Self-Righteous Indignation

The tag line in a recent Newsweek piece on The Wire summed it up nicely: “For five seasons, critics have worshiped The Wire—and lamented that more people don’t. Now’s your last chance to catch what may be TV’s best drama ever.” Along with the critics, fans of the show, small in number but very dedicated, have been telling people about this terrific drama, and for a number of reasons new viewers have been slow to come around.

The only comparable television show to The Wire would be The Sopranos, the recently retired other-greatest-drama-ever. Both featured plot lines that carried over multiple episodes and often seasons. Both centered, at least in part, on crime. Both used the allure of a crime show to draw in viewers who would then be exposed to the themes that most interested the Davids who created and ran the shows–David Chase of The Sopranos and David Simon of The Wire. Both were, and are, so well made that one would be hard-pressed to find anyone–critic, fan or casual viewer–who could deny the quality of the shows.

But while The Sopranos would grow to become a big part of our pop-culture vernacular, drawing what are for pay-TV very large numbers of viewers on each new showing, The Wire has struggled along. The Sopranos regularly drew 8 million viewers per episode, The Wire usually has about half of that, and their season 5 premier recently drew only 1.2 million.

There are plenty of reasons for only 1.2 million people watching the premier of The Wire on January 6. First, it was running on Comcast’s HBO OnDemand a full week before the sixth. Additionally, episodes 1, 2, 5, 6, and 7 are available via download or streaming media on a few Internet sites. So fans who were chomping at the bit had plenty of opportunity to see the episode prior to the January 6 premier date. The first episode additionally will run several more times on HBO and HBO2 during the following week, and will remain on OnDemand through the end of the season, meaning a subscriber can catch up later. Put all these factors together, and 1.2 million is certainly not an accurate account of how many people were eagerly anticipating the first episode of the last season of The Wire. The Sopranos, in comparison, did not premier a week early on OnDemand, and the episodes were extraordinarily closely guarded, with no major Internet leaks prior to the premier of each episode.

I’ve tried to convert viewers. I’ve pleaded with people that this is a program that is novelistic in scope, much like reading Moby Dick or Dickens. Or, as one character says in Episode 2 of the new season: “an amorphous series on society’s ills.” I’ve explained to friends, to work associates, to people in bars that it’s above The Sopranos, because it dares to be about all of America. I’ve had only one success. My wife, would not watch a single episode during the first few seasons. She’d take a glance at the TV, see a couple gangsters talking about the dope trade and who needed to be killed next, and would proceed to open a book. She started on Season 4 and became so hooked so quickly that we quickly had to rent Seasons 1-3 so she could catch up.

One of the big challenges for The Wire as far as bringing in new audience members is the need for a newbie to catch up. If someone saw Season 5 Episode 2, with all the talk between Marlo and Avon and Sergei, not only would that new viewer not understand the depth of the conversation–especially Avon’s olive branch to Marlo–they would not understand the basic plot. Sample explanation: You see, back in Season 3, Avon and Stringer argued over joining the Co-Op with Proposition Joe Stewart…Wait, who’s Stringer…Oh, he was one of the central characters in Seasons 1-3 but he’s dead now. Anyway, Avon hates the Co-Op and East Siders, see he used to run the West Side, and now Marlo runs it, and Avon and Marlo were at war in Season 3 but despite that they share a dislike for Prop Joe….Who’s Prop Joe?…Oh, he’s the big guy who ran the co-op meeting at the hotel last week. Remember? Short dreadlocks and reading glasses, kind of freckled? Yeah, so he runs the East Side and the Co-Op, but it looks like, ok this guy Sergei is from Season 2, when…

You would have to pause the show for 20 minutes every 5 minutes to get your new viewer caught up. HBO did a nice job of running all of The Wire on Comcast OnDemand over the three months leading up to the final season. They ran Season 4 last month, Season 3 in November, Season 2 in October, Season 1 in September. But I have a problem with the way they did this, and I think it has cost them viewers for the final season. When each new season appeared on OnDemand, they took the last season off. So the only way a complete newcomer would have used this service to catch up on the show is if that viewer 1. Knew that the final season was coming in 4 months; 2. Knew that Comcast was running the episodes OnDemand; and 3. Was willing to put in the time to watch them all. But HBO didn’t do any marketing to let their subscribers know that this was coming. So if you were flipping through the OnDemand menu in November and found Season 3, you were already way behind. They should have left all the episodes up–and they should still be up. The Wire has been in the news lately, with just about every critic in print journalism saying the same thing as Newsweek: the best thing you have never seen. If these episodes were still on OnDemand, perhaps a few new viewers would hustle up and catch up to this series. (I can say from experience, it’s not impossible to watch 1.5 seasons of The Wire in a long weekend and another 2 seasons in the course of a week of evenings.)

HBO is delusional regarding the pricing of their DVDs. Each of the three seasons of Deadwood retail for $99.98. Each box has 12 episodes that clock in just under one hour, and a few hours of supplemental material. So you’re paying over $8.25 per episode. The Sopranos DVDs are priced the same: $99.98 for Season 6 Part 1, 720 minutes of content. The Wire is not as exorbitantly priced. $60 per season for 13 episodes of Season 4, only $4.61 per hour, a bargain compared to the others. On the surface, it compares well to other television on DVD: both Lost and Desperate Housewives retail at $60 per season. However, they both offer about 50% more content for the $60 price tag: Season 1 of Lost has 1068 minutes of content, so at $3.37 per hour it’s over 25% less expensive than The Wire. Perhaps if HBO priced their DVDs more accordingly against other televised drama, they would have more success in selling those DVDs and gaining new viewers and new subscribers. This is especially the case for The Wire, a show that Simon himself has described as being a show for the underdog, the downtrodden, the people society often forgets.

The nature of The Wire such that character is far more important that plot. Going back to high school English, we know that plot is what happens: Bunk and Landsman take this kid and convince him that a photocopier is a lie detector capable of indicting the kid in a murder. Story is what’s going on beneath the plot, it’s what we’re watching is about: the police in Baltimore resort to creative deception to lure not-too-bright criminals into admitting guilt. While The Wire does not want for plot, it relishes story, and the story for Simon and his crew of writers is derived from character. We who have watched and lived with these characters for four years know them like they are family–small spoiler, but not too major: when Randy Wagstaff appears for a couple minutes later this year, we know all we need to know about him, and we’re not surprised one bit by his situation or his reaction to what happens around him. The richness of the interaction he has with another character is rewarding, and it’s rewarding because we have spent time with him and we’ve put in time thinking about him. It comes from character and from story, both of which have been very carefully and accurately drawn by the writers of The Wire.

The Wire runs 180 degrees opposite of most of the rest of television. This is not Law & Order or CSI, which work within the framework of the classic television policier: 1. Cold open with crime, 2. Credits, 3. Commercials, 4. Act 1 in which we learn about the crime and the people involved, 5. Commercials, 6. Act 2 in which the investigative work is done and we get a little bit of character work from the supporting actor playing the suspect/relative of the victim/witness to the crime, 7. Commercials, 8. The solution to the crime. All is resolved, and we do it again next week. In The Wire all is not resolved every week. In fact, very little is resolved. We get a burst of violence here and there, a few characters are killed off, some go to jail, but the stor–not the plot, but the story–continues to unfold, week after week, season after season. McNulty’s drinking problem, the bureaucracy of the police department, the financial mess the city of Baltimore is in, these bits of story run on and on. The Wire runs against the grain of episodic TV, and it’s especially a hard pill to swallow in the post-MTV age of YouTube, in which our attention spans are growing even shorter. Simon et posse demand our attention for a long period of time–in this case five years, and it’s a lot to ask and it costs him viewers.

But Simon doesn’t really care. From the Newsweek piece: “(smaller viewership) pleases Simon enormously because it appeals to his underdog instincts, and his conviction that bare-knuckled authenticity isn’t for everyone. And besides, he’s got the fans he really wants. ‘I’d rather have the allegiance of these people than all the viewers in the world,’ he says. ‘Mainstream America has 100 shows to love. The other America has this one. I’m proud of that.’” Simon’s attitude is what makes The Wire so damn good. He doesn’t care if he fits in with the rest of TV, he’s making a show about the forgotten people in a forgotten city in a country in great decline. It’s grand Greek tragedy, in which the institutions fail the people in them and no knights in shining armor–or even a collection of knights in somewhat tarnished armor–exist to bring the city out of its slump. This is not Sex and The City in which all the characters are upscale women-on-the-make in the Big Apple. This is the slums, the police station and city hall in one of the most depressing cities in the US. And Simon is a misanthrope with little trust in the types of characters found in more mainstream television. He’s interested in the little people, those who struggle with life every day, and those who want to make things better but are restricted by the institutions in which they live and work. So while Simon’s maverick instinct is what makes the show so good, it’s also what turns off viewers. Not everyone is interested in a show that, if pitched in a single sentence would be described as “an amorphous series on society’s ills.” It’s big, it’s difficult, it’s grandiose–like The Sopranos–but it’s very liberal, and it’s not for everyone, unlike The Sopranos.