The Wire

The Wire Final Season

Week 3: Who doesn't like a blind bartender?By Jeffrey Goldberg, David Plotz, and John SwansburgUpdated Tuesday, Jan. 22, 2008, at 4:52 PM ET
From: Jeffrey GoldbergTo: David PlotzSubject: Week 1: I'm WorriedPosted Monday, Jan. 7, 2008, at 11:01 AM ET
Dear David,
Yes, I remember the time I had an awesome college girlfriend and I hadn't seen her all summer and it was finally the first day back on campus. I remember that time very well, because she had decided, over the summer, to start wearing black nail polish, stop shaving her armpits, and go to Nicaragua to help the Sandinistas pick coffee beans or some shit like that. Luckily, I didn't like her anyway.
The way I felt when I made these unhappy discoveries is a little bit the way I felt after watching the first episode of the final season of The Wire last night. I was enjoying myself just fine for the first 20 minutes or so, becoming reacquainted with some of my favorite drug dealers—the intensely lovable psycho-killer Snoop most of all—and scandalous cops. But then we entered the newsroom of the Baltimore Sun, and it was straight-up whiskey-tango-foxtrot time for me. I thought the show stopped dead, just about the time we were introduced to the saintly city editor and the darkly ambitious white-boy reporter. But let me not get ahead of myself here. We are told that the collapse of big-city journalism is the show's theme this season, so the two of us will have plenty of time to discuss the thing that interests all reporters more than anything else—namely, us.
First, let me dissent from Mr. Weisberg's audacious claim that The Wire is the best show on television ever. I think that I would have agreed with his assertion, except that I recently watched, in seriatum, the first season of The Sopranos, which is just pure Shakespeare. Actually, it's better than Shakespeare, because Paulie Walnuts isn't in Shakespeare.
It has become a cliché to call The Wire Dickensian, because it so clearly is, but it's no insult to Dickens to say that he's no Shakespeare. Of course, The Sopranos has had more bad seasons than The Wire, but that is in part because it has had more seasons than The Wire. So, I would say that The Wire is perhaps the second-best series on television ever. Welcome Back, Kotter, of course, rounds out the top three. Talk about a realistic portrayal of urban school life!
In re: the comparison between me and Bunk: Are you calling me fat?
I agree with you that Bunk is a wonderful character, and I agree with you that the list of great characters is nearly as long as the cast list itself. My favorite, Snoop aside, is Omar, and I missed him last night. I'll take more Bunk, more Omar, and less of the Baltimore Sun. Why, you ask, have I had such a negative reaction to the Sun crew? The brilliance of this show is its complexity: Never before, apart from the novels of Richard Price or the genius George Pelecanos (both of whom write for The Wire, naturally), have we had such a fully realized, tangled-up, humane, and morally ambiguous portrayal of the black inner-city, and not only its criminal underclass, but the cops who fight the robbers: Bunny Colvin, the erstwhile mayor of Hamsterdam, was one of David Simon's greatest creations, and, in a just world, Clarke Peters, who plays Det. Lester Freamon, would win a bucketful of Emmys. (Of course, the show has won exactly no Emmys, which is insane and worthy of much discussion.)
In our early glimpse of the Sun newsroom, we're not seeing much in the way of gray: just asshole bosses, a fantasy-camp city editor, a brooding and envious general assignment reporter and his naive-seeming Hispanic colleague, who gave us the most unrealistic moment last night: After she is publicly humiliated by the grammarians of the city desk, she actually seems grateful. Give me a break.
I have to tell you, David, I'm worried about this: We all know that David Simon is obsessed by the injustices wrought against the Sun, his former employer, but I'm hoping that his desire for revenge hasn't blinded him to the need for dramatic complexity.
Best,Jeff
From: David PlotzTo: Jeffrey GoldbergSubject: Week 1: Does the Journalism Feel Clichéd Because We're Journalists?Posted Monday, Jan. 7, 2008, at 12:12 PM ET
Jeff,
Having now seen the episode again—I watched the first time when my wife was out, which is a hanging offense in our house, so I had to do a second viewing with her—I share some of your concerns about the Sun newsroom. I actually like the darkly ambitious white-boy reporter. He reminds me powerfully of, oh, three or four or 40 friends at the Post and Times. And the exchange about the photo of the burned doll was inspired. But you're right that most of the newsroom characters—the crusty, big-hearted city editor, the pompous editor, the crotchety grammar-fascist old-timer—arrive as caricatures, and do very little in Episode 1 to flesh themselves out.
Still, it's not surprising that the newspaper seems familiar—and trite—to us, because it's the ocean we swim in. If we were drug dealers or cops (God help the public!), maybe we would have felt the same way about Episode 1 of The Wire's first season. Maybe drunk-cynical-but-brilliant homicide detective McNulty is just as much a cliché in Copworld as cranky-romantic-and-fearless city editor Gus is in ours. Maybe we have to make a conscious effort to watch the newspaper subplot as outsiders rather than insiders. If we watch as insiders, we're bound to be disappointed: It will inevitably feel clichéd or dishonest.
Don't you think that Simon is taking Mayor Carcetti a little too far to the dark side? When we left him at the end of Season 4, his political ambitions and his idealism were synchronized: They fed on each other. Now he's nothing but naked political ambition. If I'm remembering correctly, the very first words he speaks in the episode are about crime stats, the subject he spent all of last season deriding. I suspect he'd be more realistic, and more interesting, if they let him retain some trace of his old goo-goo self.
Oh, and calling you a "Teddy Bear" was too subtle for you? You need me to spell it out?
David
From: Jeffrey GoldbergTo: David PlotzSubject: Week 1: Baltimore Is No Longer a Viable EnterprisePosted Monday, Jan. 7, 2008, at 2:14 PM ET
Dear David,
I admit, I wondered whether my reaction to the newsroom scenes was one of contempt born of familiarity. And it's certainly true that I've run into editors who have been monochromatically assholish, and reporters who absolutely burned with ambition. Why, it's even been said that I have, on occasion, burned with ambition. You, too, burn with ambition, but it's not so noticeable, because you're so unambitious about it.
But: I think I know a little bit about cops, being related to cops, and, more to the point, having written about cops, and David Simon's cops generally pass the verisimilitude test, and this newsroom, so far at least, does not. But, as they say on the TV news, only time will tell.
I don't see what you see in Carcetti. He's not shaking anyone down, is he? He's just trying to better his city and himself, which is what you'd expect. And his attack on the scumbag U.S. Attorney seemed motivated by righteous fury. It's no surprise that a sitting mayor would have an appreciation for low crime statistics. I've actually thought that Carcetti was, in a way, a stand-in for David Simon, who is made angry by—well, most everything, as Mark Bowden's new piece in the Atlantic shows—but mostly by the systematic abandonment of urban America. The bleakest moments for me in The Wire have not been the scenes of drug violence (although the harassment of Bubbles last season did break my heart), but those very effective moments, many starring Carcetti, which persuasively show that Baltimore itself is no longer a viable enterprise, and the reason it's not is because it is populated mainly by poor African-Americans, about whom America—Barack Obama notwithstanding—still doesn't give a shit. America's general disinterest in The Wire (and certainly the general disinterest of the people who vote for the Emmys) is a corollary to this larger disinterest, by the way.
Jeff
From: David PlotzTo: Jeffrey GoldbergSubject: Week 1: How Do You Follow Up the Best Season of the Best Show Ever?Updated Monday, Jan. 7, 2008, at 4:17 PM ET
Remember that time you had an awesome college girlfriend and you hadn't seen her all summer and it was finally the first day back on campus? That's approximately how I feel about the return of The Wire for its fifth and final season.
As Slate Editor Jacob Weisberg observed a year ago, The Wire is not merely the best show on television now, but the best show that has ever been on television. And Season 4, which focused on the catastrophic lives of four Baltimore schoolboys, was The Wire's best season. So, Season 5 has a practically impossible task: It's following the best season ever of the best show ever—how could it not be a letdown? (Compare this to The Sopranos, The Wire's rival for show of the century. The Sopranos limped into its final run, coming off two bad years. Its last episodes—which really were incredible—seemed even better because they followed dud seasons. The Wire has no such luck.)
Here's a good sign: Season 5 begins with a tight close-up on the face of homicide detective Bunk Moreland, who's in the process of conning a particularly dim murder suspect into confessing, in part by rigging up a Xerox machine as a "lie detector." Bunk, the profane teddy bear, is one of my favorite Wire regulars (though that list is so long it's hardly worth keeping anymore: Bunk, Omar, Clay Davis, Stringer Bell, Prop Joe, Herc, Snoop, Namond, Dukie, Norman, Cutty …). Now that I think of it, Jeff, if you were a Wire character, you'd be Bunk—funny, ironic, lovable, and brilliant. Anyway, if this season is going to give us plenty of Bunk, it's going to be all right with me.
That said, I found the opening episode promising but a little too busy. It threw a huge number of balls in the air, almost too many to follow: a brewing battle between Marlo and Prop Joe; the collapse of the police department, McNulty's return to alcoholism, womanizing, and the homicide squad; Bubbles' sorry attempt at rehab; a shady real estate deal rigged by the city-council president; the investigation of Clay Davis; Carcetti's descent into pure political opportunism; Herc's new dirty tricks; Dukie's failure as a drug dealer. … And I am skipping a bunch, notably the Baltimore Sun, which is going to be a central character in Season 5 the way the schools were in Season 4 and the docks were in Season 2.
I'm a little worried about the Baltimore Sun plot. I've had two brief conversations with David Simon—he's a friend of a friend—and my wife has had two long ones. In all four of those exchanges, Simon demonstrated an obsession with the Sun that bordered on monomania. There Hanna and I were, slobbering to him about Omar, and Simon kept changing the subject to stories that his editors had screwed up 19 years ago. I'm praying that his fury at the Sun won't overwhelm his genius for storytelling. The signs in Episode 1 are good: The Sun characters—most notably city editor Gus Haynes—are vivid and humane, and there's only one heavy-handed scene (the one where the Sun's blowhard editor squashes a story idea). And it gets the newspaper uniform—the cheap looking ties and dingy striped dress shirts—exactly right.
Finally, let me pay homage to the miracle of Snoop: She utters only one sentence, and it's the best line in the episode. She's explaining to a reluctant partner of Marlo how she'll retaliate if he doesn't cooperate: "We will be brief with all you mother-----rs—I think you know."
Best,David
From: David PlotzTo: Jeffrey GoldbergSubject: Week 1: Do We Really Want a President Who Would Skip The Wire Premiere?Posted Monday, Jan. 7, 2008, at 4:17 PM ET
Dear Jeff,
Speaking of Obama, did you know that The Wire is one of his favorite shows? But—and here's the kind of scoop that makes Slate the must-read that it is—according to my colleague Chris Beam, Obama actually missed last night's premiere. I know Obama's busy, but The Wire is The Wire! Doesn't the Manchester, N.H., Radisson have HBO?
As for your excellent observation that The Wire is bleakest when it shows the nonviability of Baltimore, I've been puzzling over that question for a long time. When I was in college, during the depths of the crack epidemic, it was widely believed that the American city was doomed. Sure, centerless megasuburbs like Phoenix would survive, but the sunny-side-up city, with a rich delicious center, was written off. In the 20 years since, though, center cities have bounced back: most notably New York, but lots of other ones, too—Boston, Chicago, even our own fair city of Washington, D.C., have filled back in with downtowns livelier than they were 30 years ago. So, why is the renaissance not universal? Why are some cities worse than ever? For a sheltered white yuppie like me, Baltimore remains a terrifying, I Am Legend-nightmare, where any wrong turn can take you down a street that's at once empty and terrifying.
So, what is it, ultimately, that distinguishes the New Yorks from the Baltimores? Is it race? Or poverty? Or the vagaries of the global economy? (New York has rebounded because Wall Street and the entertainment industry have had 15 fantastic years.) Or governing and policing strategies? Is it truly inevitable that Baltimore must fail?
David
From: Jeffrey GoldbergTo: David PlotzSubject: Week 1: I Get Why David Simon Is AngryPosted Monday, Jan. 7, 2008, at 4:47 PM ET
Dear David,
Well, you're one deep-thinking dude. I thought we were going to talk about killer Snoop and Robin Hood Omar the whole time.
Let's look at the cities you mentioned: New York is New York, the world capital of finance. So, it has the money to stay afloat. Boston is the world academic center. If Washington goes out of business, America goes out of business. Baltimore, on the other hand, has what? Johns Hopkins, which is something, but not enough. It doesn't give meaning to Baltimore the way Yale gives meaning to New Haven, and believe me, as someone who lived in New Haven (don't worry, Yale wouldn't have taken me in a million years; it was my wife that brung me to that dance), New Haven is barely floating. What else does Baltimore have? That crappy Inner Harbor, with its wildly overpriced aquarium and its World's Fair-circa-1972 feel? Some cities get passed by, and some don't. Baltimore seems to have been passed by. And you're on to something: The percentage of a city's population that's African-American has something to do with the overall health of the city; there's simply no way around the fact that the murder and sickness and general debasement of urban African-Americans don't register as crises to most Americans. Every time I read a front-page story about death in Baghdad, I ask myself: How many African-Americans died violent deaths in the same time period in American cities, without anything more than a news brief to record the awful fact? In other words, I get why David Simon is angry.
By the way, Obama's love of The Wire speaks well of him. I don't picture Hillary going in for this sort of thing.
Jeff
From: John SwansburgTo: Jeffrey Goldberg and David PlotzSubject: David Simon RespondsPosted Tuesday, Jan. 8, 2008, at 5:25 PM ET
David and Jeff,
A quick note from your TV Club editor. It seems David Simon came across David's first TV Club post on a blog called Ubiquitous Marketing and had a few thoughts on it. Here they are:
Just curious:
What were the circumstances at which those conversations occurred? When I am at say, at a book-release party with a bunch of journos, or at a wedding table, where I am seated exclusively with newspaper people, or simply talking to a noted reporter or editor, the conversation is often about journalism and quite naturally, my unlikely transition from newspapering to television also is a topic and yes, I am very blunt about what went bad for me at The Sun, and for many, many others there as well.
If it were at a party of say, Baltimore cops, then the drug war, or the copshop, or the bar tab itself would predominate. And journalism and/or my experiences in journalism would go unmentioned in any regard.
Entertainment industry people? We talk about the business.
Drug dealers? We talk about the, um, business.
And in all instances when people come up to me to discuss how much they love them some Omar and how he's the bestest character ever, well, okay, my eyes do glaze to the point of distraction and I do desperately try to change the subject back to whatever the collective conversational zeitgeist might be at a given gathering.
I was a newspaperman from my high school paper until I left the Sun at age 35. It was a delight to me. It informs my work in myriad ways. At some point, it went bad. And the fact is, you'll not find me speaking openly against the fellows who made it go bad for long after my departure. I held my tongue pretty well despite my low regard for those fellows. But in 2000, five years after I left The Sun, those cats finally made clear that they had dragged The Sun into a journalistic fraud through the same myopia and indifference that later cost [Howell] Raines and Gerald Boyd their careers, except they did so despite private warnings about the reporter who was the problem. Why yes, at that point—which you describe as 19 years ago, though it is in fact, seven—I got angry and vocal and direct.
Mr. Carroll and Mr. Marimow are notable journalists with impressive resumes. They have done some fine things, I am sure. But in Baltimore, in their hunger for prizes, they tolerated and defended a reporter who was making it up wholesale. Events, quotes, meetings at which people were supposed to have spoken powerfully about The Sun's powerful coverage of a Pulitzer-worthy issue but never said any such thing—it was simply farce. Yet even after that third retracted article, they continued to defend the behavior as the honest mistakes of a good, aggressive reporter.
To flourish, shit like that relies on silence and fear within the newsroom, and complicity within the industry itself. And at the point when the third story had been retracted in full and these guys were still trying to mitigate the fraud and accept no responsibility for it, I resolved that I was going to speak to it openly and without regard to decorum. I make no apologies whatsoever for that. I grew up a newspaperman; I do not know how to regard newspapermen who would go out of their way, over a period of years, to continually retract stories by the same reporter and continue to defend such. And so, when I meet other journos, I am full-throated in a way that everyone still in the game never manages to be when it comes to a yet-to-be-outed Blair, Bragg, Kelley, or Glass. These scandals keep coming one after another and everyone pretends that they are aberrations, that the only guilty parties have all been caught, that there isn't an underlying and fundamental problem with prizes and ambition and accountability that is inherent within the shrinking pond that is print journalism.
I loved my newspaper and I loved working for my newspaper; and given the basic ethics of newspapering, I don't know how not to be angry over what happened there. You want to call that sour grapes? No problem. Call it spoiled roast. It is what it is. I got in the business thinking certain things about journalism; naively, maybe, I took that shit to heart. My mistake, apparently.
That said, if you've ever taken an Introduction to Logic course, you know that Argumentum Ad Hominem, while a stock maneuver in most half-assed journalism and commentary, is the weakest sort of intellectual crutch. If you are serious in addressing something, then ideas matter, not the man. The Wire's depiction of the multitude of problems facing newspapers and high-end journalism will either stand or fall on what happens on screen, not on the back-hallway debate over the past histories, opinions passions or peculiarities of those who create it. I've got a secret for you cats: Ed Burns has some pretty fierce feelings about the people he worked for and with in the Baltimore Police Department and the Baltimore Public School System. Do you really believe that insiders in the B.P.D. and school system can't recognize certain specific references to reality in the previous 50 hours of television? Writers of fiction cannibalize their most meaningful experiences and then regurgitate them and hope for the best. There is nothing at all new to this.
The only difference between your discussion of seasons one through four and the current one seems to be that you did not encounter Ed Burns at a party. Next time we meet, remind me to talk about the Orioles parsimony when it comes to pitching or my complete collection of Professor Longhair albums in order that you might be able to address yourselves to the work itself, for better or for worse.
Best,
David Simon
From: Jeffrey GoldbergTo: David PlotzSubject: Week 2: All Thrust, No VectorPosted Monday, Jan. 14, 2008, at 7:42 AM ET
David,
Well, you've achieved the possible—you've pissed off David Simon. You have now gone where, well, thousands of people have gone before. Perhaps it was this line of yours, from last week's dialogue, that triggered the attack: "The Wire is not merely the best show on television now, but the best show that has ever been on television."
What did you expect after you delivered yourself of such praise? A thank you? A basket of muffins?
I reread Mark Bowden's excellent piece on Simon in this month's issue of my magazine, the Atlantic, after receiving Simon's complaint about you. Bowden, like you, is an unabashed partisan of the show: "The show's boxed sets blend nicely on the bookshelf with the great novels of American history," he wrote. Naturally, Simon is infuriated with him, as well. In the course of unpacking Simon's epic, unidirectional dispute with Bill Marimow and John Carroll, the one-time Baltimore Sun editors who, in Simon's view, destroyed the paper, Bowden makes an obvious mistake: He decides to remain neutral in the fight. "When I discovered," Bowden wrote, "after my last conversation with Simon, that the final season of the show would be based on his experiences at The Sun, I felt compelled to describe the dispute, but I resolved to characterize it without entering it." Bowden showed Simon a draft of his piece, "which provoked a series of angry, long-winded accusations" in which Simon impugned Bowden's journalistic integrity to the editor of the Atlantic, which is amusing, of course, because Bowden is one of the five or six best reporters in America.
Which brings me back to your first posting and Simon's response to it. Simon accuses you of … I'm not sure what, precisely. Violating his privacy by reporting on a conversation you had at a wedding? Sort of. Mischaracterizing that conversation? Not exactly, either, since he pretty much admits that, in conversation with other reporters, he's fairly monomaniacal on the subject of Marimow and Carroll and their manifold sins. His lengthy post seems to confirm your analysis. As did the second episode, which I'll get to, briefly, in a second. But to conclude this sorry conversation: This is a man who is all thrust, no vector. He's mad at the rapacious capitalists who have destroyed the American city, and he's mad at reporters who praise him. A little bit of discernment would be useful here. I don't know much about the Carroll-Marimow years at the Sun, but I do know that Marimow, as a reporter, was one of the greats, taking on a grotesque and frightening Philadelphia Police Department, and changing his city for the better, and I do know that Carroll quit the Los Angeles Times rather than gut its newsroom.
Which is why his Carroll stand-in, the dim-bulb, corporate hack executive editor, seems like a semi-unreal character to me. Very few big-city-paper editors are quite so ostentatiously stupid and venal as the Carroll of Simon's imagination, and so, once again, the Sun subplot was not at all compelling to me. Also, it's almost ridiculously telegraphed. We've learned that the overambitious Templeton is already suspected of creating a Baltimore variant of Janet Cooke's "Jimmy" (we've learned this thanks to a most unnaturally perceptive city desk), and we also know that top management just adores our sweater-vest-wearing Stephen Glass and is giving him the opportunity to write a Pulitzer-bait "Dickensian" series (I like the way Simon subverts the Dickens meme by associating it with one of his villains) on a city classroom. I have no idea what will happen to McNulty and Bunk and Marlo and Proposition Joe. I have a very good idea what will happen in the Baltimore Sun newsroom. But I'll let you defend Simon from the charge of excessive obviousness.
It's a shame that Simon gets in the way of his own great work; he's doing something very important here. I was reminded of this by the discovery last week in a Washington house of the decomposing bodies of four girls, who were not found by neighbors, or the police, or the schools, or by child protection agencies, but by marshals acting on behalf of a mortgage company that was foreclosing on the property. How can this horror happen in America? David Simon is one of the few people asking this question.
Jeff
From: David PlotzTo: Jeffrey GoldbergSubject: Week 2: Too Much Moralizing, Not Enough OmarPosted Monday, Jan. 14, 2008, at 10:06 AM ET
Dear Jeff,
At the risk of making this a Slate dialogue that is mostly about itself, let me just say a few more words about Simon's furious response to my post last week. And those words are: He was right. It was wrong for me to write about social conversations we had at a mutual friend's wedding and book party. He had every right to expect privacy when we talked and to be angry when I turned the conversations into journalistic fodder.
OK, back to the show. There was something off about the second episode, but I don't think it's the Sun subplot. The conniving ascent of the Cooke/Glass fabulist, egged on by the two evil editors, doesn't bother me the way it bothers you. I agree that it's obvious—I don't think the Sun editor needed both horns and a pitchfork—but it's not boring. In fact, my favorite part of the episode is the bull session in the Sun's loading dock. How could you not crack up at Gus' riff about the mother of four who died from an allergic reaction to blue crabs: "Ever notice how 'mother of four' is always catching hell? Murder. Hit and run. Burned up in row house fire. Swindled by bigamists." I'm giggling just typing it. "Swindled by bigamists"—give that writer an Emmy!
So, it's not the newsroom that's confounding me. No, I think the problem is that The Wire has gotten preachy. The show has always had a didactic streak, but a relatively subtle one. For all that Simon is seething with righteous anger, he never let that overwhelm the show. It was a backbeat. He let the story and the characters do the work, and didn't lay the lessons on thick. Like the great journalist that he is, he showed, he didn't tell. He and his colleagues understood that no "the game is rigged" speech could ever mean one-fiftieth as much as, say, the momentary shot of Dukie selling drugs at the end of Season 4.
But the first two episodes of this season repeatedly pause—stop dead—for heavy-handed moralizing. It didn't bother me in Episode 1—I figured they were just breaking us in—but now I'm getting worried. Just checking my notes from Episode 2, I see:
1. The hooker's overwrought speech about her addiction
2. Lester's majestic peroration about the importance of the Clay Davis case
3. Steve Earle's exhortation to Bubbs, urging him to stop bottling up his sorrow about Sherrod and live again
4. The face-off between Gus and the Sun's editor about their schools series—the editor pompous, Gus biting, both sermonizing
5. Michael's conscience-ridden argument with Chris and Snoop about killing a guy who may have insulted Marlo
6. Bunk, Lester, and Jimmy's chorus about the devaluation of black men's lives ("You can go a long way in this country killing black folk.")
In every one of these scenes, The Wire's characters are just a bit too grandiloquent, their dialogue a shade too portentous. Maybe because this is the final season, Simon and Ed Burns don't want to leave anything unsaid, but they're saying too much.
Two episodes and counting without Omar! On the upside, Avon Barksdale is back, and flashing that awesome West Baltimore "W" hand signal. We need one of those—a three-finger "S"—for Slate.
David
From: Jeffrey GoldbergTo: David PlotzSubject: Week 2: Give Me More Clay Davis!Posted Monday, Jan. 14, 2008, at 11:01 AM ET
Dear David,
I appreciate your deep morals, I really do. But still: Your post was fairly inoffensive and had the benefit of being true. So, no guilt!
Like you, I love the expression "swindled by bigamists." David Simon and his writers love words, and I love them for loving words. That said, I thought the scene in which this marvelous line was embedded, on the loading dock, was forced and ostentatious and heavy-handed. Why not just have St. City Editor say, "Man, Baltimore hacks are so witty and hard-boiled and yet they have hearts of gold, all except that yuppie shit who is obviously going to Jayson Blair our newspaper half to death."
I was so busy hating the Baltimore Sun story line that I neglected to notice what you picked up: that it's not only the reporters who are ardently speechifying. I don't mind speeches—give me more Clay Davis any day! It's the moralizing that's getting me. Why do they have to tell us that the lives of black men are cast away by our society? Isn't that the whole point of this show? We get it. We've been watching for years.
These occasional bumps in the writing are not so noticeable in most cases because the acting is so good—otherworldly good. Have you noticed that Isiah Whitlock Jr., as the febrile and corrupt Clay Davis, is a genius? One question I'm always left with after an episode of The Wire is this: Where will these brilliant African-Americans actors go when The Wire is finished? Maybe this is why David Simon is so pissed—he knows that Hollywood hasn't figured out how to showcase large quantities of black talent and fears for the careers of his cast. I can't think of another cast of such astonishingly good unknown actors, except maybe for The Sopranos—though if you watch Goodfellas carefully, you'll see that they're all there. (Weirdly, Isiah Whitlock Jr. was also in Goodfellas.) So, let's have a moment of appreciation for Lance Reddick, who plays Cedric Daniels; and our mutual favorite, Wendell Pierce, who plays Bunk; and, of course, Clarke Peters, who plays Lester Freamon; and Andre Royo as Bubbles; and Jamie Hector as Marlo Stanfield; and, for his voice alone, Anwan Glover as Slim Charles. The list goes on and on. Every so often, the writing fails, but the cast never does.
As Sarah Silverman says, I have a dream, too: My dream is that some savvy Shakespeare company hires, en masse, the cast of The Wire for what would be just a thrilling Julius Caesar. Wood Harris, who plays Avon Barksdale, has already appeared in Troilus and Cressida. Just imagine him as Brutus.
From: David PlotzTo: Jeffrey GoldbergSubject: Week 2: Where Is Simon Going With the Parallel Fraud Plots?Posted Monday, Jan. 14, 2008, at 11:49 AM ET
Jeff,
One of the weirdest moments of my Wire offseason was when I spotted Clay Davis—I mean Isiah Whitlock Jr.—playing a goofy dad in a Verizon cell phone commercial. Much to my disappointment, his several lines didn't include his trademark "sheee-it." (Maybe he could do late-night toilet paper spots instead?) And he's not the only one of The Wire's great black actors who's moonlighting to make ends meet: Lance "Cedric Daniels" Reddick brightened my NFL watching this year by showing up as the new face of Cadillac.
I share your amazement at the concentration of acting talent on The Wire, and your concern about what will happen to all these great black actors now that the show is ending. I'm hoping that they get to cash in on their talent the way Idris Elba (Stringer Bell) has since his character got murdered at the end of Season 3. But I fear you're right that Hollywood isn't going to figure out a way to employ idiosyncratic geniuses like Felicia "Snoop" Pearson, Michael K. Williams, and Anwan Glover as anything but "Street Thug #3" in crime dramas.
Where are Simon & Co. going with the parallel fraud plots? We've got the newsroom con artist Scott fabricating a sob-story 13-year-old cripple to advance his own career. And now Jimmy McNulty is fabricating a serial killer to … do what exactly?
Seeing it for a second time, it occurs to me that the final minutes of the episode, when Jimmy turns an accidental death into a homicide while Bunk observes in horror, is a grim echo of that Season 1 scene when Jimmy and Bunk solve a murder with nothing but gestures and 38 utterances of the word "fuck." Watch the "fuck" scene again: It is one of the Wire's all-time great moments.
David
From: Jeffrey GoldbergTo: David PlotzSubject: Week 2: Templeton Needs a Big Story and McNulty's Selling OnePosted Monday, Jan. 14, 2008, at 1:30 PM ET
David,
It's not only actors on The Wire who have a tendency to show up in dispiriting commercials: The guy who played Agent Harris on The Sopranos now appears as a chef in a Campbell Soup commercial, and—if you don't mind me saying so—looks like a fuckwad.
And speaking of fuck, you're right, that scene between Bunk and Jimmy possesses Raging Bull-quality fuckedness. (Have you ever seen the Flintstones version? Hysterical.)
Where are Simon & Co. going with the parallel fraud plots? It seems to me that he'll have to merge them. Stephen Glass needs a big story, and McNulty's selling one. I can't imagine McNulty having trouble closing the deal; Scott is dying for the story that gets him to the promised land of the Washington Post metro section. Ordinarily, I'd predict that Scott gets chewed up in the process, but isn't David Simon's main complaint against his one-time bosses at the Sun that they protected a Pulitzer-bound fabricator, rather than expose him? I feel like I've read about this complaint of his a dozen times already.
You've noticed, of course, that more people write about The Wire than actually watch it? The magazine articles never stop coming.
Jeff
From: David PlotzTo: Jeffrey GoldbergSubject: Week 2: Avon ReturnsPosted Monday, Jan. 14, 2008, at 2:48 PM ET
Jeff,
I know what you mean about the endless Wire commentary. I'm having a hard time separating what I see on the show from what I read in the papers (and magazines, and blogs). Sometimes that's because what I'm seeing on the show is what I am reading in the papers. During the episode last night, it's-hard-to-be-a-saint-in-the-city editor Gus Haynes savages the Sun editor's idea for a public schools expose:
[If] you want to look at who these kids really are, you have to look at the parenting or lack of it in the city, the drug culture, the economics of these neighborhoods. … It's like you're up on the corner of a roof and you're showing some people how a couple shingles came loose. Meanwhile, a hurricane wrecked the rest of the damn house.
This morning, I read the Columbia Journalism Review's opus about Simon's war with Marimow and Carroll and saw this quote from Simon:
You can carve off a symptom and talk about how bad drugs are, and you can blame the police department for fucking up the drug war, but that's kind of like coming up to a house hit by a hurricane and making a lot of voluminous notes about the fact that some roof tiles are off.
It's a great metaphor, incidentally.
Let me just return to my other favorite moment in last night's episode: the visiting-room negotiation between Avon and Marlo. It plays a great trick by making us root for the heartless murderer Avon because he's putting one over on the even-more-despicable Marlo. (That kind of sympathy manipulation is a specialty of The Wire. See also: Prop Joe, Omar, Bodie …) Also, how great was the final moment of chitchat between them, when Avon, hungry for details about the street, asks: "What about you, how you been?" And Marlo answers with a shrug: "You know. The game is the game." That's what I'm going to start saying whenever anyone asks me about my job.
David
From: David PlotzTo: Jeffrey GoldbergSubject: Week 3: Whiplashed by Jimmy McNulty's FallPosted Monday, Jan. 21, 2008, at 6:31 AM ET
Dear Jeff,
Maybe it was just that melodramatically tight closing shot of Omar—thank God! Omar—distraught over Butchie's death, but I thought there was a slight telenovela feel to Episode 3. Or maybe it is the too-fast way the show has altered its characters this season. We're not in Bold and the Beautiful territory—no one has suddenly remembered that she's actually a lesbian incest victim—but McNulty, Marlo, and Clay Davis have all become very different men, very fast. Sen. Davis, who has always projected omnicompetence in his sleazy dealings, is uncharacteristically panicky as the grand jury investigation tightens around him. Marlo, who's terrifying because of his total lack of affect, cracked this week, revealing an unexpected anxiety about his money.
And Jimmy McNulty—well, what to say about Jimmy's extreme makeover? In this episode, Jimmy embellishes his serial-killer fabrication, inventing—over Bunk's fierce objections and with the help of a flask of Jameson's—a murderer who targets homeless men and marks his victims with red ribbons.* Jimmy plants evidence, tampers with a corpse, and forges documents, drinking and screwing blondes in the few minutes he's not inventing crimes. I'm whiplashed by Jimmy's fall: We've always known that his sweet domesticity couldn't last, but don't you think this nose dive is too much, too quickly?
As for the serial-killer plot itself, I'm ambivalent. It seems a little far-fetched to imagine that Jimmy and ultimate good cop Lester could betray the job so easily. On the other hand, Simon proved in Season 3 that he could take an outlandish premise and make it enthralling. The drug-legalization zone of Hamsterdam, the great idea of Season 3, was as far-fetched as Jimmy's fake serial killer, and Simon made it utterly gripping and persuasive. Maybe he will do it again this year.
What I loved most in this episode was its variations on the theme of escape, or rather, the impossibility of it. The scene of Marlo, fish out of water, trying to get his money at the Antilles bank reminded me of Season 4's most powerful moment, when Bunny took the kids to a fancy downtown restaurant and they panicked. Then there was Omar's brief fling with beach life at the end of the episode, another reminder that the game will keep sucking you back in. And there was Michael and Dukie's glorious day out at the amusement park, which ends with Michael in trouble for leaving the corner. Some of the best scenes in The Sopranos were when the insular characters encountered the outside world—Vito hiding out in the New Hampshire B&B, Paulie and Chrisopher lost in the snowy pine barrens. The Wire too understands the power of claustrophobia, the terrible difficulty of leaving the familiar.
As for the newspaper subplot, the less said, the better. (I wish I had a dollar for every time someone said, "do more with less" this season—I could afford to take the Sun buyout.)
David
Correction, Jan. 22, 2008: The article originally stated that McNulty relied on the help of Jim Beam. (Return to the corrected sentence.)
From: Jeffrey GoldbergTo: David PlotzSubject: Week 3: Does the Baltimore Sun Not Have a Web Site?Posted Monday, Jan. 21, 2008, at 10:35 AM ET
Dear David,
Since you won't take on the newspaper subplot, let me.
But before I do, let me attach myself to your comments re: the terrible difficulty of leaving the familiar. There is one other Sopranos analogy here, in this case, having to do with Adriana's disappearance. You'll recall a meeting at the offices of the FBI, when one of the agents suggests that Adriana might have not, in fact, been murdered but had instead taken off to China. This suggestion was met by looks of absolute incredulity from her colleagues. It was an absurd notion, the idea that Adriana had the will, knowledge, and wherewithal to escape North Jersey. I thought of this scene while watching Marlo at the bank. Here is the lion out of his den and, without any defenses, just a shmuck who can't speak French (which is also an apt description of me). It's a useful reminder of the completely circumscribed lives these characters lead, though I do prefer to take my Marlo straight up and affectless—I like my gangsters cold. What next? Scenes of Snoop playing with her American Girl collection?
Unlike you (presumably, since your tight-lippedness on the matter of the Baltimore Sun has me guessing just a bit), I found the newsroom scene moving, perhaps because I had just read about the latest coup at the formerly great L.A. Times; the "fellows" from Chicago—as David Simon calls them in his latest elegy to the lost world of the Sun papers—have taken to murdering their own now, firing a corporate-shill editor who wouldn't shill enough, apparently refusing to carry out more newsroom head-chopping during the labor-intensive presidential campaign.
That scene in the newsroom was near perfect because it had the power of truth, right down to the moment when the patrician executive editor, Whiting, forces his sweaty, ferretish managing editor, Klebanow (sounds like …), to deliver the actual bad news. How can your heart not break for 40- and 50-year-old reporters, with no discernible skills other than the ability to work the phones, who are cast adrift by a newspaper company that still makes barrels of money?
The problem, of course, is that these realistic scenes of newsroom life circa 2008 are undermined by deeply unrealistic scenes of newsroom life circa never. In other words, why does Roger Twigg, the discarded police reporter, have to be so encyclopedically perfect? Why does Scott, the unpleasant upstart, have to be so ostentatiously Glass-ian (or Blair-ian)? And why is there no reference whatsoever to the newspaper's Web site? Simon makes it clear in his Washington Post Outlook piece that he neither knows very much nor cares very much about the Web, but doesn't reality demand that we see the newsroom of the Sun feeding the beast? All this talk of finals and double dots is so archaic. Are you telling me that the cub reporter, Alma Gutierrez, would run all over the city looking for an early edition of the paper before checking to see how her story was played on the Web? I just looked—the Baltimore Sun actually does have a Web site.
All this raises a larger question: Just how good was the Sun in David Simon's day? Was the golden age really so golden? I'm not equipped to answer this question. Perhaps there's someone out there who can.
Best,Jeff
From: David PlotzTo: David PlotzSubject: The Skeleton in Daniels' ClosetPosted Tuesday, Jan. 22, 2008, at 7:50 AM ET
Dear Jeff,
Thank you for figuring out why Alma's early-edition odyssey bugged me so much! A real Alma wouldn't even have woken up early to see her story. She would have checked the Web site at midnight the night before, when the paper went live (and then immediately updated her Facebook status to read "Alma Gutierrez is getting screwed by her editors," and Twittered same to 135 friends). Heck, the single act of her logging onto the free Sun Web site rather than schlepping out to buy the paper would have explained more about the newspaper crisis than 17 close-ups of Whiting's I'm-an-asshole suspenders ever could.
It's weird that The Wire clings to a 1999 vision of the newspaper—no e-mail, no texting, barely even cell phones—when it's so incredibly au courant about the practices of drug dealers. According to one of the 18 zillion Wire articles from the past couple of weeks (though I can't remember which one), New York gangbangers actually watch the show for tips on how to avoid cell-phone wiretaps and other popo surveillance.
Its newspaper Luddism gives me another thought: The Wire is in many ways the useful counterpoint to another cultic TV show that began around the same time, 24. In 24, conspiracies are everywhere and institutions are corrupt, but technology is omnipotent and the individual can triumph. In The Wire, conspiracies are everywhere and institutions are corrupt, but technology always betrays us, and the individual can never triumph. All anyone can hope for is sheltered, private happiness. Needless to say, I find The Wire much truer to the world I live in. (Hmm, does this help explain why 24 is revered by Republicans and The Wire by Democrats? I have to think about that.)
I'm not a newspaper guy, and I lack the profound emotional connection to them that drives Simon. So, I'm skeptical about this newspaper nostalgia. Our mutual friend and Slate media critic Jack Shafer has explained that the newspaper glory years—1950s through the '80s, right Jack?—were anomalous, a period of artificially high profits that allowed papers to overstaff, throw resources into huge projects, and avoid the exigencies that plague most competitive businesses. So, maybe what's happening now isn't a rape, but a long overdue correction. And maybe it's not true that smaller newspapers mean less journalism—or even less great journalism. Web journalism is thriving. So is magazine journalism. Public radio is bigger and better than ever. It's true that they're not the same as newspaper journalism. Certain wonderful kinds of newspaper stories don't get done anymore. On the other hand, it doesn't mean they're worse. I like Thomas Edsall even more as a blogger and political analyst at the Huffington Post than I did when he was a campaign-finance reporter for the Washington Post.
Now you've made me talk about all the newspaper stuff I vowed to avoid! Let's get back to the show. I've forgotten: What was it that Cedric Daniels did wrong, deep in his past? (It's the All the King's Men subplot: Everyone, even Saint Cedric, is dirty: "Man is conceived in sin and born in corruption.")
David
From: Jeffrey GoldbergTo: David PlotzSubject: Week 3: I Will Not Be Criticizing the Baltimore Sun Plot Today Posted Tuesday, Jan. 22, 2008, at 11:38 AM ET
Dear David,
Sorry, I don't see the All the King's Men subplot. Cedric Daniels is the personification of rectitude. I like the character, but he always struck me as one of David Simon's less complicated creations. Maybe I'll be proven wrong, but this episode of alleged corruption buried in Daniels' past seems to be a bit of a red herring. I can't even remember what it was he's said to have done wrong; I think the allegation dates to when he ran McNulty's squad. Now you're forcing me to watch all of the first season again.
I would like to get back to Snoop and Omar and Butchie (what a man, huh?—though they should have tried water-boarding; it's quite effective, according to many Republicans), but I have to say this, in light of the firing of the editor of the Los Angeles Times: I will not be criticizing David Simon's Baltimore Sun plot today. The truth is, the battle between David Simon and the Tribune Company is the battle between the Forces of Good and the Forces of Evil. The Forces of Good whine a lot, but I'll take David Simon's whining over corporate pillaging, gladly. There's an astonishing quote today from David Hiller, the publisher of the L.A. Times, who fired the editor (who—and this shows you how bad things have gotten—was the corporate lackey put into the editorship after the previous editors were shit-canned for standing up for their newsroom) and who will be held responsible by God for the gutting of a great American newspaper. Hiller asked, "Can you solve the newspaper industry's problems by spending more? It's an attractive theory, but it doesn't work."
Of course it doesn't. Spending more money to gather more news and hire better reporters couldn't possibly help the newspaper industry, could it?
What a barbarian. David Hiller is the Marlo Stanfield of daily journalism.
Jeff
From: David PlotzTo: Jeffrey GoldbergSubject: Week 3: Would Somebody Please Give Daniels a Sandwich?Posted Tuesday, Jan. 22, 2008, at 12:34 PM ET
Dear Jeff,
One big difference: Marlo is a West Baltimore gangster trying to muscle in on the East Side, while Hiller is an East Side tough trying to muscle in on the West Side. (Also, I suspect that Hiller would be perfectly comfortable talking up a French-speaking bank clerk.)
Nothing more from me today about The Wire and the state of newspaper journalism. I'm going to leave that to my colleague, Slate media critic Jack Shafer. I mentioned Jack's views on newspaper nostalgia in my last entry, and I'm happy to report that he is going to write a piece today about David Simon's critique of the newspaper business. Since Jack is so much smarter than I am about this subject (and most others, for that matter), I'll read his piece to find out what I really should think.
I agree that Daniels is one of The Wire's thinner creations. (Thinner in all ways: His cadaverous frame, which is meant to suggest that rectitude you're talking about, mostly makes me think: "Someone give that man a sandwich.") That said, his mysterious ugly past is what makes him more than just a stick figure. Like Judge Irwin, he is haunted by a sin that could destroy him. At the same time, that sin—and the deep shame he feels about it—may be what turned him into the upright cop he has become. The Wire is brilliant in giving us characters who sin and overcome it, or rather, harness it to redeem themselves: Cutty, Carver, Daniels, to name a few. And they are all the more persuasive because they stand next to the weaker men, such as Herc, who refuse to own their sins.
Later,
D
From: Jeffrey GoldbergTo: David PlotzSubject: Week 3: Who Doesn't Like a Blind Bartender?Posted Tuesday, Jan. 22, 2008, at 4:52 PM ET
Dear David,
The people of America—including the .00003 percent who watch The Wire—can rest easy now that Jack Shafer is going to weigh in on Simon. Prediction: Jack pisses him off.
This means, I suppose, that we can go back to talking about the show next week. Which is a relief, of course. A thought struck me not long ago, a dangerous one: Perhaps the weakness of the Baltimore Sun subplot is not Simon's fault, but ours. And by "ours," I mean all of us in journalism. Maybe we're just not that interesting; David Simon can't make us interesting; David Milch couldn't make us interesting; maybe even David Chase himself couldn't make us interesting. Well, maybe he couldn't make me interesting. You, he could build a show around.
An amendment to an earlier post: Alert reader (and Jack Shafer acolyte) Ryan Grim points out that, though Butchie was not water-boarded by Chris and Snoop, he was in fact "liquor-boarded," before he was shot in the legs and then murdered. Butchie's demise was unfortunate—who doesn't like a blind bartender?— but at least it brings Omar back into our lives, and, with any luck, Omar's return will set off all sorts of conflicts between Marlo and Chris and Prop Joe and Slim Charles and Cheese, all of whom are much more interesting than the sad-sack denizens of the Sun newsroom. As Mitt Romney recently said, "Woof woof."
Jeff

Jeffrey Goldberg is a national correspondent for the Atlantic and the author of Prisoners: A Story of Friendship and Terror.

David Plotz is Slate's deputy editor. He is the author of The Genius Factory: The Curious History of the Nobel Prize Sperm Bank. You can e-mail him at dplotz@slate.com.

John Swansburg is a Slate associate editor.