I just got through the first season of The Wire, and I must thank the many friends who have urged me toward the show (most compellingly, by more-or-less putting it in my hands, HB).  I’m excited for the rest of the series.

It didn’t take but the first scene (Snot Boogie) to see that this is a very good show, and inside of a few episodes to see that it may be much better than even that.  An early impression was that it feels like a book, the episodes more like chapters in a novel than the more complete but also closed units that television episodes usually are.  In this it is quite different from the last show that hooked me after its entire run was over: In The West Wing, it was an annoyance to me that whole plot lines could disappear somewhere between the roll of the credits and the start of the next episode.  With few exceptions (like every cliff-hanging season finale), each hour is a whole with non-essential narrative threads running out to the rest of the series — making it more like a collection of short stories than a novel.  I don’t think the writing on The West Wing, when at its best, is less sophisticated than that of The Wire, but this format, while less punishing to viewers picking up mid-season, allows much less room for depth and complexity — and so also, I’ll say it, greatness.

Most of The Wire‘s characters are very richly developed, and even those who are introduced in unsympathetic ways eventually become not only humanized but sympathized with and rooted for.  One arresting counter-example, though, is Maury Levy, who may be better described the way Brianna Barksdale refers to him in one episode: the Jew lawyer.  When he appeared once or twice, it was easy enough to let his sliminess lie with the mystery of his character; but he keeps coming back, and is tied to more and more characters, yet remains completely shallow and completely despicable.

I first assumed he was a public defender, though with the presence of a stylishly-dressed Barksdale man in the courtroom, maybe that was foolish.  Later, when he smacks D’Angelo on the head while walking him out of the police department, and asks how many times he has to tell “you people,” (and D’Angelo gives a hell of a look to the detectives) the assumption seemed all right to me.  He’s some poor schlub, not a very good lawyer, probably somewhat racist, drawn into a job he didn’t much like because he couldn’t get another one, or from some youthful idealism that waned some time ago along with the energy it would take to leave.  But he’s not a public defender, and he seems to be a fine lawyer, and he works for the Barksdale clan.  And his entire motivation as a character is mysterious to me.  I have to suppose it’s money, but it’s not clear that he’s getting so much of it — or that it would be so hard to get otherwise — to rationalize what he’s complicit in.  About all that’s clear is that he is profoundly wicked, certainly one of the most and perhaps indeed the most remorselessly and irredeemably evil characters in the first season of the show.  He is aware not just of drug dealing but of murders — including murders of innocent witnesses, one of whom seems to have been killed following his legal advice — and he continues to pull strings to keep the perpetrators from the law.  And unlike most of the actual killers, we are given no reason to sympathize with or even to understand him, not shown that he was raised for this life, or that he is providing for a family the only way he knows how, or that he is defending an amoral family empire, or that he follows a harsh code but is in some way a patron of his community — nothing.  And it’s striking that while both of the recurring lawyers on the show — Levy and prosecutor Rhonda Pearlman — are presumably Jewish, the latter’s Jewishness is (by the end of the first season at least) invisible apart from surname, while Levy’s is unmistakable and explicit.

Omar, on the other hand, is the secret star.  Something about him suggests to me the Western hero — the individualism, the respect for the lawman and yet the lack of use for the law (not contempt for, mind you: lack of use for), the penchant for the double-barrel, the whistle.  The calm, steady theatricality of him.  Once he paraphrased Emerson, (or is it really Oliver Wendell Holmes?) I cast my lot with him forever.  I’m glad he’s made it to the end of the season alive.  I hope the show goes places with him.

I was also drawn in, strangely and unexpectedly, by near-constant resonance with my experience as a public school teacher in Mississippi; but not, as a reader might expect, for some demographic similarities between my students and the cast of characters, but rather for the massive and catastrophically failing bureaucracies — the people getting punished for doing their jobs too well, the punishing of already over-worked people by giving them even more work, the important and obvious things slipping by because nobody wants or is able to take responsibility for them, the obsession with reportable and publishable numbers that sacrifices all else including a concern for what those numbers ostensibly represent, the petty careerism and politics.  McNulty has a hostile conversation with a superior in one episode and I remember having an essentially similar one with my principal.  This resonance excites me for season four, which I’m told focuses on the public schools.

And since I’m now throwing out impressions and observations, I may as well throw a linguistic one: the use of police as a singular, non-collective noun.  As in, “You’re a good police,” or, “They shot a police.”  I like it a lot.  I wonder if it’s part of the lingo across the country, or if it’s peculiar to Baltimore or the mid-Atlantic, and if it predates gender sensitivities over “policeman” (I’d expect avoidance of those sensitivities with “officer”).

And now, onto season two. . .