June 12, 2020 - 11:23am
I don’t think The Wire could be made now. Or, at least, I don’t think it would attract the critical acclaim that it did when it was first aired, almost twenty years ago.
I started rewatching the show at the beginning of lockdown, and last week got to the final season, at the same time that various media outlets began calling for an end to police shows, the most popular genre of TV in both America and the UK. The argument is that heroising, or even just humanising, police officers is an act of “copaganda”, encouraging viewers to sympathise with the agents of police brutality at a time when radical proposals to abolish or defund the police are suddenly on the agenda.
Several shows have already been cancelled and activists have apparently now set their sights on Paw Patrol, a children’s cartoon that features a talking police dog called Chase (“Defund the paw patrol!” reads one tweet, “Euthanize the police dog!” urges another.)
Of course, The Wire was not just any old police procedural. It was the jewel in the crown, the very best of the Golden Age of Television (an age that is now, I fear, behind us). But the moral and narrative complexity of the show, the very thing that made it so accomplished, would now be its undoing.
It’s not as though The Wire shies away from depictions of police brutality, corruption, incompetence, and malice. But, to the extent that there are any heroes in the show — Howard “Bunny” Colvin, Cedric Daniels, and Lester Freamon come closest — they are police officers, and black police officers too. And, although we regularly see police mistreating the black people of Baltimore, the show refuses to offer up any kind of simple narrative to explain the problems besetting the city.
The orthodox Leftist analysis of crime — that it is a consequence of structural factors including poverty, racism, and police overreach — is not rejected as such, but the show is far more concerned with the complexity of character and moral agency, with some of the most sympathetic figures (Bubbles and Dukie) suffering the most wretched misfortune, while outright villains (Mayor Royce and Major Valchek) enjoy power and affluence. In the world of The Wire, there is no clear relationship between virtue and circumstance — the two are constantly shifting.
The Wire does have a political message, and a progressive one: decriminalise drugs, stamp out corruption, and focus police resources on the most powerful gangsters, rather than on petty criminals. But while this kind of moderate, reforming instinct might have been acceptable two decades ago, I fear that the progressives who set the cultural agenda would not now look kindly on a white man writing a show about (mostly) black people that tries to complicate their simple political narrative.
Above all, I doubt very much that the redemption of a character like Pryzbylewski, the violent white police officer turned compassionate teacher and mentor to black teenagers, would be acceptable in the current climate. Redemption, complexity, nuance, moral humility — these are the values of a bygone era.
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SubscribeNo, The Wire would not be made today and nor would anything else, it seems.
That aside, at least one purpose of The Wire was to highlight the ongoing and endemic political corruption and incompetence that has blighted Baltimore – and by extension all Democrat-run cities – for decades. Yet when Trump highlighted this corruption and incompetence a few months ago the creator of the show, needless, to say, attacked Trump.
Trump called Baltimore a “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess”. Simon responded that “the president is ‘literally’ a simplistic, racist moron”. Why? Because the latter was ignoring the racism, the white flight to the suburbs and resultant inner city decline, and the drug war and mass incarceration policies. In sum “all of modern U.S. history about which your kind stays mute”.
The white flight to the suburbs is a perfectly rational response to the dysfunction that seems to have afflicted most inner cities run on progressive lines. The pertinent question – one you don’t even notice you’ve posed – is WHY is that “decline” inevitable? What about the wonders of “vibrant diversity” – why aren’t the new white-free inner cities now contented, just, brotherly paradises?
Why would any law abiding person or business remain in a city such as Baltimore, Detroit or so many others when there is corruption and criminality all around them? What ‘my kind’ wants is for people of all colours and backgrounds to is make their way on basis of their own merits and character. Sadly, this will never happen while the educating systems are in the grip of leift-wiing teaching unions and the cities are ruled by Democrats.
And if whites move back into the cities, it’s decried as gentrification, which is also “racist.” Note that white progressives, as well as Asians, resist living in these areas, as do Mexican-Americans in LA.
Why would people have a problem living there? Crime, litter, constant loud arguments with threats of violence. I note all those who decry white flight, never even landed in the nabes in the first instance, no less stayed long enough to eventually flee.
The word rat was unnecessary, otherwise President Trump was spot on.
Well, nothing’s ever going to be made unless we get rid of this wretched social distancing.
Might just be your wording – but that answers itself. The reason the show is so highly acclaimed is because it ably displays the multiple factors and issues at play in Baltimore. It is almost second to nothing in portraying the complexities of individuals acting within systems. So why would it offer up any simple narrative?
None of those are particularly ‘progressive’ at all, except the ‘decriminalise drugs’ – which i think you have misread completely. The show shows brilliantly how that particular house of cards came crashing down. Crime is reduced across the district, but at the expense of utterly condemning a section of society. I would not read its portrayal of a post-apocalyptic hell on earth section of the community as being pro abolition in the slightest.