Season 1 was introduced to me via English seminar in freshman year. Da-yum, I really have my hippie-long-haired-pot-smoking(he admitted this openly in class, I'm definitely not stereotyping him here)-adjunct-staff-teacher to thank for. We watched Season 1 and had to write a term paper for it. I wrote mine on Omar Little. God, best time writing a school paper, fo' sho!!!!
Heheh, I'll stop pretending to be gangsta. That's just embarrassing. But honestly, every time I watch the Wire I just wanna start swaggering out to the corner.
Now obviously the show's point is not to show how cool gangsters are and how cool drug-dealing is. OBVIOUSLY NOT. Actually, the show is to its core, about Baltimore. The city. "Baltimore is all they know"---whether you're a corner boy, homeless guy rifting through trash, drug addict shooting up, kid in a foster home, po-po, the hacks in City Hall, unscrupulous lawyer, cheating mayor, or whatever.
Baltimore is your home, and you damn love it even knowing how dirty it is.
I love that. I've felt that too, more and more now, spending time in Pittsburgh these years and loving it with a passion sometimes that surprises me. A city can be a person, can be living and breathing. It can be deeply flawed and problematic, and you can hate it just as much as you love it. But it's your home, the place you know, and you love the stinking sewers and polluted air and you love the nameless people on the streets, because they're Baltimore/Pittsburgh/wherever too.
Which is why the last episode, "-30-" was just so perfect. The few sequences of quiet shots, just of Baltimore, of scenes around the city, no music soundtrack, just dim noises from the city, moved me nearly as much as the montages (always my favorite from every season) at the end.
And season 5's montage was beautiful, of course. I didn't even realize how many shots they recycled from earlier seasons until I went on Youtube and rewatched those montages in a row.
(I'm seriously considering rewatching from Season 1 again... this show just does that to ya!!)
It really sucks that The Wire is so... obscure, like, I can't find anyone to talk out my feelings to in real life... boo. I only know one other guy who watched it too, and he loves it just as much, that goes without saying. He's been convincing me for a while to finish Season 5, but I've just been lazy (hunting for the streaming links is kinda hard ya know --cough--) but after discovering The Wire on Amazon Prime, I jumped. Yea, 100 bucks down the drain for this stupid membership I didn't realize I paid for, but at least I get this out of it eh?!
Trust me, I ALWAYS try to get people to watch The Wire, ALWAYS, but it's so hard to sell it for some reason. I mean, people always be asking me "What's it about?" and I say, "It's a cop vs drug dealer show" and I see them just be like, "Oh not my thing," and I have to be immediately like, "But it's soooo much more than that!!!! It's about institutions beating down individuals!!! Realistic things wrong with society!!!! It has amazing writing and incredible characters like Omar!!!!..."
Yeah so I keep ranting, and people just stare at me like I'm crazy.
Seriously people don't realize how great The Wire is until they sit down and watch it. But that's the thing too. It's not a show like Game of Thrones that's gonna grab you from the start (although tbh I thought Episode 1 of Game of Thrones was pretty boring). It's not full of sparkly action and gore and stuff. It's subtle (which I love!!!!! but not everyone appreciates), it's slow and smooth and kind of envelopes you into a warm hug. I can't even explain.
You just grow to love the characters, man, do you grow to love them. Oh and duh. You grow to hate some of them too. (Or you start out hating and always hate them).
That's why when I'm watching the Wire on my laptop I annoy and scare my roommate with my stream of curses and yells at the screen and mutters to myself. The Wire gets a rise out of you. (Or else something is wrong with your limbic system and you may be a sociopath). The Wire makes you angry, it makes you sad, and it makes you happy, and excited, and it's just overall a roller coaster ride.
It's taught me so much too, I feel like more than 4 years of college education did, more than my sheltered life has ever done for sure. And what's really AWESOME-LICIOUS is that it opened my eyes to a lot of parallels and similarities in reality. I mean, in S5 there was that line Bunk said, "In this country deaths of black men don't mean a thing" (I'm paraphrasing here), and I'm just sitting there with my mouth open at how eerily relevant it is to 2016. I mean with the Black Life Matters and all those incidents from last year???? Another deep hit in the gut that hey, all these issues are not new. Are not recent. The Wire has been talking about it circa 2003. And decades before that, it's been the same. 2016, it still is the same, and it is depressing to think in 2036, it might still be the same.
That's the whole message from the last season of the show: the cycles. Repeating, going on. The game is forever rigged and it outlasts the people.
And the game is not just the drug game. It's life, it's everything. The school system is a game; politics is a game; even newspapers run the same sort of pretend-game that keeps the bigshots at the top, and the people who actually have ethics and values on the bottom. Just the way it is.
I'm going to be a medical student and let's face it, I'll be part of an institution too. I already hear all this about UPMC being evil. Capitalism at its finest (but see how messed up China is too---maybe it's truly universal).
Institutions or not, it's still about the individuals, the people, I think---and The Wire does that, it zooms out and zooms in, plays a great balance. In the series 5 montage they show faces of Baltimore, Black, white, Hispanic, whoever, these faces that are Baltimore more than the players. They don't know what's going on outside of their own lives. They don't expect change, they just go on living the way they know how.
So even though it's a sobering/pessimistic ending for Baltimore, I'm still cheering when Bubbles sits down at the table, I'm grinning when Carver gets promoted (even as Daniels leaves for Valchek), I'm sighing indulgently at Kima and Bunk the new dynamic duo...
I'm even happy for McNulty, a bittersweet happy, because he was great police, he really was. And Lester, a true loss to the system. But there's some slivers of hope---getting out of that could be better for their health, and well, maybe it's fair too.
Bittersweet- that word to describe The Wire. For every like 5 horrible gut-wrenching-makes-me-want-to-throw-my-computer moments, there's that one beautiful uplifting moment, you know, and although that doesn't cancel out the bad moments, it's rewarding to watch.
Here I would like to honor in memory some of the best-now-dead-fictional-characters, may your legacy live on:
- Omar
- Bodie
- Wallace
- D'Angelo
- Frank Sobotka
- Prop Joe
- Butchie!!!!
I'd like to nominate some people for the Most-Character-Growth&Development-Award:
- Carver
- Prez
- Bodie
- Bubz!!!!
- Dee
- Slim Charles (like who was this guy? I didn't even remember him appearing in S3, but man, I find him to be the coolest guy---and alarmingly attractive loll---at the end)
- Cutty
- Wee-Bey
- Stringer
Best Written Character, flawed-as-hell-but-you-just-like-them:
- McNulty
- Annoying lying sonabitch reporter, name does not even deserve to be stated
- The white guys at the top of The Sun
- Kenard (I don't care if he's like 6)
- Levy
- Carcetti (dude, I used to like you in S3 and 4, Tommy. If I knew you were rotten as Littlefinger all along!!!!)
- CLAY DAVIS
- Cheese (hehe, at least he's dead, thanks Slim!)
Characters I hated with burning passion for a while but... met their right fate:
- Snoop (that last minute, man)
- Chris (I guess he was just the muscle man---him and Wee-Bey in the montage was super fitting)
- Marlo (but note I will never forgive him for Bodie and Butchie and Randy, fuck yeah, Randy!!)
Best comic relief:
- Bunky Bunk!
- That black guy on Carcetti's team (lol sorry forgot his name)
- Donut (it took me while to remember him, but seeing him in S4 finale was so endearing!)
- Jay Landsman, haha
- Rawls (at some points)
"Good people":
- Bunny
- Gus (you go, Gus!)
- Daniels
- Kima
- Bunk
Best bromance:
- Carver & Herc (even if I am not as fond of Herc!)
- McNulty & Bunk
- Avon & Stringer
- Michael & Dukie
Last but not least my babies:
- RANDY
- Michael Lee
- Dukie (oh, Dukie T_T, why you gotta...)
- Bodie (can you tell I really love Bodie?)
- Omar ("")
Well, what a great show it was. It's already been 2 days since I finished the S5 finale but I'm still hung up over it, reading articles, rewatching clips, listening to soundtrack, writing blogs (laugh-cry-face).
The Wire is hands down one of the BEST shows I've watched, if not the best (in terms of script and filming and acting). Thank you David Simon (if I could get to see him in real life one day I'll probably just pass out). Thank you to all the people involved, and btw how cool is it that some of the actors from previous seasons popped back for cameos in S5 (like Nick and Shardene and Poot!).
One last note: I wish to point out that every time I watch a movie trailer and see one of the actors from The Wire appear I start spasming and whisper-screaming, "HOLY THAT'S STRINGER/CARCETTI/MCNULTY/OMAR!!!!"
(I recognized Stringer's voice as that police chief in Zootopia. HAHAHAHA the irony!!!!!! -looks around, sad no one else gets it-)
Thank you, The Wire. 爱你一万年！
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