AFTER A ONE YEAR HIATUS, HBO’s other gripping crime drama, The Wire, finally returns for a new season. While The Sopranos gets all the accolades and takes home all the trophies, The Wire has evolved into the network’s most interesting show. Uncompromising and hard hitting, the series is the creation of David Simon, a former Baltimore Sun reporter.
The new season of The Wire is something of a synthesis of Simon’s books, Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets and The Corner (co written with Edward Burns). In these two volumes, Simon tracks a year in the life of his subjects; Homicide followed Baltimore’s homicide department in 1988, tracking the detectives working the 234 murders recorded that year, while The Corner focused on the life of DeAndre McCullogh and those close to him–his drug addicted parents, his drug slinging friends, and the woman who runs the local rec center, among others.
Simon borrows from his books when it comes to the HBO series. Season three was driven by the creation of “Hamsterdam,” an area in Baltimore’s western district where purchasing and using drugs is essentially legalized by the district chief; in a speech to his officers, the district chief compares it to the winos who place their malt liquor in a brown paper bag while they drink on the streets–as long as police don’t see the alcohol they can pretend no laws are being broken and focus on violent offenders. As Simon and Burns wrote in The Corner:
For creating a “paper bag” out of a chunk of the city, Major Howard ‘Bunny’ Colvin (Robert Wisdom) loses his job.
While Simon often infuses elements from his true life crime dramas, every season of The Wire is a work independent of his books. Rafael Alvarez, a writer for the show’s first three seasons told me that “Simon approaches The Wire as he would a world class work of nonfiction. Each year he brings a single theme to the table: the failed war on drugs in season one; the death of organized labor in season two; reform in season three; and, for this new season, the failure of public education in the cities. . . . The theme [is] then broken up into 13 major plot points for each episode and then broken into drama from there.”
Alvarez, like Simon, is a former Baltimore reporter and is constantly impressed with the level of accuracy to which the show aspires. “Like nonfiction,” he told me, “each theme is heavily researched (we interviewed many longshoremen and other waterfront types before launching the season two writer’s room, my Baltimore seafaring background proved valuable that year. [Former] homicide detective Ed Burns . . . has proved invaluable in each of the seasons (Burns left the police department to teach middle school, thus the authenticity of season four).”
BACK FOR ITS FOURTH ITERATION, The Wire picks up about a year after the end of season three. Gone is the Barksdale drug syndicate (a staple of the first three seasons), replaced by a cold hearted killer named Marlo Stanfield (Jamie Hector). All of the other regulars return, however: Omar Little (Michael K. Williams), the stickup artist who never kills a citizen, only fellow drug dealers; Detective Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West), who has changed his hard-drinking ways; Councilman Tommy Carcetti (Aidan Gillen), the white mayoral candidate loosely based on Baltimore’s current Democratic mayor and gubernatorial candidate, Martin O’Malley.
New to the mix is a group of “corner boys,” youths whose lives are shaped by the drug culture surrounding them. The show follows the middle school aged children as they drift into (and away from) dealing drugs on the city streets. The mother of one of the boys, Namond (Julito McCullum), treats dealing like a family business: now that his father, formerly a soldier for the Barksdales, is in jail, it’s up to him to get out on the corner and sling heroin to maintain the family’s standard of living. Two of the boys have to deal with the ravages of drug addiction within their own families–one of the boy’s relatives steals his clothes to sell on the street for drug money.
Whereas prior seasons of The Wire felt more like Homicide than The Corner, this season goes to great lengths to capture what drugs and drug enforcement have done to Baltimore’s inner city. While the show still follows the tribulations of the Baltimore Police Department, the true victims of the drug war’s failure are the focus of this season. As the series progresses, the prospects for the youngest victims grow more and more dire; it is almost frustrating to watch.
Just as frustrating is the internecine political squabbling; everyone from detectives to mayoral candidates bicker about politics to no end. In the season finale, the winner of the mayor’s race (I won’t spoil it for you by revealing the victor) faces a difficult choice: confronted with a huge budget shortfall in the school system, the mayor must decide whether to accept money from the governor (thereby taking a political hit should he run for statewide office) or let the system slip further into decay. Needless to say, the children we see struggling to survive in a decrepit school system are not the mayor’s first priority.
The return of The Wire brings something for everyone; those interested in politics, cop dramas, and family relationships can all find something to love in HBO’s most addictive show. This Sunday’s season premiere is the perfect time to jump on for anyone who isn’t already hooked.
Sonny Bunch is assistant editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
