I’ve Lost my Faith in The Wire
I’m disappointed in this season of the Wire (spoilers coming–you’ve been warned). I think the Baltimore Sun storyline sucks. I don’t know if it’s David Simon’s enmity towards the Sun interfering with his creative judgment. I’d like to give him the benefit of the doubt since the first four seasons were brilliant. It’s amazing to look back at season one and two when I had to beg anyone I met to just give this show a chance and we lost sleep over whether HBO would renew for a third and fourth season.
Anyway, the newspaper characters feel contrived and one-dimensional. The dialogue makes me nauseous and reminds me of network TV dreck. And I just can’t buy the whole McNulty serial killer storyline. It’s just like, really? After episode 3 I find it more tolerable, but it still bothers me. At least I care about what’s going to happen, if only because it would be so stupid to see McNulty and Lester go to jail over this. I can’t see the same for The Sun; I find myself daydreaming of Omar coming back to Baltimore to shoot up the newsroom. Something…anything… just do something interesting… make me care.
The Wire has always been about Show Me, Don’t Tell Me. This season it’s the opposite. It feels so preachy and in your face. And so the veil of trust has been broken. It happened with The Sopranos in season 3 (IIRC) with the Columbus Day episode. I saw that episode and I thought “man, that was stupid. And contrived. What were they thinking?”
And the veil of trust disappeared; I no longer believed everything I saw. I lost my faith in the show and the characters. I began to notice other faults with the show and I began to loathe the characters. Especially those mobster criminals. The Sopranos always intrigued me but I never felt sympathy for them at the end; only disgust. The plot was still compelling but I couldn’t get lost in their world anymore.
I never though that would happen with The Wire. I believed everything about The Wire as truth; I took it all at face value, and I don’t think that was naiveté. I mean Baltimore really is a fucked up place, I lived there for two and a half years and I still go there almost every day. The show was so real.
But then the serial killer came along and there was the Sun story and I lost my faith and trust in the show. Now it’s just a very real (and still very good and interesting) show. But I can’t get lost in that world anymore and I can’t sympathize with the characters. They are loathsome criminals–the police, the government, and the drug dealers. A morass of socialist decay that has wreaked its havoc on Baltimore.
Then again, maybe that’s the point. That we fall in love with these characters and then wake up at the end and realize that they’re evil or that the institutions are wrong.
OK, now I’m the one preaching… 4 out of 5 ain’t bad for what’s still the best TV show I’ve ever seen.
