Lives up to its fame (as long as you watch with subtitles), more than 12 years later. Satisfyingly intricate and intelligent police drama delving into the War on Drugs from a realistic point of view not blinded by idealism or unfounded confidence in police, courts, or governments like so many other shows which are based more on what writers think the audience wants to be true. Better than any other cop show I’ve watched. The filming on location in Baltimore helps realism for me, since I’ve wandered around Baltimore more than once. The downside is that the ~60 hours demands to be marathoned, and ate my month.
The first season is perfect in its taut narrative from start to finish and illustrating the theme of The Wire: it’s the incentives, stupid.
There’s a lot of discussion of The Wire and praise for how it deals with racial themes, but this misses the mark—race is almost entirely irrelevant in the series, except occasionally as something fools are blinded by and can be manipulated with (such as how Clay Davis gulls voters and jurymen with racial rhetoric).
What is important is how, black or white, male or female, everyone faces pressure from the system & reality to maximize pursuit of their assigned objectives, not the underlying latent goals.
Everyone is ‘juking the stats’ and responding to incentives to the extent that the series is practically a primer on public choice: the police respond to overtime increases and pressure to fake the crime statistics; poorer people respond to demand from junkies to make easy risky money selling drugs; politicians respond to the pressure from myopic voters and their ambition for re-election or election to higher office to do what looks good rather than what is good; newspapers tolerate faked news for the potential awards; and everyone faces coordination problems posed by incentives. Stringer Bell & Avon Barksdale sell each other out, resulting in their death & incarceration respectively; two prisoners remain silent but one is tricked into thinking the other is talking and then defects; a stickup boy is tortured to death, not because anyone really wants to but to maintain deterrence; a young boy talks to police, but an error results in his defection being detected and punished; the mayor frantically argues with his advisers to maintain a successful drug legalization policy but his police chief interprets the delay as indicating the mayor is preparing to pin all the blame on him and defects to the newspapers, contributing to the mayor’s electoral defeat; the next mayor asks for FBI help with a cluster of murders but that’s outside the FBI’s terrorism mission (FBI employees are not rewarded for making Americans safer but fighting ‘the War on Terror’) and he refuses the political sacrifice which would give them cover to help. Incentives pop up from the grand politics to the low interpersonal relationships: the political consultant won’t sleep with the mayor when he’s only a lowly councilman but the instant he’s elected? Jumps on him the first moment they’re alone.
And this is all systemic, so it’s not clear how it could ever be fixed. Anyone who claims to be a reformer may well decide to ‘sell out’ and respond to the incentives, as the season 3-5 mayoral arc illustrates. Real-world events since then have illustrated this: one of the saddest things about The Wire is that there’s only one thing in the Wire world which actually seems to be done right and morally: the eponymous wiretaps. They have to show probable cause, they get it for limited times and purposes, barely abuse it at all, and have to fight to have it at all. When they do abuse it, it’s in the service of a good cause, the abuse is discovered, and the culprits are punished more than most characters. And now here we are in 2014 with smartphones and Facebook and the endless Snowden revelations, and it all doesn’t mean shit any more. All it took was one terrorist attack, and that was that. The politicians responded to the incentives.
One of the things I like most is that almost none of this is spoonfed you: season 3 doesn’t ever explicitly point out the parallel plots are Prisoner’s Dilemmas in which both groups wind up defecting and reaching the worst outcome for most members, it expects you to infer this; similarly, when the white junkie kid ODs, it doesn’t hammer his death in, just does a quick ~10 second bit of his body being found and you barely see his face; or when you see the police major at a gay bar, explaining why he has no family and is such a paranoid careerist, he’s just a face in the background; or it establishes characters in bits which are almost invisible, such as in season 4 when the camera pans in on the ex-convict’s boxing gym past a poster of Avon’s photo up on the wall with the legend ‘platinum club’ - referencing the original photo in season 1 of Avon, and also requiring us to remember that Avon didn’t want his sponsorship known because he was free but that he’s back in jail now in this season and this is a comment on the boxer’s loyalty. Timing can be established similarly, in the unremarked-upon upgrade of kids playing Halo on Xbox to playing it on Xbox 360.
There are some missteps. I disagree with the pollyanna-ish approach to inner-city school problems; the kids are pretty bad at playing Halo—the SMGs are useless against close-in Elites, they should’ve been meleeing them; Stringer Bell misuses the concept of elasticity, confusing it with competitiveness/market-power; the Brother Muzon character was a bad idea, coming off like a a shonen or comic book monster-of-the-week character (‘the nerd gunfighter!’); in contrast to the others, the gang boss Marlo is too opaque and it’s unclear what motivates him besides sheer lust for power and an animalistic taste for conflict; season 2 wastes time on the Ziggy character who winds up contributing nothing; and I’m unsure the mayoral arc of season 3-5 really needed to last that long.
You summarize it well, but I’d like to add that most of the characters feel amazingly real. The language is a big part of that of course, but much of the rest is that the cast largely played people they knew personally. The extreme is Felicia Pearson, a murderess who is played by a convicted (supposedly second-degree) murderess of the same name.
I’m amazed at how well this series has aged. It looks copyable, but somehow nobody ever did—maybe showrunners would rather avoid the comparison? Even Breaking Bad, which started out somewhat similar, went away from the realistic and toward the cinematic after the first few episodes, and I imagine the reduced comparisons to The Wire were an intended part of the effect.
(Although now that I think about it, there’s a German series (“Kriminaldauerdienst”) that obviously copies The Wire. Makes sense though, because The Wire is practically untranslatable, and its German dubbing is atrocious, so you can kind of avoid that juggernaut if you hide inside the German language market. Maybe other non-English language markets have similar series.)
It definitely needs subtitles if English isn’t your first language.
How about ending or at least toning down the war on drugs?
Who ends the war...? It’s humans all the way down—there you get into the Hamsterdam arc and the bit I discussed about politicians defecting against each other for fear of public condemnation. Systemic problems are systemic.
Consider marijuana legalization: some months ago after a referendum for legalization passed, I went looking for national level politicians who endorsed legalization. This is a proposition with tremendous support in some demographics, which is succeeding at the electoral ballot, and which comes at little direct cost to the implementing governments (legalization is easy compared to almost any other major issue—most of the work is setting up additional taxes and regulation!), so I figured I should find some prominent politicians endorsing it. Maybe not a President, but surely some Senators and state governors? The entries I found were distinctly underwhelming in prestige and some were questionably endorsements. Some leadership!
There’s been some pulling back from the war on drugs, and I hope it will continue, though I’m expecting a fairly slow and incomplete process. (Alcohol is only sold in state stores in Pennsylvania—every now and then, there’s a effort to open up the market, but I assume the state stores are a fairly powerful lobby.)
As for the war on drugs, I keep wondering whether organized crime is bribing politicians to keep it going, but I don’t really know.
How about ending or at least toning down the war on drugs?
Prediction: within a decade of drug X, say crack, becoming legal, the same people currently calling for an end to the war on drugs will denouncing the evil crack corporations as “merchants of death”.
Will they be wrong? It’s possible for those crack corporations to be a) evil merchants of death and b) still better than what we have now. It’s even possible that denouncing them will cause them to behave better.
How about ending or at least toning down the war on drugs?
In addition to the public choice theory issues that gwern has already described, many of the problems and most of the severe problems of the war on drugs are path-dependent. Just as the mafia didn’t disappear at the end of Prohibition, there’s no reason to expect gangs to close up shop because drug funding disappears.
The gangs wont, but the addicts will stop committing crimes to support their habit, which will free up lots of police manhours, and just about all alternative forms of crime the core gangs would turn to are different from the drug trade in one key aspect—The victims will generally cooperate with the law when it comes to putting them behind bars. And without addicts doing stupid stuff and getting caught, lots of empty jail cells to throw the gangs in, too.
I loved the first four seasons, but gave up in disgust at season 5 - one of the major characters went from being a well-intentioned screwup to doing some pretty messed-up stuff out of seeming boredom, and I just couldn’t handle it. (Rot13: Jura Zpahygl qrpvqrq gb fanc n pnqnire’f arpx gb snxr n frevny xvyyre)
Erzrzore, ZpAhygl vf n pnerre ubzvpvqr qrgrpgvir. Guvf vfa’g gur svefg obql ur’f frra. Guvf vfa’g gur uhaqerqgu obql ur’f frra. Ur jbexf va Onygvzber, sbe puevffnxrf.
ZpAhygl unf nyjnlf orra nobhg tbvat sbe gur gehgu, orvat Erny Cbyvpr, rgp.. Vg znqr frafr gb zr gung ur’q frr nabgure frafryrff qrngu, naq guvax “jung gur uryy, V pna hfr guvf gb trg erny jbex qbar.”
V qba’g guvax vg jnf oberqbz ng nyy gung zbgvingrq uvz; vg jnf frrvat rirelguvat ur pbhyq qb gb npghnyyl qb uvf wbo engure guna whxr gur fgngf snvy. Uvf zrgubqf tbg zber rkgerzr bire gur pbhefr bs gur frevrf. Va gur irel svefg rcvfbqr ur vasbezf ba gur cbyvpr qrcnegzrag gb gur whqtr—guvf vf cebonoyl rzbgvbanyyl uneqre sbe n ubzvpvqr qrgrpgvir gb qb, va ernyvgl, guna gnzcrevat jvgu rivqrapr (rira vs gur rivqrapr vf n uhzna pbecfr).
I know some folks were okay with it, but it was a bridge too far for me. Also, most of the other plotlines had gone a bit stale for me as well—Avon and Stringer were always more interesting than Marlo, Carcetti’s story was kind of played out, and the newspaper angle didn’t interest me.
The Wire
Lives up to its fame (as long as you watch with subtitles), more than 12 years later. Satisfyingly intricate and intelligent police drama delving into the War on Drugs from a realistic point of view not blinded by idealism or unfounded confidence in police, courts, or governments like so many other shows which are based more on what writers think the audience wants to be true. Better than any other cop show I’ve watched. The filming on location in Baltimore helps realism for me, since I’ve wandered around Baltimore more than once. The downside is that the ~60 hours demands to be marathoned, and ate my month.
The first season is perfect in its taut narrative from start to finish and illustrating the theme of The Wire: it’s the incentives, stupid.
There’s a lot of discussion of The Wire and praise for how it deals with racial themes, but this misses the mark—race is almost entirely irrelevant in the series, except occasionally as something fools are blinded by and can be manipulated with (such as how Clay Davis gulls voters and jurymen with racial rhetoric). What is important is how, black or white, male or female, everyone faces pressure from the system & reality to maximize pursuit of their assigned objectives, not the underlying latent goals.
Everyone is ‘juking the stats’ and responding to incentives to the extent that the series is practically a primer on public choice: the police respond to overtime increases and pressure to fake the crime statistics; poorer people respond to demand from junkies to make easy risky money selling drugs; politicians respond to the pressure from myopic voters and their ambition for re-election or election to higher office to do what looks good rather than what is good; newspapers tolerate faked news for the potential awards; and everyone faces coordination problems posed by incentives. Stringer Bell & Avon Barksdale sell each other out, resulting in their death & incarceration respectively; two prisoners remain silent but one is tricked into thinking the other is talking and then defects; a stickup boy is tortured to death, not because anyone really wants to but to maintain deterrence; a young boy talks to police, but an error results in his defection being detected and punished; the mayor frantically argues with his advisers to maintain a successful drug legalization policy but his police chief interprets the delay as indicating the mayor is preparing to pin all the blame on him and defects to the newspapers, contributing to the mayor’s electoral defeat; the next mayor asks for FBI help with a cluster of murders but that’s outside the FBI’s terrorism mission (FBI employees are not rewarded for making Americans safer but fighting ‘the War on Terror’) and he refuses the political sacrifice which would give them cover to help. Incentives pop up from the grand politics to the low interpersonal relationships: the political consultant won’t sleep with the mayor when he’s only a lowly councilman but the instant he’s elected? Jumps on him the first moment they’re alone.
And this is all systemic, so it’s not clear how it could ever be fixed. Anyone who claims to be a reformer may well decide to ‘sell out’ and respond to the incentives, as the season 3-5 mayoral arc illustrates. Real-world events since then have illustrated this: one of the saddest things about The Wire is that there’s only one thing in the Wire world which actually seems to be done right and morally: the eponymous wiretaps. They have to show probable cause, they get it for limited times and purposes, barely abuse it at all, and have to fight to have it at all. When they do abuse it, it’s in the service of a good cause, the abuse is discovered, and the culprits are punished more than most characters. And now here we are in 2014 with smartphones and Facebook and the endless Snowden revelations, and it all doesn’t mean shit any more. All it took was one terrorist attack, and that was that. The politicians responded to the incentives.
One of the things I like most is that almost none of this is spoonfed you: season 3 doesn’t ever explicitly point out the parallel plots are Prisoner’s Dilemmas in which both groups wind up defecting and reaching the worst outcome for most members, it expects you to infer this; similarly, when the white junkie kid ODs, it doesn’t hammer his death in, just does a quick ~10 second bit of his body being found and you barely see his face; or when you see the police major at a gay bar, explaining why he has no family and is such a paranoid careerist, he’s just a face in the background; or it establishes characters in bits which are almost invisible, such as in season 4 when the camera pans in on the ex-convict’s boxing gym past a poster of Avon’s photo up on the wall with the legend ‘platinum club’ - referencing the original photo in season 1 of Avon, and also requiring us to remember that Avon didn’t want his sponsorship known because he was free but that he’s back in jail now in this season and this is a comment on the boxer’s loyalty. Timing can be established similarly, in the unremarked-upon upgrade of kids playing Halo on Xbox to playing it on Xbox 360.
There are some missteps. I disagree with the pollyanna-ish approach to inner-city school problems; the kids are pretty bad at playing Halo—the SMGs are useless against close-in Elites, they should’ve been meleeing them; Stringer Bell misuses the concept of elasticity, confusing it with competitiveness/market-power; the Brother Muzon character was a bad idea, coming off like a a shonen or comic book monster-of-the-week character (‘the nerd gunfighter!’); in contrast to the others, the gang boss Marlo is too opaque and it’s unclear what motivates him besides sheer lust for power and an animalistic taste for conflict; season 2 wastes time on the Ziggy character who winds up contributing nothing; and I’m unsure the mayoral arc of season 3-5 really needed to last that long.
You summarize it well, but I’d like to add that most of the characters feel amazingly real. The language is a big part of that of course, but much of the rest is that the cast largely played people they knew personally. The extreme is Felicia Pearson, a murderess who is played by a convicted (supposedly second-degree) murderess of the same name.
I’m amazed at how well this series has aged. It looks copyable, but somehow nobody ever did—maybe showrunners would rather avoid the comparison? Even Breaking Bad, which started out somewhat similar, went away from the realistic and toward the cinematic after the first few episodes, and I imagine the reduced comparisons to The Wire were an intended part of the effect.
(Although now that I think about it, there’s a German series (“Kriminaldauerdienst”) that obviously copies The Wire. Makes sense though, because The Wire is practically untranslatable, and its German dubbing is atrocious, so you can kind of avoid that juggernaut if you hide inside the German language market. Maybe other non-English language markets have similar series.)
It definitely needs subtitles if English isn’t your first language.
How about ending or at least toning down the war on drugs?
Who ends the war...? It’s humans all the way down—there you get into the Hamsterdam arc and the bit I discussed about politicians defecting against each other for fear of public condemnation. Systemic problems are systemic.
Consider marijuana legalization: some months ago after a referendum for legalization passed, I went looking for national level politicians who endorsed legalization. This is a proposition with tremendous support in some demographics, which is succeeding at the electoral ballot, and which comes at little direct cost to the implementing governments (legalization is easy compared to almost any other major issue—most of the work is setting up additional taxes and regulation!), so I figured I should find some prominent politicians endorsing it. Maybe not a President, but surely some Senators and state governors? The entries I found were distinctly underwhelming in prestige and some were questionably endorsements. Some leadership!
There’s been some pulling back from the war on drugs, and I hope it will continue, though I’m expecting a fairly slow and incomplete process. (Alcohol is only sold in state stores in Pennsylvania—every now and then, there’s a effort to open up the market, but I assume the state stores are a fairly powerful lobby.)
As for the war on drugs, I keep wondering whether organized crime is bribing politicians to keep it going, but I don’t really know.
One of the characters tried that—the politicians basically shat themselves and sacked him mercilessly.
Prediction: within a decade of drug X, say crack, becoming legal, the same people currently calling for an end to the war on drugs will denouncing the evil crack corporations as “merchants of death”.
Will they be wrong? It’s possible for those crack corporations to be a) evil merchants of death and b) still better than what we have now. It’s even possible that denouncing them will cause them to behave better.
In addition to the public choice theory issues that gwern has already described, many of the problems and most of the severe problems of the war on drugs are path-dependent. Just as the mafia didn’t disappear at the end of Prohibition, there’s no reason to expect gangs to close up shop because drug funding disappears.
The gangs wont, but the addicts will stop committing crimes to support their habit, which will free up lots of police manhours, and just about all alternative forms of crime the core gangs would turn to are different from the drug trade in one key aspect—The victims will generally cooperate with the law when it comes to putting them behind bars. And without addicts doing stupid stuff and getting caught, lots of empty jail cells to throw the gangs in, too.
I loved the first four seasons, but gave up in disgust at season 5 - one of the major characters went from being a well-intentioned screwup to doing some pretty messed-up stuff out of seeming boredom, and I just couldn’t handle it. (Rot13: Jura Zpahygl qrpvqrq gb fanc n pnqnire’f arpx gb snxr n frevny xvyyre)
Guvf ernyyl vfa’g nf rkgerzr nf lbh’er znxvat vg bhg gb or.
Erzrzore, ZpAhygl vf n pnerre ubzvpvqr qrgrpgvir. Guvf vfa’g gur svefg obql ur’f frra. Guvf vfa’g gur uhaqerqgu obql ur’f frra. Ur jbexf va Onygvzber, sbe puevffnxrf.
ZpAhygl unf nyjnlf orra nobhg tbvat sbe gur gehgu, orvat Erny Cbyvpr, rgp.. Vg znqr frafr gb zr gung ur’q frr nabgure frafryrff qrngu, naq guvax “jung gur uryy, V pna hfr guvf gb trg erny jbex qbar.”
V qba’g guvax vg jnf oberqbz ng nyy gung zbgvingrq uvz; vg jnf frrvat rirelguvat ur pbhyq qb gb npghnyyl qb uvf wbo engure guna whxr gur fgngf snvy. Uvf zrgubqf tbg zber rkgerzr bire gur pbhefr bs gur frevrf. Va gur irel svefg rcvfbqr ur vasbezf ba gur cbyvpr qrcnegzrag gb gur whqtr—guvf vf cebonoyl rzbgvbanyyl uneqre sbe n ubzvpvqr qrgrpgvir gb qb, va ernyvgl, guna gnzcrevat jvgu rivqrapr (rira vs gur rivqrapr vf n uhzna pbecfr).
Vg’f nyy va gur tnzr.
I know some folks were okay with it, but it was a bridge too far for me. Also, most of the other plotlines had gone a bit stale for me as well—Avon and Stringer were always more interesting than Marlo, Carcetti’s story was kind of played out, and the newspaper angle didn’t interest me.
Subtitles?
Many of the characters have thick accents and/or a patois. If you can comfortably carry a conversation in a crowded bar you’ll be fine without them.
And on top of that, I’m hearing-impaired. Let purists watch without subtitles—I’d prefer to actually understand what people are saying.