“It?s morning in Baltimore,” newly promoted Baltimore Police Col. Cedric Daniels (Lance Reddick) tells Det. Lester Freamon (Clarke Peters). Seasoned viewers of “The Wire” know better.
They know the HBO series, which begins its fourth season Sunday at 10 p.m., will immerse them in the grim terrain of a just-barely fictional Charm City.
And they know any morning in that Baltimore will be a hard, cold one.
Daniels? moment of optimism arises during a spasm of civic reform prompted by the political rise of Councilman Tommy Carcetti (Aidan Gillen).
You may remember Carcetti?s impassioned speech advocating a renewed war on drugs last season. It endures as an exquisite moment of high comedy.
“In the morning, I still wake up white in a city that ain?t,” Carcetti laments as his mayoral primary campaign against a powerful black incumbent stalls. He gains traction only when events disprove the mayor?s claim of falling crime. The mere prospect of a new city boss sends political appointees into a squall of bureaucratic infighting as vicious as the sales contest in “Glengarry Glen Ross.”
Marlo “Black” Stanfield (Jamie Hector) emerges as the new street boss. He gives fistfuls of cash to kids on his corners for school clothes.
He adjudicates disputes, distributes favors and grooms new talent. And he enforces his rule with ferocity undreamed of by the Barksdale gang he supplanted.
Chris (Gbenga Akinnagbe) and Snoop (Felicia Pearson) follow Marlo?s dictates with a heartless precision uncomfortable to watch.
They execute dozens, but police don?t find any bodies.
With Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West) weaned off Jameson and thoroughly domesticated, Freamon asserts himself as the pivotal cop.
He pursues the link between drug money and campaign money with a round of election-season subpoenas; his keen eye spots the small detail that leads him to Marlo?s victims.
The soul of this season?s heartbreaking story is four middle-school boys ? played with style and depth by rookie actors Jermaine Crawford, Maestro Harrell, Julito McCullum and Tristan Wilds ? and the education system that fails to reach them.
“The Wire” adds the four ? and what seems like a dozen other ? new characters without explaining things.
We learn about them by the way they talk to each other, often in remarkably illustrative jargon ? once you develop an ear for it.
David Simon and his team use the small screen to create an extended escape into reality.
The camera is still and the music ? mostly thumping from passing cars ? is incidental, not suggestive.
Deft transitions and subtle editing gradually reveal connections between far-flung characters.
Unlike Academy Award winner “Crash,” which crassly manipulated viewers? feelings, “The Wire” deserves every emotion it creates. And its use of symbolism would work on the big screen.
Cops still go down to the train tracks to finish getting drunk after the bars close, while trains roll by with as much momentum as the immense forces that shape the city more than a police department ever could.
Young boys try to trap homing pigeons to sell to Marlo, not realizing that the empty-eyed lord of the city has a firmer grip on their own fates than he does the birds in his cages.
And the rowhouses of West Baltimore stand still and pale in the night like tombstones.
Aaron Keith Harris writes about politics, the media, pop culture and music and is a regular contributor to National Review Online and Bluegrass Unlimited. He can be reached at [email protected].
