The first series of The Wire ends by placing the programme firmly in a tradition of deterministic naturalism that stretches back to late-19th-century American authors such as Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser and Frank Norris. It's a theme that found its purest expression four series later when the show closed by smoothly replacing each of the main characters with a younger, fresher version of him or herself.
The naturalistic authors described a world "in which the individual is an exclusive creation of heredity and environment and consequently by turn either victor or victim of chance – mainly victim, of course," as Jerome Loving of Texas A&M University puts it in his introduction to Norris's 1899 novel McTeague. Like Simon, these authors focused on the urban poor, helping make that a fit subject for literary scrutiny just as Simon has established it as a fit topic for TV drama. Compare Loving's description of McTeague with conscience-stricken drug dealer D'Angelo's attempt in this episode (see clip above) to explain to detectives Bunk and McNulty how it is that he has got to a point where he is indirectly or directly implicated in half a dozen gruesome murders, almost all of them ordered by his uncle, drugs kingpin Avon Barksdale.
Y'all don't understand … You grow up in this shit. My grandfather was Butch Stamford. You know who Butch Stamford was in this town? [Bunk and McNulty nod.] All my people, man – my father, my uncles, my cousins – it's just what we do … I was courtside for eight months, and I was freer in jail than I was at home.
The script for this episode is by Simon and his main co-writer, Ed Burns, and this speech by D'Angelo seems to me one of their clearest attempts to present the idea that a person's life is shaped and controlled by the social structures and "institutions" – for Simon, a word that describes the police, the drug "game", the docks, politics, or the media equally well – around them.
The final scenes of the series are a rehearsal for the final scenes of the show as a whole: despite the convictions of key figures (here Avon and D'Angelo), life goes on exactly as it ever did on the drug corners of the projects. Stringer Bell, Barksdale's number two, has taken over at the head of the business, two younger dealers, Poot and Bodie, are beginning to step into the role left vacant by D'Angelo, and the luckless heroin addicts Bubbles and Johnny Weeks are back to pulling their usual "capers" and scams in order to scratch together enough money for a hit. This cyclicality is also emphasised through key moments of mirroring in the script. Harking back to the first episode, McNulty and Stringer find themselves once again sitting in the public gallery of a courtroom watching a trial, but this time it is Stringer who concedes grudgingly that the other man's victory has been "nicely done". This naturalistic theme – the idea that the game continues even if the players change, the idea that life in the projects will struggle on to its ultimately awful conclusion no matter how hard anyone tries to alter its course – makes for powerful storytelling, and is probably one of the reasons The Wire is credited with so much intellectual heft. But isn't it also a somewhat hopeless, even defeatist, attitude? Elijah Anderson, whose A Place on the Corner was in some ways a forerunner of Simon and Burns's brilliant non-fiction book The Corner, has complained that The Wire "left out … the decent people. Even in the worst drug-infested projects, there are many, many God-fearing, churchgoing, brave people who set themselves against the gangs and the addicts, often with remarkable heroism."
I would say that the programme's commitment to a cyclical bleakness where small victories are ultimately subsumed into enormous defeats largely precludes the possibility of change, hope or redemption, and runs the risk of suggesting that nothing can be done to solve the immense problems of inner cities such as Baltimore's. This may well be true; Simon's attitude certainly seems to be that he is presenting reality as he sees it. When Mark Bowden of the Atlantic Monthly criticised The Wire's bleakness, Simon responded: "This premise that The Wire wasn't real because it didn't show people having good outcomes in west Baltimore ... I don't know what to tell him … If he's telling me it's not happening, I want to take his fucking entitled ass and drive him to west Baltimore and shove him out of the car, at Monroe and Fayette, and say: 'Find your way back, fucker, because you've got your head up your ass at the Atlantic.'"
It's not the bleakness I mind, but the cyclicality. If it is simply realism for the end of the series to press the reset button, for it to present the drug trade as continuing exactly as it did when the series started, for it to suggest that "Bell is now Barksdale" (as Simon put it in his proposal for the show), that the residents of west Baltimore's fates are fixed before they're born by the grand forces arrayed around them and against them, doesn't that encourage a certain attitude of inertia towards the problem in the viewer? And surely one of Simon's motivations in writing this programme was to provoke the opposite response, to help prod people towards solving the problem?
To me, this issue comes up again in the presentation of the drug-tolerance zone Hamsterdam – but we'll get to that in due course. For now, here's a treat for you: Bunk (Wendell Pierce) in costume as a trombone player on the set of Simon's proposed new series about New Orleans, Treme. And if that isn't incongruous enough, try this: Freamon (Clarke Peters) discussing his upcoming part in Holby City.
So that was series one. Next stop the Baltimore docks.
Totals for this series:
Murders: nine – most of them claimed by Wee-Bey. And for "another pit sandwich and some potato salad", he'll gladly confess to a few more.
Omar stick-ups: Omar rounds off the series with a quick street robbery for old times' sake, leaving us with a total of five.
Herc fuck-ups: four-and-a-half. Far from fucking up, he actually seems to show some atypical maturity in this episode, giving a level-headed lecture to two new officers promoted from foot patrol.
McNulty: "giving a fuck when it wasn't his turn": up two in this episode to a grand total of nine. First he goes over Deputy Commissioner Burrell's head to bring the FBI in on the Barksdale case, and then he throws the whole thing back in the feds' faces when they won't do things his way. Drunk: still six. Bunk drunk: unbelievably, still two; Bunk has been a paragon of sobriety this series. Who'd have thought it? School of dubious parenting: still two.
Bubbles's attempts to get clean: still on two, as, in this episode, like almost everyone else, he's very much back in the game.
