The Frame

Summer of The Wire

TV critic Alan Sepinwall started his “summer of The Wire,” where he reviews an episode of The Wire each week this summer. This summer it is season two in two versions: the Veterans version, for viewers who have already watched the series; and the newbies edition, for people like me who just started watching the show.

Apparently, he did the same thing last summer with season one. I am glad to have found so much written about this TV show, which I (and everybody else) thinks is the best show on television, not to mention quite literary. Since I started watching the show last month, I have wanted to read some critical response, but never expected to find something as dense as Sepinwall’s treatment of season one.

After season one, I started digging around for critical responses to the show and found a quote from David Simon on Wikipedia (I know, I was digging deep) that I found particularly illuminating:

“[The Wire is] really about the American city, and about how we live together. It’s about how institutions have an effect on individuals, and how whether you’re a cop, a longshoreman, a drug dealer, a politician, a judge [or] lawyer, you are ultimately compromised and must contend with whatever institution you’ve committed to.”

Season one was full of individuals “contending” with their institutions, whether it be the Chain of Command or the Game. The series asks the question: Is it possible to live a modern life outside of the institution? Wallace and D’Angelo both imagine such a world. Wallace, hearing the sounds of the crickets for the first time doesn’t know what they are. For his entire life, he has been a part of the Game, where drug shouts replace the natural chirp of the crickets. D’Angelo’s mother questions him about his dream of living outside the institution: “You can’t live without your people.”

On the police side of things, individuals face a choice, as Daniels tells Ellis, confronting him about snitching, between “themselves and the work.” This choice could also be understood as one between the institution and the truth. My question is, and I think the series asks the same question, is there such a thing as the truth (or life) outside of the institution? Will the search for the truth inevitably intersect with the institution? When the police chief tells Daniels that if he asked the right questions, he could expose dirt about Daniels too. Asking questions seems to be only about obtaining the truth, but in The Wire—and in the institution—asking questions is inevitably political.

Bill Walton On a Track Bike | The Weekly Pile-Up (4/17/09)

• Play him off keyboard cat! This gets me every time.
• Speaking of memes, here’s a hilarious video explaining “Yo Dawg I herd you like…”
• Geoffrey Pullum rips on Strunk & White (via: Arts & Letters Daily)
• This week in mash-ups: Sitcoms with literary captions (via rach) /Family Circus cartoons with random Nietzsche quotes.
• Backyard Bill is like The Selby but with clothes instead of interiors. (via ACL)
• Scripts from The Wire turn up. From David Simon’s proposal: “But more than an exercise is realism for its own sake, the verisimilitude of The Wire exists to serve something larger.” (via kottke)

On the Cramer/Stewart Interview

• If you haven’t seen it already, here is the complete, extended and unedited interview between Jon Stewart and Jim Cramer.
• Glenn Greenwald gets it right: Jim Cramer is not an aberration. It’s easy to view this interview and think, ‘Wow, Cramer is dumb,’ but, as Greenwald points out, it’s not just Cramer—it’s the entire press corps that too often takes officials’ words at face value.
• I can’t help but recall Neil Postman’s point in his critique on television, Amusing Ourselves to Death, that the best possible television program would intend “not to get people to stop watching television but to demonstrate how television ought to be viewed, to show how television recreates and degrades our conception of news political debate, religious thought, etc. I imagine such demonstrations would of necessity take the form of parodies…the idea being to induce a nationwide horse laugh over television’s control of public discourse.” I can’t help but think that the Daily Show is doing exactly that: showing us how to view television. In the context of the Daily Show, the “In Cramer We Trust” promo (aired in the interview) comes off like a joke, even though it is a straight-faced ad on CNBC.