You Feelin' Me?

I have a rule that I’ve been pretty good at following, and that rule is not to deem a creative work as great until I’ve subjected it to multiple viewings…or readings…or listenings…whatever. I’ve been breaking that rule with wild abandon for the past 10 years as I’ve gone about the decade declaring The Wire as the greatest show in the history of TV even though I had only seen it once. But now I’ve just completed a second viewing, and I’m here to reaffirm my earlier declaration of its greatness.
First, a little background on my initial Wire experience: When the show originally aired on HBO in 2002, my friend Peter Johnston alerted me to it. Lorna and I watched the first episode and were unimpressed, so we stopped watching. Five years later, as the show was winding down its run, Peter came to me again with a Netflix disc of the first season, imploring me to give it another try. “Just watch the first three episodes,” he pleaded. Because Peter has steered me to so many winners over the years (e.g., Cave of Forgotten Dreams), I agreed to give it another go…and sure enough three episodes in on the second try, Lorna and I were both hooked on The Wire.
Flash forward to 2014, we give the complete DVD set as a Christmas present to brother Tim and wife Hayden with the proviso that they watch at least the first three episodes. They do, and then proceed to blow through all five seasons in semi-marathon style. Then comes our turn again.
As with all such great film or TV, it begins with the writing:
Judge Phelan: McNulty, I hold you in contempt.McNulty: Who doesn't?
Burrell: What makes you think they'll promote the wrong man?Daniels: We do it all the time.
Slim Charles: Don't matter who did what to who at this point. Fact is, we went to war and now there ain't no goin' back. I mean, shit, it's what war is, you know? Once you in it, you in it. If it's a lie, then we fight on that lie. But we gotta fight. (Bonus Iraq War commentary right in the midst of the damned thing.)
Serge: Family cannot be helped.Prop Joe: Who you tellin'? I got motherfuckin' nephews and in-laws fucking all my shit up all the time and it ain't like I can pop a cap in their ass and not hear about it Thanksgivin' time. For real, I'm livin' life with some burdensome niggers.

I can go on all day, but The Wire is not just one-liners, bon mots, and pithy truths. Nor, as you can see, is it burdened by politically correct bullshit. The Wireis mercifully fee of meddling from the PC police. In watching it, one realizes how badly it would’ve been neutered if back when it first arrived on the scene it had been subject to Twitter attacks from special interest groups, academic pedants, and 20-year old co-eds high on their first snort of empowerment. Indeed, one can imagine half the world’s great art being lost if the scourge of PC had reared its ugly little head over Western Culture earlier. The political right, as is its talent, has effectively hung the donkey ears of PC on the political left (I swear, if American politics were The Godfather, the rightwing would be Sollozzo and the left would be Luca Brasi, swimming with the fishes un-avenged until Michael Corleone comes along and shows how to play the game). But let’s be clear, political correctness is an American trait…from the decorous (“erectile dysfunction” to describe a limp dick) to the perverse (“friendly fire” to describe the killing of one’s own troops). And while the right taunts Obama with charges of political correctness for his refusal to use the term “radical Islam,” they engage in the boldest, most pernicious act of political correctness ever by trying to replace the word slavery in our history books with "Atlantic triangular trade"! The Wire works because it does not aim to placate either delicate or duplicitous sensibilities. 
Not only does The Wire use words--especially racially tinged words—freely, honestly, and most creatively, but no where in American culture has the reality of our race relations been treated more forthrightly. Every character…from the lowliest "hopper" on the street to the biggest shots in the mayor’s office--knows and acknowledges the burdensome role race plays in virtually everything they do. John Roberts, Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court with a Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah view on American race relations, would be sorrier than a fish out of water in the Baltimore of The Wire…he would be a severely ridiculed fish.    
In a scene prefiguring by a decade the recent embarrassments of Brian Williams and Bill O’Reilly, an angry war vet marches into a newspaper office and demands a retraction for a story that exaggerated his role in a military action…more to the aggrandizement of the reporter who "got" the story than the soldier who became a prop in it. The vet tells the reporter he did not earn the right to falsify his story like that. “A lie ain't a side of the story," the Vet proclaims, "It's just a lie.” In those two simple sentences he sums up an odious political strategy that’s become far too common these days.
Creator David Simon and his stable of top-notch writers weave intricate dramas around a Shakespearean cast of characters drawn from the headlines of our times--The War on Drugs, the death of American unionism, the pervasive corruption of politics, the impossibility of public education, the desperate and subsequently hysterical state of the media. Over all of it is the banal oppressiveness of bureaucratic ineptitude and inflexibility. A hundred years from now, scholars wanting to know what the United States was all about at the beginning of the 21st century could not do better than watch The Wire.

The show was built for resonance because, like Shakespeare, it delves deep into the human condition. Most all of the show’s many flawed characters (over 100 of them!) have moments of very human truth. Good cops battle personal demons to get their jobs done. Stone cold killers care for their families and fear the unknown. Kids with no reason to hope get up each day and try to make something out of nothing. Women hopefully invest in their men…and wait...or move on. Old folks struggle to live in dignity as their world crumbles around them. McNulty, the ostensible hero, is brought down by his own hubris like a classic figure in ancient Greek tragedy; Bubbles, the meek who seems unlikely to ever inherit the earth, finally finds redemption and ascends to the light as foretold in Christian myth; and Omar, the dark, scarred shadow of every modern day comic book superhero, shows what Batman's life would be like if he’d been born poor, black, and gay. Omar: It ain't what you takin', it's who you takin' it from.

Take it from me, kind readers…if you haven’t ever seen The Wire, do so (at least promise yourself to watch the first three episodes). And if you have seen it, see it again….it's even better the second time. You feelin’ me?