SUV.

  As they pull away, Partlow tells him: “You can look ’em in the eye now.”

  And then comes the season-ending montage, set to a version of “Walk on Gilded Splinters” by Paul Weller of The Jam fame as the arc of the coming days and months plays out.

  Namond, the would-be corner boy without the heart for the game, goes with Colvin – we last see him eating a wholesome breakfast before school in a quiet neighborhood.

  McNulty looks at a photo of Marlo like he hasn’t since Stringer Bell died; while Marlo and Partlow begin educating themselves about Vondas, Prop Joe and how the best dope in Baltimore gets from there to here.

  Burdened with 22 unsolved murders, Bunk and Detective Crutchfield go over the evidence while Pearlman and Daniels lunch with Carcetti.

  Prez watches Dukie work a corner with Poot while boss man Michael drives away in an SUV. The snitch label and its attendant violence has followed Randy to the group home.

  On crutches, Cutty is back at his gym as Carver lectures an even younger gang of kids – the next wave of Michaels and Dukies – outside the abandoned factory.

  In the apartment he shares with Bug, Michael helps the kid with his homework, an idyllic scene broken by one of him dumping his murder weapon down a storm drain.

  And Season Four is washed away …

  1 . From Felicia “Snoop” Pearson and David Ritz, Grace After Midnight: A Memoir (Grand Central Publishing, 2007), p. 44

  2 . Pearson and Ritz, p. 26 & p. 24

  3 . Pearson and Ritz, p. 12

  4 . Pearson and Ritz, p. 107

  5 . Pearson and Ritz, p. 166

  6 . Felicia “Snoop” Pearson Q&A with The Wire writer William F. Zorzi, Jr. Podcast of appearance at Enoch Pratt Free Library, November 14, 2008.

  7 . Pearson Q&A with Zorzi, November 14, 2008

  AN INTERVIEW WITH DAVID SIMON, BY NICK HORNBY

  “My standard for verisimilitude is simple and I came to it when I started to write prose narrative: fuck the average reader.”

  Some things television is good for:

  Catharsis

  Depicting the “other” America

  Pissing off the mayor

  Three or four years ago, I got an email from a friend in which he described The Wire as the best thing he’d ever seen on TV, “apart from Abigail’s Party.” Here was a recommendation designed to get anybody’s attention. No mention of The West Wing, or The Sopranos, or Curb Your Enthusiasm, or any of the other shibboleths of contemporary TV criticism; just a smart-aleck nod to Mike Leigh’s classic 1977 BBC play. It reeled me in, anyway, and I went out and bought a box set of the first series.

  I’d never heard of the show. It wasn’t widely known or shown here in the UK, although whenever a new season starts, you can always find a piece in a broadsheet paper calling it “the best programme you’ve never heard of,” and I didn’t know what to expect. What I got was something that bore no resemblance to Abigail’s Party, predictably, and very little resemblance to any other cop show. At one stage I was simultaneously hooked on The Wire and the BBC’s brilliant adaptation of Bleak House, and it struck me that Dickens serves as a useful point of comparison; David Simon and his team of writers (including George Pelecanos, Richard Price, Dennis Lehane) swoop from high to low, from the mayor’s office to the street corner – and the street-corner dealers are shown more empathy and compassion than anyone has mustered before. The hapless Bubbles, forever dragging behind him his shopping tr
olley full of stolen goods, is Baltimore’s answer to Joe the Crossing Sweeper.

  We talked via email. A couple of weeks later, we met in London – David Simon is making a show about the war in Iraq with my next-door neighbor. (Really. He’s really making a show about the war in Iraq, and the producer literally lives next door.) We talked a lot about sports and music.

  – Nick Hornby

  NICK HORNBY: Can I start by asking you something about the writing? How did you kick it off? All the seasons have had very unconventional shapes and paces to them, I think. Did you have something different in mind before you started, or did that happen during the creation of the series?

  DAVID SIMON: I think what you sense in The Wire is that it is violating a good many of the conventions and tropes of episodic television. It isn’t really structured as episodic television and it instead pursues the form of the modern, multi-POV novel. Why? Primarily because the creators and contributors are not by training or inclination television writers. In fact, it is a little bit remarkable that we ended up with a television drama on HBO or anywhere else. I am a newspaper reporter by training who wrote a couple of long, multi-POV nonfiction narratives, Homicide and The Corner. The first became the basis for the NBC drama of the same name; the second I was able to produce as a miniseries for HBO, airing in 2000. Both works are the result of a journalistic impulse, the first recounting a year I spent with the Baltimore Police Department’s Homicide Unit, and the second book detailing a year spent in a drug-saturated West Baltimore neighborhood, following an extended, drug-involved family. Ed Burns, my co-author on The Corner and co-creator on The Wire, was a homicide detective who served in the BPD for 20 years and, following that for seven years, as a seventh-grade teacher at a Baltimore public school. The remaining writers – Richard Price [Clockers], Dennis Lehane [Mystic River], and George Pelecanos [The Night Gardener] – are novelists working at the highest level of the crime genre. Bill Zorzi covered state and municipal politics for the Baltimore Sun for 20 years; Rafael Alvarez, another Sun veteran, worked as a merchant seaman and comes from two generations of port workers. So we are all rooted in a different place than Hollywood.

  We got the gig because as my newspaper was bought and butchered by an out-of-town newspaper chain, I was offered the chance to write scripts, and, ultimately, to learn to produce television by the fellows who were turning my first book into Homicide: Life on the Street. I took that gig and, ultimately, I was able to produce the second book for HBO on my own. Following that miniseries, HBO agreed to look at The Wire scripts. So I made an improbable and in many ways unplanned transition from journalist/author to TV producer. It was not a predictable transformation and I am vaguely amused that it actually happened. If I had a plan, it was to grow old on the Baltimore Sun’s copy desk, bumming cigarettes from young reporters and telling lies about what it was like working with H. L. Mencken and William Manchester.

  Another reason the show may feel different than a lot of television: our model is not quite so Shakespearean as other high-end HBO fare. The Sopranos and Deadwood – two shows that I do admire – offer a good deal of Macbeth or Richard III or Hamlet in their focus on the angst and machinations of the central characters (Tony Soprano, Al Swearengen). Much of our modern theater seems rooted in the Shakespearean discovery of the modern mind. We’re stealing instead from an earlier, less-traveled construct – the Greeks – lifting our thematic stance wholesale from Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides to create doomed and fated protagonists who confront a rigged game and their own mortality. The modern mind – particularly those of us in the West – finds such fatalism ancient and discomfiting, I think. We are a pretty self-actualized, self-worshipping crowd of postmoderns and the idea that for all of our wherewithal and discretionary income and leisure, we’re still fated by indifferent gods, feels to us antiquated and superstitious. We don’t accept our gods on such terms anymore; by and large, with the exception of the fundamentalists among us, we don’t even grant Yahweh himself that kind of unbridled, interventionist authority.

  But instead of the old gods, The Wire is a Greek tragedy in which the postmodern institutions are the Olympian forces. It’s the police department, or the drug economy, or the political structures, or the school administration, or the macroeconomic forces that are throwing the lightning bolts and hitting people in the ass for no decent reason. In much of television, and in a good deal of our stage drama, individuals are often portrayed as rising above institutions to achieve catharsis. In this drama, the institutions always prove larger, and those characters with hubris enough to challenge the postmodern construct of American empire are invariably mocked, marginalized, or crushed. Greek tragedy for the new millennium, so to speak. Because so much of television is about providing catharsis and redemption and the triumph of character, a drama in which postmodern institutions trump individuality and morality and justice seems different in some ways, I think.

  It also explains why we get good reviews but less of an audience than other storytelling. In this age of Enron, WorldCom, Iraq, and Katrina, many people want their television entertainments to distract them from the foibles of the society we actually inhabit. Which brings me to the last notion of why The Wire may feel different. The chumps making it live in Baltimore, or, in the case of guys like Price, Pelecanos, and Lehane, they are at least writing in their literary work about second-tier East Coast rust-belt places like Jersey City, northeast Washington, or Dorchester, rather than Manhattan, Georgetown, or Back Bay, Boston. We are of the other America or the America that has been left behind in the post-industrial age. We don’t live in LA or go to their parties; we don’t do what we do to try to triumph in the world of television entertainment by having a bona fide hit, and meeting the pretty people and getting the best table at the Ivy. Shit, the last time George and I went to the Ivy on a road trip, we waited 45 minutes for a table and then were announced as “the Pelican party.” We don’t belong there and we don’t need the kind of money or the level of Zeitgeist required to belong there. We hang out in the Baltimores of the world, writing what we want to write about and never keeping one eye on whether or not it could sell as much as a drama that had, say, more white faces, more women with big tits, and more stuff that blows up or squirts blood real good.

  Our impulses are all the natural reactions of writers who live in close proximity to a specific American experience – independent of Hollywood – and who are trying to capture that experience. And that too is an improbability, given how insulated the American entertainment industry normally is. I don’t mean this to come off as some snotty declaration of classist, pseudo-proletarian pretension, but it is what it is. I live in Baltimore. How many yachts can I water-ski behind in Baltimore harbor? Fuck it, I’m happy to be getting paid what I’m paid to make a television show about what I would normally write magazine articles and newspaper series and narrative tomes about. And the other writers feel pretty much the same.

  So we are misfits, and while we hope the show is entertaining enough, none of us think of ourselves as providing entertainment. The impulse is, again, either journalistic or literary. Hope this helps and doesn’t sound as wrought and pompous as I think it does. Forgive us for actually thinking about this shit; we know it’s television, but we can’t help ourselves. But as you yourself probably know from your love of music, sometimes even three chords and the right guitar solo and a good chorus can be pretty much everything.

  NH: How did you pitch it?

  DS: I pitched The Wire to HBO as the anti-cop show, a rebellion of sorts against all the horseshit police procedurals afflicting American television. I am unalterably opposed to drug prohibition; what began as a war against illicit drugs generations ago has now mutated into a war on the American underclass, and what drugs have not destroyed in our inner cities, the war against them has. I suggested to HBO – which up to that point had produced groundbreaking drama by going where the broadcast networks couldn’t (The Sopranos, Sex and the City, et al) – that they could fur
ther enhance their standing by embracing the ultimate network standard (cop show) and inverting the form. Instead of the usual good-guys-chasingbad-guys framework, questions would be raised about the very labels of good and bad, and, indeed, whether such distinctly moral notions were really the point.

  The show would instead be about untethered capitalism run amok, about how power and money actually root themselves in a postmodern American city, and, ultimately, about why we as an urban people are no longer able to solve our problems or heal our wounds. Early in the conception of the drama, Ed Burns and I – as well as the late Bob Colesberry, a consummate filmmaker who served as the directorial producer and created the visual template for The Wire – conceived of a show that would, with each season, slice off another piece of the American city, so that by the end of the run, a simulated Baltimore would stand in for urban America, and the fundamental problems of urbanity would be fully addressed.

  First season: the dysfunction of the drug war and the general continuing theme of self-sustaining postmodern institutions devouring the individuals they are supposed to serve or who serve them. Second season: the death of work and the destruction of the American working class in the post-industrial era, for which we added the port of Baltimore. Third season: the political process and the possibility of reform, for which we added the City Hall component. Fourth season: equal opportunity, for which we added the public education system. The fifth and final season will be about the media and our capacity to recognize and address our own realities, for which we will add the city’s daily newspaper and television components.

  Did we mention these grandiose plans to HBO at the beginning? No, they would have laughed us out of the pitch meeting. Instead, we spoke only to the inversion of the cop show and a close examination of the drug war’s dysfunction. But before shifting gears to the port in Season Two, I sat down with the HBO execs and laid out the argument to begin constructing an American city and examining the above themes through that construction. So here we are.