TV (The Book)

by Alan Sepinwall

  But none of the show’s meditations on morality, philosophy, theology, consumerism, popular culture, deli meat, ziti, and espresso would have found a mass audience without compelling plotlines, complex and eccentrically written characters, and high and low humor. (Paulie Walnuts insists that his place is so clean you could “eat maple walnut ice cream off the toilet”—it’s the “maple walnut” that makes it art.) The Sopranos was instantly notorious for the way it pushed pay-cable sex and violence far beyond the already minimal boundaries that had been established before, and the aura of continual disreputability helped sell it to people who might not otherwise have sat still long enough to savor Chase’s other fascinations. Audiences saw characters strangled (“College”), graphically raped (“Employee of the Month”), cough themselves to death after murdering a man (“Another Toothpick”), sexually humiliated and then beaten to death (“University,” “Cold Stones”), beaten to death and then beheaded and hacked into pieces (“Whoever Did This”), shot at close range (too many examples to list), and crushed or killed by cars (“Toodle-Fucking-Oo” and “Made in America”). But the totality of the series is not nearly as violent as its reputation suggests. The vast majority of any given episode consists of people talking to one another, or sitting by themselves thinking. Or in Tony’s case, dreaming.

  In some of its best seasons (particularly the first and last), The Sopranos had the structure of a long movie, or a televised novel, weaving mob plotlines (Uncle Junior wants to be boss, or the New York mob wants to wipe out its little brother across the river) in with more intimate personal crises for Tony (Livia’s outrage over being moved into “a retirement community,” a depressed A.J. attempting suicide in the family pool). In other seasons, though, like the third, The Sopranos was less novel than short-story collection, each week presenting fully realized, dark and amusing tales of both family and Family life that were connected by the presence of the same characters, rather than by the propulsive arcs that many post-Sopranos dramas would make their bread and butter.

  The Sopranos was a show of great climaxes—most memorably involving Tony, having learned that his own mother talked his uncle into ordering his murder, barreling through the nursing home with a pillow in his hands—but also of divisive anticlimaxes. Before season 2 villain Richie Aprile (David Proval) can go to war with Tony, Janice shoots him in response to a punch in the face. Tony’s enforcer Furio Giunta (Federico Castelluccio) begins a flirtation with Carmela that seems likely to end in his death, or maybe hers; instead, he flees back to Italy before much of anything has happened. Tony’s therapist, Dr. Jennifer Melfi (Lorraine Bracco), is raped near her office but denies the audience’s desire for vengeance, or closure, by refusing Tony’s offer of help; similarly, the Russian whom Paulie and Christopher chased through the Pine Barrens never returns. Even some of the most powerful gratification was delayed, and presented ambiguously: Tony wants Joe Pantoliano’s insufferable capo Ralphie Cifaretto dead from the moment Ralphie beats a stripper to death behind the Bada Bing! club, but the reckoning doesn’t come until late the following season, and it’s only implied in a roundabout way that her murder played any role in it.

  E Street Band member turned Soprano crew member Steve Van Zandt (who plays Tony’s pompadoured consigliere Silvio Dante) once described the show as “the gangster Honeymooners.” There are long stretches of the series where this summary fits perfectly. Of TV contemporaries, its closest spiritual kin isn’t another drama but Seinfeld, another vaguely purgatorial look at vain twits making an already miserable world more miserable through their selfishness. Tony was one of TV’s most complex characters, with Gandolfini breathing as much life into him with simple shifts in body language as with his thunderous delivery of Chase’s dialogue. (There is a moment in season 1 where he is really and truly acting with the back of his neck.) But he was surrounded by relatives, friends, and fellow wiseguys who shared his crippling inability to change his worst behavior. Every significant character moment feeds back into the show’s fascination with what people are made of, and whether it’s possible for them to control and change their destinies. Even the showiest moments of performance and characterization enrich Chase’s themes, but they have such humor and life force that they never feel merely demonstrative. The show and Edie Falco give Carmela moments of powerful self-realization, but inevitably have her choose the path of least resistance over the one she knows is right. She keeps calling out Tony for his betrayals and infidelities, only to return to his embrace when he offers her a bigger bribe: jewelry, a new car, a new house. Christopher’s dreams of becoming a screenwriter give the show pathos (“Where’s my arc?” he wonders, perhaps dimly recognizing that he is but a minor figure in Tony’s story). But they also gave the writers an opportunity to satirize the most hackneyed conventions of the business Chase and company had chosen to work in. Their contempt for TV-as-usual is demonstrated most vividly in a moment from season 5’s “In Camelot,” where a gambling addict writer tries to pawn his Emmy only to be told that it’s worthless.

  Livia was modeled closely on Chase’s own mother, and it showed in the detailed and darkly hilarious cataloging of her phobias and vendettas. Livia’s stock dismissal of Tony’s troubles—“Poor you!”—reappears in a coded way in season 6, when Tony, recuperating from gunshot wounds, encounters an old Ojibwe saying posted on a wall: “Sometimes I go about in pity for myself, and all the while, a great wind carries me across the sky.” This is, not coincidentally, the season where Tony hallucinates encountering Livia again. Like Twin Peaks, a show that Chase adored, the series was attentive to dream logic, and it often seemed to deliberately blur the boundaries separating waking and sleeping life.

  Tony’s mind is the nexus point for this blur. In season 2, he realizes there’s an informant in his crew after experiencing a series of nightmares brought on by food poisoning; the dream literally tells him the answer to a riddle that’s been tormenting him. Season 5’s “The Test Dream” is even more tantalizing, staging a twelve-minute sequence containing dream scenarios that also happened in life. Did they happen as Tony was dreaming them, and he somehow saw them in his dreams? Did his dreaming cause them to happen? Is Tony’s dream, or are Tony’s dreams, plural, or all dreams, merely extensions of, or windows into, what we call “reality”? On The Sopranos, life itself often seems like one long dream, not in the hack sense of “It was all a dream,” but in the sense of the same-titled Lewis Carroll poem, which ends:

  In a Wonderland they lie,

  Dreaming as the days go by,

  Dreaming as the summers die:

  Ever drifting down the stream—

  Lingering in the golden gleam—

  Life, what is it but a dream?

  Cut to black. The dream is over.

  —MZS & AS

  The Wire (HBO, 2002–2008) Total score: 112

  The Wire is about a clever cop who doesn’t play by his bosses’ rules.

  Or is it about how that cop pushes his bosses to create a task force to take down a dangerous inner-city drug crew?

  Maybe it’s about the charismatic leaders of that drug crew?

  Could it be about dysfunction inside the police department?

  Wait… now it’s about the stevedores’ union?

  Only now the mayoral campaign is the most important thing?

  How is the show suddenly about four boys in middle school?

  And here at the end it’s about the inner workings of the city’s biggest newspaper?

  What on earth is this show supposed to be about, people?

  Actually, it is about people: not only the cops fighting a self-destructive War on Drugs, not only the criminals who view slinging dope as their only viable life choice, but everyone whose life is in some way affected by that war, and every person in power who through conscious action or blithe indifference makes things worse.

  It’s about one city in which that war is being fought, but by implication is about every city, and about the many great failings of th
e American experiment.

  The Wire is about all those things, and so many more. It starts with one detective, Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West), and expands outward, introducing us to a kaleidoscope of cops, dealers, junkies, hookers, politicians, teachers, students, reporters, and more—a teeming mass of Baltimore citizenry, most of whom never meet even as their actions affect one another. McNulty and his partner, William “Bunk” Moreland (Wendell Pierce), lead us to D’Angelo Barksdale (Larry Gilliard Jr.), a glorified middle manager in the dope conglomerate of his uncle Avon (Wood Harris). Through D’Angelo and Avon we gradually get to meet other players in the Game: Avon’s right-hand man, Stringer Bell (Idris Elba), who wants to apply economic theory from his community college business classes to the distribution of heroin; Lt. Cedric Daniels (Lance Reddick), a company man who will learn in time how badly his particular company is being run; Omar Little (Michael K. Williams), a stickup artist operating with a strict moral code; Baltimore PD superior Bill Rawls (John Doman), a profane master of vendetta against all who try to rock the boat; and D’Angelo’s teenage deputies Bodie (J. D. Williams), Poot (Tray Chaney), and Wallace (Michael B. Jordan), each viewing the Game as the only career available to them. The Wire treats each character as worthy of being at the center of his or her own story rather than orbiting someone else’s. As one of the show’s more unabashedly heroic characters, wily detective Lester Freamon (Clarke Peters), puts it to a colleague, “All the pieces matter.”

  The Wire grants abundant humanity to all but the most minor characters, insisting that they were all connected, and that the only thing stopping them from walking in one another’s shoes is a simple twist of fate. And it locates them in mundane reality. The world of The Wire is not a clichéd or stylized TV world. It strives to approximate this one. The first season’s cops-and-robbers routine is a Trojan horse gambit. It upends our expectations about its detectives and drug dealers, as evidenced by how it lends its ultimate sympathy to Daniels the traditionalist rather than McNulty the wild card. And it poses questions about police tactics, and the drug war in general, that would resonate beyond the projects and precinct houses of season 1. Both sides of the conflict are shown to be prisoners of a system interested only in perpetuating itself, a grim farce in which idiocy becomes policy because that’s how life works.

  Such a grim and unrelenting worldview should have made the show unwatchable, but its message about the fundamentally broken system of America came intertwined with abundant humor, suspense, action, and revelatory human drama. It lectured, but it entertained, too. It was a show that could bring us to the edge of despair as D’Angelo repeatedly asked Stringer, “Where’s Wallace?” in response to news that his young friend had been murdered, but also one that could put us in stitches watching Stringer run drug distribution meetings according to Robert’s Rules of Order (“Chair recognize Slim Charles”), and watching Omar talk rings around Barksdale attorney Maury Levy (Michael Kostroff) in open court. “I got the shotgun; you got the briefcase,” he says. “It’s all in the Game, though, right?”

  The characters were so sharply delineated and imaginatively acted that we came to care about the likes of beleaguered union leader Frank Sobotka (Chris Bauer), his aggressively stupid son Ziggy (James Ransone), parolee Dennis “Cutty” Wise (Chad L. Coleman), police district commander Howard “Bunny” Colvin (Robert Wisdom), and middle schooler Randy Wagstaff (Maestro Harrell) as deeply as we did about the core group. We could even understand, if not feel much sympathy for, people who seemed to have no soul, like the dead-eyed young kingpin Marlo Stanfield (Jamie Hector) and the egomaniacal politician Tommy Carcetti (Aidan Gillen).

  Once you know that the show’s cocreator, David Simon, was a crime reporter for the Baltimore Sun, this worldview makes sense. We’re seeing things through the eyes of someone who simultaneously has the sensibilities of a journalist and a novelist (not for nothing is a season 5 episode titled “The Dickensian Aspect”), and whose age and life experience shaped his sense of what storytelling could and should do. Simon came of age in the post-Vietnam era, a transformational time for the Fourth Estate. Before the 1970s, journalism was a blue-collar profession inhabited by observers who tried to capture the human circus in terse but lyrical prose; afterward, it became a middle-class profession filled with university-educated baby boomers who thought of journalism not as a job but as a calling. Some of these younger writers, especially ones who covered city politics and policy, were equally concerned with describing how things were and envisioning what they could be if readers could only be made to care.

  Simon shared that mind-set, but he tempered it with an old-school newspaperman’s sensibility that prized hard-won emotion over pandering sentiment. He teamed up with Ed Burns, a Vietnam veteran and Baltimore police detective. Burns knew Simon from his work at the Sun and would eventually collaborate with him on The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood. Burns’s knowledge of police work and the drug trade lent a grubby reality to the cat-and-mouse games between dealers and cops, and his exasperation with police bureaucracy mirrored Simon’s frustrations with the Sun. Because both creators came into television through the side door, they had little patience for the simple black-and-white morality and hermetically sealed storytelling that typified TV crime shows.

  The Wire’s structure owed a bit to both journalism and police work. Throughout its run, it kept adding new characters, stories, and communities that were at once separate from and connected to the rest, like precinct maps or sections of a newspaper. Season 2 revisited the dope slingers of season 1, but mixed in stories set at the docks, where contraband (including sex workers) was shipped in from overseas. Season 3 moved up one layer in both the police department and the local drug trade, showing how ego battles and turf wars affected the rank and file on both sides of the law. There was also a prominent subplot about Bunny Colvin conducting an unauthorized drug legalization experiment by establishing a free-market zone called Hamsterdam. Season 4 focused on a group of children moving through Baltimore’s understaffed, underfunded, crime-ridden public schools; watching it, you understand how the next generation of criminals was formed through economic deprivation and societal neglect. Season 5 pivoted into broad media satire, showing how the decline of daily newspapers (including Simon’s old employer the Sun) inspired them to concentrate on tabloid-type stories rather than the social-policy-driven reporting that Simon championed. He and Burns weren’t making episodic TV—watched in isolation, no episode (not even the show’s very first) makes much sense. They were building a novel for television, shaped by the aesthetics of big-city journalism and down-and-dirty crime fiction by authors like George Pelecanos, Richard Price, and Dennis Lehane (all of whom ended up writing for The Wire).

  The show’s opening credits summed up its ever-more-elaborate ambitions. The season 1 opening was all images of cops and criminals and surveillance, but each successive credits sequence retained elements from earlier ones while adding new material, some of it playfully foreshadowing future twists. The effect was a bit like watching The Wire itself, a series that piled layer upon layer upon layer while somehow managing to check in with major characters from earlier seasons and tie their progress and their fates to what was happening in the dramatic foreground. Fittingly, the theme music was Tom Waits’s “Way Down in the Hole,” performed in successive seasons by the Blind Boys of Alabama, Waits, the Neville Brothers, DoMaJe, and Steve Earle—the peppiest, catchiest way of telling people that when they watched The Wire, they were hearing the same song sung in different voices.

  The Wire’s great triumph is that for all of its detail, and all of its Cassandra-like prophecies of the moral damage done to society by institutionalized corruption and individual ambition, it is ultimately a restrained humanist work: a pointillist mural comprised of faces. It makes you care, often deeply, about what happens to every individual who passes before its lens—even long after it has become clear that the most sympathetic characters will suffer the worst. Conven
tional TV precepts about good and evil didn’t apply here. Evil was done to many people, and good to a few, but the motivations were far more complex, and had far more to do with the immutable nature of the various machines (the police department, city hall, the school board, and, of course, the drug corners) than with decisions made by individuals. We’re left to wonder if any of the four boys at the center of season 4’s devastating middle school arc, all of them with lives at least adjacent to the drug world, will manage to avoid being touched by it. In the end, only one escapes that life: not the smartest, or bravest, or even most likable one, but simply the one who was in the right place at the right time. The scripts showed how one tiny action could trigger a chain of tragic, unintended consequences, then observed the unfolding tragedy with a numbed sorrow that left its audience in tears, wondering why on earth they kept watching this show. They watched because of the level of craft exhibited by Simon and Burns and their collaborators, and because the stories had the sting of truth. In The Wire, good things rarely happened to those who deserved it, and terrible things often happened to those least suited to handle them, yet the show was so entertaining that we were willing to accept the heartbreak as the cost of doing business with it.

  —AS & MZS

  Cheers (NBC, 1982–1993) Total score: 112