The Wire Almost Killed Me

I came way late to the party for The Wire, but over the past couple of months my better half and I have knocked out almost the entire first three seasons on DVD, only lacking about three more episodes in season 3 to be fully caught up to the fourth installment. Of course, here is not the place for up-to-the-minute breakdowns of the ongoing campaign, 'cause I'm a cheap bastard and therefore ain't gonna pay $12 a month to watch season 4 as it happens, especially when I'm only now just catching up.

The only point I'm trying to make here is that watching The Wire has apparently ruined almost every other form of dramatic entertainment for me. I'd swallowed almost every episode of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit with satisfaction, mollified by its one-and-done approach of putting a neat little bow on the end of every show. Suddenly, however, it seems almost ridiculously tame and rigid (I'm aware it was never exactly the grittiest of shows), the characters never even alluding to the bigger picture of their war on crime except to engage in the occasional awkward swapping of Dem Party talking points. The bad guys are sometimes humanized, sure, but the simple fact that they pretty much never recur ensures we'll always side with the heroes.

And I know it's totally unfair to hold a 2 1/2 hour movie against a 40-odd hour show, and I know the film wasn’t necessarily aiming for street-level realism, but even The Departed left me sour to a degree. Perhaps 40 hours of Jack Nicholson's character would have plumbed fascinating depths, but as it was he verged on coke-and-whore caricature, quoting Joyce and Lennon as twin pillars of an Irish Catholic survivor of the 60s. As complex crime lords go he’s got nothing on Stringer Bell’s frustrated social striving, using Robert’s Rules of Order to govern meetings with street dealers and ultimately realizing his illegal empire can’t buy institutional legitimacy. Likewise, the ways in which Damon and DiCaprio’s occupational pressures hampered their respective trysts with the shrink were nowhere near as gut-wrenching as watching Kima distance herself from her partner and new baby. I thought Baldwin and Wahlberg were the standouts of the entire cast with their verbal pungency and hair-trigger tempers, but that only puts them about dead-level in my book with Rawls and Burrell.

And don’t even get me started on the nuts-and-bolts aspects of the crimes themselves. The use of text messages and calls to “Mom” in order to warn against encroaching police were canny, but had absolutely nothing on The Wire's ever-evolving games of one-upsmaship between detectives and dealers (cell phones beget pay phones beget burners).

The thing is, I actually quite liked The Departed too. It had plenty of clever moments and I thought Leo was far more distinctive than Alfred apparently does. He's just no Jimmy McNulty.