The Wire Is Over

What did we think of the ending of The Wire? I have to say I was a little disappointed. For me, the show was best when it had a very light directorial touch--no fancy shots, just lots of great dialogue and gritty street scenes. Sure, every season would have a sappy end-of-season musical montage, and there was the occasional weird intrusion of surveillance footage for no reason, but part of the performance of "authenticity" that Simon and Co. worked so hard on depended, for me at least, on a very carefully controlled cinematographic hand. And then...the last episode is full of annoyingly obvious allusions to previous seasons, a musical montage to end all musical montages (based on the first season's theme song, no less), and a general sense of "aren't we so clever." Honestly, the self-satisfaction of the show's creators is the one thing that has always bothered me. I mistakenly watched some episodes with directors commentary once, and was totally put-off by Simon's smugness. That smugness was particularly a problem in this last season, I thought, when Simon's own former employer, the Baltimore Sun, got put put under the microscope.

And don't even get me started on the ridiculous serial killer story line...

All that said, what an amazing show. I was introduced to it during Season Three, by my friend Steph. Thanks to his tutelage I got hooked, and later we watched Season One and Two together one magical summer. Mary then got on board, and we watched Season Four as it came out each week, and just kept on getting blown away. I even have a (slight) academic connection to the show: one of my dissertation chapters was on the early R&B vocal group the Orioles, who grew up in West Baltimore--I'm not positive, but I'm pretty sure that the actual street corner they formed on has been shown occasionally on The Wire.

I've blogged about this before, but one of the most beautiful moments on the The Wire was when Bunk, the detective, and Omar, the thug, have a conversation about their shared history in the city, and what the town used to be like before being decimated by drugs and urban renewal. When I wrote about the Orioles, I did so knowing that I was writing about that exact moment, when the affluence of the post-war economy seemed finally to be trickling down to a new African American urban middle-class. It was a brief moment of hope, but a beautiful one.

On that note, I leave you with the classic opener to Season Four:


Via Train of Thought.