Klosterman on The Wire
In making a case for Breaking Bad as the best show of the past decade, Chuck Klosterman offers fans of The Wire a reality check:
There’s never been a more obstinate fan base than that of The Wire; it’s a secular cult that refuses to accept any argument that doesn’t classify The Wire as the greatest artistic endeavor in television history. It’s almost as if these people secretly believe this show actually happened, and that criticizing the storyline is like mocking an episode of Frontline. This was not a documentary about Baltimore: Wallace is not alive and playing high school football in Texas, Stringer Bell was not reincarnated as a Pennsylvania paper salesman, and you are not qualified to lecture on inner-city education because you own Season 4 on DVD. The citizens on that show were nonexistent composites, and the events you watched did not occur. As a society, we must learn to accept this.
As for the show itself, he writes:
In The Wire, everyone is simultaneously good and bad. The cops are fighting crime, but they’re all specifically or abstractly corrupt; the drug dealers are violent criminals, but they’re less hypocritical and hold themselves to a higher ethical standard. There were sporadic exceptions to this rule, but those minor exceptions only served to accentuate its overall relativist take on human nature: Nobody is totally positive and nobody is totally negative, and our inherently flawed assessment of those qualities hinges on where we come from and what we want to believe. And this, of course, is closer to how life actually is (which is why The Wire felt so realistic). It’s a more sophisticated way to depict the world. However — from a fictional, narrative perspective — it ends up making the message a little less meaningful. If nothing is totally false, everything is partially true; depending on the perspective and the circumstance, no action is unacceptable. The conditions matter more than the participants. As we drift further and further from its 2008 finale, it increasingly feels like the ultimate takeaway from The Wire was more political than philosophical. Which is not exactly a criticism, because that’s an accomplishment, too … it’s just that it turns the plot of The Wire into a delivery mechanism for David Simon’s polemic worldview (which makes its value dependent on how much the audience is predisposed to agree with him).
I wouldn’t disagree, but I do wish there were more like Simon who had the guts to write and produce television that depicted such a “polemic worldview.” The show Breaking Bad, which I haven’t seen, seems on the face of it less political (or even philosophical) than just plain entertaining—in other words, nothing that quite breaks with the status quo.
