The Wire Read online

  In the origin of Baltimore’s public housing lies a sad irony of the entrenched underclass: one generation’s attempt to provide good housing becomes a later generation’s nightmare.

  In the late 1940s and 1950s, government housing projects of steel and brick with indoor plumbing and central heating replaced wooden shacks dating to the 19th century. They went up in every quadrant of Baltimore.

  Some 40 years later, the city razed the towers and replaced them with suburban-styled townhomes.

  Under the Clinton Administration, Baltimore was the first American city to tear down all of its high-rise projects. By the time The Wire began production in 2002, none remained to film.

  To get the look, a two-tower apartment complex for senior citizens in West Baltimore was dressed to look like the old projects. On each side of the city, the towers have been replaced by good-looking homes on streets with names like New Hope Circle.

  The new configuration houses less than half of the 4,000 or so people who once lived in the towers; the poverty and attendant problems once defined by the high-rises are dispersed throughout the city and the near and aging suburbs of Baltimore County.

  Said former city homicide detective Oscar Requer, whose nickname and general demeanor inform the character of Detective Bunk Moreland, “The problem just moved somewhere else.”

  “We have a culture of violence made up of kids two generations removed from people who worked and neighborhoods that were viable,” added Burns. “Now, we’re seeing the limits of what teachers and police can do.”

  In the new housing developments, low-and middle-income homeowners are sprinkled in with families living on federal housing vouchers.

  Homeowners complain that renters and their “ghetto” ways bring down property values. Renters resent homeowners – their private property is built on land once housing folks too poor to own anything – who look down on them.

  Strict lease agreements tell renters what they can and cannot do in regard to visitors, noise, and tidiness. The regulations have helped create an environment that poor folks in the city have long imagined exists in that over-the-rainbow land called “the county.”

  Having chronicled the time when the high-rises defined the rampancy of Baltimore’s drug trade, The Wire would follow the natural progression of the story once they came down.

  Said David Simon: “The demolition of the projects was, I think, a tactical solution to a strategic problem.”

  By depicting the tactical approach as a mere salve, Simon hoped that attempts at social reform would become public debate. The inherent contradictions of America’s war on drugs would stand throughout the five-year run of The Wire, even though the Terrace towers did not.

  It took a mere 20 seconds for several hundred pounds of dynamite to implode Murphy Homes, Lexington Terrace, and Lafayette Courts. But nearly a decade after the bricks fell, the children of those projects were naming gangs after the lost world.

  In April of 2004, a US district court found two West Baltimore gang members guilty of conspiracy in a crack cocaine business supported by homicide near the projects where they grew up.

  The gang, ten of whom went to jail on various federal charges, were known as the Lexington Terrace Boys Prosecutors won convictions against all ten, claiming that the victory also cleared more than two-dozen open West Baltimore murder cases.

  After the trials, then US Attorney General John Ashcroft ordered federal prosecutors in Baltimore to seek the death penalty. Defense attorneys argued otherwise, describing for federal jurors – many from distinctly rural and suburban counties in Maryland – what it was like to grow up in the projects.

  Among witnesses testifying for the defense during the penalty phase was The Wire producer Ed Burns. Burns spoke successfully against putting the Lexington Terrace boys to death because, he said, Americans have the right to be judged by a jury of their peers.

  “You cannot be a peer to these defendants if you don’t understand what that world was like and what it meant to grow up in that world.”

  THE WOMEN OF THE WIRE

  (No, Seriously)

  Certain biases must be acknowledged: I have always loathed the tokenism that prevails in most television shows about cops and courts. According to the unscientific survey conducted with my remote control, this alternative universe teems with a rainbow coalition of female professionals – cops, attorneys, coroners, lab techs, judges, maybe even dogcatchers.

  They occasionally butt their pretty heads against primitive attitudes about women and their capabilities, but these ceilings prove to be more gossamer than glass, allowing our plucky gals to shimmy through with no effort greater than a furrowed brow.

  There are no institutional biases, just a backward individual here or there who needs his consciousness yanked sternly upward, an atomic wedgie for the sexist soul. The argument is not that entertainment should function as documentary; anyone who writes, as I do, about homicide-solving private investigators has obviously embraced the power of fantasy. The problem with these frictionless utopias is their numbing complacency.

  The Wire, by contrast, offers a world so starkly masculine that the very title of this essay requires defensive clarification. What women? The dancers bumping and grinding in what my sister once dubbed “the obligatory HBO tittie bar shot”?

  The bodies on the dock in Season Two, a veritable pile of double-X chromosome MacGuffins? The first season of The Wire had only two female actors billed in the opening credits; Season Two, just three.

  Yet the full list of Wire women is, in fact, long and varied. And while the roster may appear yawningly familiar at first glance – the cop, the prosecutor, the wife, the ex-wife, the mother, the girlfriend, the stripper, the corpse – The Wire’s writers have provided some welcome subtlety within these archetypes.

  Take Shakima Greggs, the narcotics detective played by Sonja Sohn, the most prominent female in Wire-world. Smart, tough, and hardworking, Greggs seemed almost too admirable in the early going – it’s a bird, it’s a plane, it’s Super-Lesbian!

  One cynical critic even predicted that the writers would make Greggs the show’s heroine, allowing her to crack the case while her less competent partners were undone by their het-male peccadilloes. Instead, she ended up sidelined by a gunshot wound well before the Barksdale case reached its climactic anticlimax in Season One. The last glimpse we had of Greggs was on a walker, thumping her way down a hospital corridor, far from the action she craved.

  When the second season began, Greggs was deskbound against her will – and on the receiving end of some surprising advice. “If you were a man – and in some ways, you’re a better man than most of the men I know – a friend would take you for a beer and tell you the truth,” advised Herc, a colleague not usually known for his interpersonal insights. “You’re whipped.”

  It turned out that Greggs’s relationship problems, while superficially not as severe as those of her male colleagues, were slowly catching up with her, exacerbated by tensions rooted in temperament, class, and ambition. Greggs might not have been pussy-whipped, but her partner, Cheryl, sure wanted a house cat.

  Greggs’s opposite number is Beatrice “Beadie” Russell, the transportation cop portrayed by Amy Ryan, who played a pivotal role in Season Two. No one would ever call Russell a good police, to use the Baltimore vernacular. When first sighted, she was cruising through her days literally and figuratively. Her only concern appeared to be getting to the end of her shift and rushing home so she wouldn’t have to pay the babysitter overtime.

  Yet Russell proved an eager acolyte when the situation demanded that she step up, readily admitting what she didn’t know and learning on the fly.

  The scene that cemented my Russell–Ryan love, however, was the character’s tentative attempt to transform a would-be boyfriend into a confidential informant. No femme fatale, Russell struggled with the assignment, torn between being a good police and a good person.

  The resulting exchange was rueful, elliptical, pai
nfully real. We’re used to watching men and women smolder on-screen, reciting blocks of brittle, hyper-knowing dialogue. It’s more unusual to watch two recognizable humans tiptoeing around a subject that is seldom discussed past seventh grade: Do you like me? Check “yes,” “no,” or “as a friend.”

  Of course, there are women on The Wire who enjoy a more conventional chemistry with the men around them. A partial list would have to include Assistant State’s Attorney Rhonda Pearlman, the redhead with the bad Jimmy McNulty habit that she can’t quite break. McNulty’s ex-wife, Elena, who has kicked her Jimmy Jones, but dabbles just often enough to keep him off-balance; Shardene, the nearsighted stripper who is saved by the love of a good man; and the deliciously pragmatic Donette, who understands that her body is the only capital she has, so it must be invested wisely.

  The actors who play these roles embrace the flaws and contradictions, not worrying about seeming foolish or – in the case of Elena – even shrewish and manipulative.

  There are false notes here and there – a line of dialogue that clanks because it’s better suited to a eunuch as opposed to a woman, some notable failures to explore why some of the women behave as they do.

  Pearlman – as written, not as played by Deirdre Lovejoy – strikes me as especially problematic. While utterly convincing as a driven prosecutor, she is an enigma when it comes to her love life – or, more correctly, her lust life.

  It’s baffling to me that the same show that probes the conflicts between Greggs and her upwardly mobile girlfriend doesn’t want to explore the self-destructive dynamic between Pearlman and McNulty.

  We know why McNulty sleeps with Pearlman; he’ll sleep with pretty much anyone. But Pearlman’s willingness to pursue this doomed romance is never explained. Lonely? Horny? Self-loathing?

  McNulty is clearly not marriage material for a striver such as Pearlman, who steps so adroitly around the minefields in her professional life. He’s not even particularly reliable as a friend-with-benefits, unless one interprets “benefits” as falling into a dead-to-the-world stupor before anything happens.

  On the other hand, the motivations of Marla Daniels, wife of Lieutenant Cedric Daniels, are abundantly clear. In terms of screen time, it’s a small part, but Baltimore actor Maria Broom wrings a lot out of it.

  [To appreciate just how good she is in The Wire, it’s helpful to go back to The Corner and her equally strong performance as a drug addict.]

  Marla is no Lady Macbeth, but she has definite ideas about her husband’s career, counsel that he once sought regularly. Alas, he also rejected her shrewd advice, which is good for The Wire as a drama, but not so good for the Danielses’ marriage.

  In fact, for those keeping score at home, few romantic relationships have flourished in The Wire, except for the surprising alliance between Lester Freamon and Shardene, the former stripper who didn’t need contact lenses to see what a catch this detective was.

  True, William “Bunk” Moreland is still with his yet-to-be-seen wife, but that could change if he continues to pursue his hobby of waking up in other women’s bathrobes. Herc and Carver? Well, if you’re going to liken two characters to Batman and Robin, no matter how irreverently, you have to own all the implications of that comparison.

  It has been said that we can judge cultures by how they treat their dead. Similarly, The Wire’s attitude toward women can be evaluated via its treatment of female corpses. Again, the number is even higher than one might recall – not only the fourteen Jane Does in Season Two, but three female victims in Season One as well.

  The characters may be cynical and benumbed about all these bodies, but The Wire never is.

  Consider Season One, when McNulty and Bunk attempted to reconstruct the scene of a botched homicide that they hoped to pin on the elusive Avon Barksdale. To the detectives, the dead woman was a means to an end, one factor in their equation of trajectories. To D’Angelo Barksdale, who exaggerated his role in her murder, she was a “shortie”with a great body and the hubristic notion that she could make an amoral killer into a faithful boyfriend. Yet the Polaroid of her corpse kept reminding the viewer of death’s indignity and, consequently, its horror.

  Through the first two seasons, only one woman, Joy Lusco Kecken, wrote for The Wire, and only three episodes were directed by women.

  There are strong women behind the scenes every day – most notably executive producer Nina Kostroff Noble, director of photography Uta Briesewitz, and producer Karen L. Thorson – but no women are involved in hammering out the stories, even as The Wire has continued to add first-rate novelists to its staff.

  So, like it or not, we must credit men with these human-scale portraits. Yes, many of the women in The Wire appear in secondary roles, but that is a simple truth about the world it portrays – and the point of view through which it is filtered. Instead of giving us Women with a capital W, it showcases flawed human beings who happen to be women. It may be frustrating, but it is never boring or unbelievable.

  Laura Lippman

  SEASON ONE EPISODE GUIDE

  “Where’s it all go? The money, where’s it go?”

  D’ANGELO BARKSDALE

  The debut of The Wire on the first Sunday in June of 2002 introduced the world to the first chapter of a visual novel – a singular, interlocking narrative played out over 13 programming hours on cable television.

  In this tale, no good deed goes unpunished, reason and morality are impaired by a mother lode of economic imperatives and institutional loyalties, and the first character to take residence in our consciousness is a freshly murdered crapshooter with an elegant Baltimore street name.

  Snotboogie.

  The detective investigating Snotboogie’s demise – the amiable, self-absorbed Jimmy McNulty – would appear to be more interested in how the victim got his moniker than how he became a victim.

  “You called the guy Snot?”

  “Snotboogie, yeah.”

  “Snotboogie? He like the name?”

  If Season One did not make its plotlines immediately clear, it was obvious that what someone does or does not like, about themselves or the world in which they are trapped, makes little difference. The Wire would be a universe where hoped-for escapes to places that value individual desires do not exist – whether Jimmy McNulty, for all his intellectual vanity, wants to admit it or not.

  Among the multiple versions of Baltimore that pulse along the banks of the Patapsco River, the only exit from this one is via an exit wound.

  The first season concentrated on parallel corridors: the drug market of the West Baltimore housing projects and the police department charged with containing it.

  Over the pilot and a dozen subsequent episodes, the cops began pulling the threads of Avon Barksdale’s drug empire and its attendant murders. The work led to a complicated investigation with wiretaps and old-fashioned surveillance mixed with ancient themes of betrayal, corruption, and luck, both good and bad.

  The characters who would bob along that investigation included the kingpin Barksdale, his corporate-inspired lieutenant, Stringer Bell, and their primary muscle, Wee-Bey and Stinkum.

  Below this tier is Avon’s nephew D’Angelo, a reluctant gangster who acts as foreman on a narcotics plantation in which the man-child Bodie labors with his running buddy, Poot, and a handful of outright children such as Wallace, who now and then is seen playing with toys amidst the open-air trafficking.

  On the other side is McNulty and his homicide partner, Bunk Moreland, who report to the Gleasonesque Detective Sergeant Jay Landsman. In turn, Landsman reports to a humorless, sexually-conflicted, statistics-will-keep-my-tit-out-of-the-wringer colonel named William A. Rawls.

  Down the hall from the homicide unit, Lieutenant Cedric Daniels heads a shift of the CID narcotics section, which includes hard-as-any-man Detective Kima Greggs; a lovable knucklehead called “Herc” (Detective Thomas Hauk); and his rip-and-run partner, the ambitious Detective Ellis Carver.

  When the investigation gets going,
with nominal support from an embarrassed and indifferent department, all are tossed together with a handful of broken-down career cops who only have eyes for overtime and a pensive detective from the pawn unit by the name of Lester Freamon.

  And then there’s Omar Little, the wild-card homo-thug at the broken edge of both worlds, robbing drug dealers for a living without uttering a foul word or otherwise violating his personal code of ethics, in which law-abiding citizens and other taxpayers are spared.

  And Bubbles, part informant and part court jester, who parlays the chump change he gets from the cops and every other dollar he can snatch into a speedball habit that promises only a pauper’s grave.

  Said Andre Royo, who played Bubbles with grace and depth: “Just doing whatever he has to do to get high.”

  episode one

  THE TARGET

  “When it’s not your turn …” - MCNULTY

  Directed by Clark Johnson

  Story by David Simon & Ed Burns; teleplay by David Simon

  The story begins with the late-night shooting to death of the aforementioned Snotboogie, whose habit of shooting craps until the pot gets big and then running off with the cash eventually proves lethal.

  McNulty asks: “If Snotboogie always grabbed the pot and ran away with it, why would you even let him play?”

  The lone witness to the murder is talking because it pissed him off that Snot would be murdered rather than simply beaten for his thieving ways. He looks at McNulty as if the question has come from another world and explains that they had to let him play.

  “This is America.”