1: The Wire
One of the things I do these days is consume podcasts - I’ll address this is a related post soon. One of the newer podcasts I’ve taken up is Marco and Tiffany Arment’s “Top Four”, which is a list show where they (kinda sorta) rank their top four of the episode’s subject1. In the second episode, they tackle TV shows.
I like the idea of a top four of things. It’s short, but a little weightier than the gold-silver-bronze standard top-three, and less tired and tiring than top-ten. But it’s also a hair limiting. Because of that, I’ll use the Arments’ system here. Then, as number 5, I’ll give everything that could easily have made the top four - and which may have if I’d written this list on a different day. Then I’ll tack on an honorable mention to list the things which easily could’ve filled out the rest of a top-ten list. As this will be wordy, I’ll put it up as separate posts.
——
My Top Four TV Shows
Number One
The Wire
When I recommend The Wire, I almost always say that “it’s the best thing America has ever done - including the Apollo Program and eradicating smallpox.” I present it as hyperbole each time, but I don’t fully regard it as such2. Whatever else can be said about American TV, it must include this: the highwater mark was HBO’s The Wire.
The Wire is an epic novel, really - about the death of an American city. It builds for us an entire fictional city, founded on a real one, and lays bare its flaws and failings. It shows how the death of a great city comes, not from a bang, but from a million tiny cuts sustained over decades.
It does this in a way that is both dramatic and devastating. In the second season, as the focus shifts from the drug trade in housing projects, the focus of season one, to the docks where the drugs (and nearly everything else) arrive in the city, the plotting is incredibly good. In the 4th season, as the focus shifts to the local school system, we see, for perhaps the first time in all American content, how parents are often complicit in some of the worst events and effects. These are no mere bad kids, out of control and violent; some of them are pushed into the drug trade by the people who should be their greatest protectors - their own parents. The disease runs so deep, not even family is enough to protect against it.
But these are just plot style and points. The Wire’s highlight is how it shows everyone’s complexity. We’re shown that some of the bad guys aren’t just bad (and that some are psychopaths), and that the police aren’t entirely good (especially the psychopaths). Complex characters aren’t new to art, but to American TV shows - especially cop shows, a category The Wire sometimes gets confined to - it was damned near unique. We’ve had antiheroes before, but seldom more than a few of them, and perhaps never so many convincing characters.
And there are so many! A list of fascinating characters would extend well behond those we get to know well. If ever a show laid fertile groundwork for a spin-off, this is it. And yet no spin-off came.3
The bredth of the show is also incredible. Each season focuses on a new part of the city: new environments of failure, mismanagement, sloth, and greed at each premier. Each time I watch The Wire I’m reminded of this:
“Each [Peloponnesian and their allies’ policy-making bodies] presses its own ends… which generally results in no action at all… they devote more time to the prosecution of their own purposes than to the consideration of the general welfare – each supposes that no harm will come of his own neglect, that it is the business of another to do this or that; and so, as each separately entertains the same illusion, the common cause imperceptibly decays.” Thucydides, as reported by Edith Hamilton
There is, of course, corruption, too - and it’s shown. But corruption is easy to show and to comprehend, which is why cop shows always focus on bad guys doing bad deeds. Corruption is, has always been, and will always be, a problem. It’s impossible to root out, because where people are interested, they will always find a way to expand their interests. But incompetence is far more prevelant, and much more damaging. Corruption exists; incompetence predominates. Individual cases of corruption may cost more, but incompetence makes up for it in volume. Incompetence shows up plenty in comedy, but much less often in drama - maybe because someone doing a bad job is inherently funny and not so inherently exciting. But as with corruption, it can also lead to tragic consequences. Not everyone who helps to push a city toward extinction intends to; some just fail to do their jobs well, which helps to increase the speed of the downhill roll, tiny rockets on a giant Catherine wheel.
The Wire handles all of this - the characters, the corruptions, the incompetences, the complexities, the plotting, etc. - so extremely well, all without preaching or suffering. I rewatch it every year.
終
Video games, worst Weezer singles, podcasts, etc. ↩︎
I mean, sure the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedoms exists, but… ↩︎
Aside, I guess, from those character shorts. ↩︎