I CAME LATE to The Wire, the TV series about life in the US city of Baltimore, all five seasons of which were screened in rapid succession on BBC 2 recently, ending last night, writes FRANK MCNALLY
Even then, it took me a while to succumb to its charms. By the middle of season two, I still thought it was interesting but not compelling. In the inevitable pub arguments about whether The Wire or The Sopranos was the “greatest TV series ever made” (and there’ll be another one of those along shortly), I remained unshakeably loyal to the New Jersey mob family.
Then, slowly and guiltily, I went over to the other side. I half-feared violent retribution. But what finally swung me was the magnificent sequence near the end of The Wire’s season three, depicting the mutual betrayal of former friends and druglords, Avon Barksdale and Stinger Bell.
By the time Bell was set up to be killed by Omar Little – one of the other great Wire characters, a gay desperado with a fierce moral code that allows him to rob and murder only those who profit from drugs – the Baltimore underworld had sucked me in completely. I wasn't alone in this. In a poll of The Wire's "Top 100 scenes", Stringer Bell's demise was voted number one.
That you can easily compile a list of 100 great scenes hints at what an epic achievement the series is. Its chief writer David Simon, a former journalist with the Baltimore Sun, credits Balzac and "the big Russian novels" as an influence. You can see why. The Wirehas more characters than War and Peace, and its Baltimore is as minutely explored as Paris was in the 90-plus novels of La Comédie humaine.
In fairness to Balzac, there were a mere 60 episodes in The Wire, and Simon had a team of assistant writers. But he and the Frenchman had something else in common. Even if Balzac struggled to follow the language and culture of the TV series, he would quickly recognise that his central themes – money, corruption, and the economic basis of everything – were also fundamental to The Wire.
The series could be hard to follow even when English was your first language. The script – elliptical, and often delivered in mumbled street slang – made few allowances for those of us who missed episodes: which may be one of the reasons The Wire attracted only modest viewing figures and few awards. By the 59th episode (the 60th was last night; I haven’t seen it yet), I still didn’t know who everyone was.
There was a chilling moment when viewers – or at least this one – finally discovered the gender of “Snoop”, a cold-blooded enforcer for the Marlo Stanfield drug organisation. The strangely androgynous figure, with a boyish physique but a smokey, old-man’s voice, had been one of Stanfield’s chief executioners, until an intended victim at last turned the tables.
Facing death philosophically, Snoop’s last words were to inquire of the would-be killer: “How my hair look, Mike?” And before dispatching her, Mike gallantly replies: “You look good girl.” Which was a shock to me, if no one else.
Apparently the actress involved was a former real-life drug dealer, discovered by chance by another cast member who didn’t know which sex she was either.
Lest I imply otherwise, The Wirewas not all about drug-lords whacking each other. The everyday trade on Baltimore's "corners", and the ebb and flow of the police campaign against it, was the constant motif. But each season also focused on a different aspect of the city – the Port, the political establishment, the school system, and finally journalism, via the Baltimore Sun– to show how lives were linked and how, in every institution, people were compromised by circumstance.
Thus another of Simon’s aims – a depressing one – was to explain why “everything stays the same”. Stringer Bell’s tragedy was that he was trying to reform the drugs trade by taking the organisation into something more respectable: ie political corruption. But the trade wasn’t for reforming, and Bell’s death was all the more poignant because his attempts at social climbing had been cruelly exposed.
One thing missing from The Wire, vis-a-vis The Sopranos, was WB Yeats. The Irish poet played a key role in the denouement of the earlier series, when his apocalyptic poem The Second Comingadded the sense of approaching doom. There were even Soprano anoraks who suggested that the series' starting point – the flying ducks that triggered Tony Soprano's panic attacks and sent him into psychoanalysis – were a homage to The Wild Swans of Coole. I suspect such people needed to get out more.
In any case, there was none of that in The Wire, which was predominantly about Black America (another reason it didn’t achieve mainstream success). It did have an Irish actor in a key role: Aidan Gillen – confusingly playing an Italian-American city mayor, Tommy Carcetti, who was partly based on a real-life Irish-American mayor, Martin O’Malley.
But the nearest thing to Irish culture in The Wirecame courtesy of sexy cop, Jimmy McNulty, who drank hard and was occasionally prone to singing along with the likes of the Pogues' The Body of an American (and its apt line: "Big Jim Dwyer, the man of wire").
To readers who haven’t seen the series, and were still planning to, and are now annoyed at me for giving away the plot, I apologise. I know exactly how you feel. Thanks to that damn “100 top scenes” list, I have already learned that McNulty comes to a bad end in episode 60, which thereby also features another Irish cultural institution. Even so, I’m looking forward to the last episode. Because in the aforementioned poll of The Wire’s greatest moments, “McNulty’s wake” was voted number two.