I've got your "Dickensian Angle" right here...
Monday, February 11, 2008
The Wire, in its fifth season, seems to be losing its most vociferous supporters. Not realistic enough, they seem to be saying. Personally, I'm a huge fan of the first and fourth seasons, because those are the seasons in which The Wire adheres most closely to the tried-and-true cops-and-robbers formula (and on the audience's collective memory of that formula) and so demonstrates how deviations from that formula equal realism. This is not a difficult rule. It goes: however true, a cliche is not realism. So, too, with its flipside: entirely unprocessed information is not realism. Realism resides in the wedding of formula and novelty*. So that's America, that's seasons one and four, and that's what makes realism fun. It's only when all the barriers of the thing break down and the show becomes pure drama, or commentary, or dramentary, blech, that the thing falls apart.
This happens far too often, especially in this season, where everybody's just bouncing off the walls and talking over each other and demonstrating one or another point. I do like that David Simon called this last episode "The Dickensian Angle"--echoing the sort of primo doofuses, like Baltimore Sun Executive Editor James Whitling, who tend to think of any thing sprawling or serial in nature as "Dickensian." It's called a soap opera, folks. HBO didn't make this up. They've been going at this every single afternoon for fifty years and the tune goes: this happens, that happens, wham, something novel happens, tune in next week. In spite of the occasional psychic evil twin sister (McNulty's role this year) or superhuman cat burglar (Omar) or case of total amnesia (poor, evil Clay Davis) the soap opera is the closest thing television has ever come to realism, and it reaches its apotheosis when no one bothers to figure out how it's going to end, because it never will. It's not a wonder to me why the networks have not let the David Simons of this world make angry little soap operas in prime time before. I mean, they wouldn't, naturally, for reasons of tordinary cowardice. Yet the really smart ones must also see that the opportunity for really "edgy" boredom and stupidity, as opposed to the other, better kinds of boredom and stupidity, given so much unadulterated "realism," is enormous. Which is to say that David Simon deserves a medal, really, for those two great seasons he had. Given the huge scope of material he's been allowed to work with (too much--a tragedy, really, because television is the last art form left that has a structure that can be meaningfully broken, and that isn't just nebulous blobs of drama and meaning as fiction, poetry, gallery arts have become) the fact that he made at least some of it into an excellent crime story shows a herculean forbearance.
Anyway, the point is, The Wire is disqualified from being the best show ever aired on television. That distinction belongs to the first three seasons of The Twilight Zone, the perfect crystallization of everything that is not realism, which can be dashed off and filed away in a half an hour, and so does not pretend to last forever, or index precisely the entire city of, say, Baltimore.
*When I think about it, Buffy the Vampire Slayer was actually the TV show that most skillfully utilized the formula for realism. In fact, until some ambitious Pierre Menard comes along and creates a one-to-one index between television and the world, Buffy gets my vote for most realistic (and second best) television show ever made.
posted by Greg Purcell @ 2:49 PM,
