“…mere mortal country boys who don’t live in New York.”

“…schools depicted in Season 1.” Of course I meant 4.

“…turn rowdiness into at least partly useful discipline.”

Baltimore feels itself to be the country, partly because it had a huge influx over the latter half of the 20th Century of rural southerners, and partly because it knows of New York and Washington and will always and forever be a backwater compared to them. Cf. “The Streets of Baltimore” (a great song), the fact that “Thank God I’m a Country Boy” (not a great song at all) is played at Orioles games, David Simon’s explanation of poor whites in Baltimore and how they can from WV, TN, and other parts of the South.

I think your explanation about the second season’s lack of wholeness has to be largely right.

I think the feds are a useful counterpoint to Brother Mouzone, and I think that they both illustrate that the Wire’s scope is purely to tell the story of Baltimore. It’s not there to illustrate the broader problems and stories of America: not only would that be impossible and ruin the show’s other excellences, but the writers don’t have that knowledge and thus, wisely, I think, don’t fall victim to hubris in trying to explore those other topics. I think New York and the feds do feel like the deus ex machina to Baltimore, just other Greek gods of the system swooping in for their own purposes and heedless of the mere mortal country boys who live in New York.

I think you’re on the right track about with the third season appears to be about no one thing by noting that local politics just doesn’t rise to the level to become interesting in its own right. City hall is not the U.S. Capitol or the Statehouse: it has to remain responsible for and victimized by the actions of rogue cops such as Colvin simply because the city politicians don’t really have that much more power than their citizens and certainly don’t have enough distance from them to develop their own invincible auras. They live in the same city, after all, and thus have no fancy capital to retreat to and by whose crazy machinations to insulate themselves from the voters. I think of the local police officers trying to answer to the angry crowd of mothers sick of violence; he loses to them a fair percentage of the time.

I think I know what you mean about the physicality of your reaction to the schools depicted in Season 1. I went to a middle school that has portions its classes be as Mr. Prezbo’s was, and for the first semester of 6th grade was placed in such a one. My parents (and the teachers, frankly) finally got me out of it and into the polite and more suburban (though not majority white) other traveling section. But I had forgotten about that old fear and paralysis, that requirement of holding yourself a certain way in the halls, where every passing juvenile male could and would just yell at you and bang a locker (if you were lucky) as they do to Bunny and then his academic compatriot. I hate to sound trite, and to compare small sufferings to great, but I think it was trauma in a very real sense to go to that building every day, and so I believe I can sympathize at least in some way with Mary’s sickened reaction in remembering this pain. I’ll say this, however: a teacher who could control her classroom had the ability very quickly to turn rowdiness into at least partly discipline. That I was taught math by the incompetent teacher and social studies, language arts, and science by competent teachers may have played a large role in convincing me (without warrant) that I was not good at the one subject and good at the others. And I’m the lucky one in this story!