The Wire: A Final Farewell

"...life is made of ever so many partings welded together..."
-- Great Expectations by Charles Dickens

I feel like Bubbles.

Not the fifth season, top-floor resurrected, clean-shaven Bubbles. I’m talking pre-stair climb, cart-pushing, vacant room resident Bubbles. It has been one week since HBO's definitive urban drama The Wire ended its powerful five-year indictment of America’s war on drugs and I need a fix.

For the past week, I kept holding my breath, hoping that somehow some way, David Simon and Ed Burns, co-creators of The Wire, would return, finding another murky crevice of Baltimore to explore. But now, seven days later, the fact that The Wire is truly over is starting to feel as real as the show felt when it was on.

It feels odd now, almost post-apocalyptic, like the world ended when The Wire went off and I was one of the unlucky ones who got left behind to the brain poisoning of shows like Flavor of Love 3. In that case, I guess I’m more like Dukie. Everything else on TV seems lifeless but alternatives don’t seem to exist. And not only that but, as weird as it sounds, characters from the incredible show have been making cameos in my dreams. Two nights ago, I dreamt I was talking to Michael about his turning point scene with Snoop in this last season:

"How my hair look?"

"You look good, girl."

And now when I watch movies, I draw connections between characters like how the ice-cold kingpin Marlo could easily embody the Coen Brothers’ "unstoppable evil" archetype most recently seen in "No Country For Old Men" with Anton Chirgurh, the heartless hitman played immaculately by Javier Bardem.

That is how it happens. The Wire creeps into your subconscious and stays there for good. It keeps you hooked long after it's over. That is part of the genius of Simon and Co. But it is so much more than that. The Wire found a way to connect worlds that, in real life, mainstream media aims to compartmentalize. There are no good guys or bad guys. There are only people with problems and potential and pain. Often, it has been said that The Wire can be compared to the fiction of Charles Dickens with its vast cast sprawled across socioeconomic levels, political spheres and the institutions that make the world go round and, too often, go wrong. Simon himself has often said that it is a novel.

This year, in its fifth and final season, The Wire -- with its compelling cast, interwoven plotlines and unflinching dialogue – reached critical mass. Every 10 minutes, some critic or blogger would post another entry rightly praising the genuine genius of the show (despite a common distaste for this season’s journalism angle). You could catch the back and forth dialogue at the TV Club at Slate, where Jacob Weisberg famously called it "The Best Show On Television." Or read the regular Wire commentary on Salon, which awarded the show its first-ever "Buffy" award. I even found a site that answered one of my original questions: why do white people like The Wire so much? My personal favorite was a New York Times’ Freakonomics blog called "What Do Real Thugs Think of The Wire? by Sudhir Venkatesh, author of "Gang Leader for a Day." And also Alan Sepinwall’s excellent Q&A with Simon. Or you could read this 6,000-word piece breaking down the first two seasons and urging us all to tune in.

Like all other Wire addicts, I too have become a private PR rep, pushing the show toward anyone in range, calling out like a corner boy. (“I got that new Wire DVD box set. Season Four.”) I got my girl on it, too. And when I’m out and I run into a fellow fanatic, it instantly becomes a point of connection. But for all the other millions who say “what’s The Wire?” or “so and so was telling me about it, but I never got into it,” all I can say is you’re missing out on a crucial part of life. But like “The Matrix,” no one can truly be told what The Wire is. You really do have to see it for yourself. And like the last film in “The Matrix” trilogy, The Wire ends with a system reboot: Michael is the new Omar and Dukie the new Bubbles. Sydnor is the new McNulty and Carver the new Daniels. And little Kenard is a Marlo-in-the-Making. Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

The Wire has made such a poignant societal statement. And Cheese (rapper Method Man) summed it up best as he delivered the show’s five season epitaph: "There ain't no back in the day. Ain't no nostalgia. Just the street and the game…"

There are so many pieces of the series that you could extrapolate and spend forever writing about, analyzing the subtle symbolism or examining the parallels of certain story arcs. You could write about the indelible mark it has made on hip hop. Felicia Pearsons, the callous killer known as Snoop, and Michael K. Williams, everyone’s favorite old-school homo stick-up king with a code, Omar, supposedly have rap projects on the way. Or try to figure out why The Wire, with its predominately black cast, has been disgracefully ignored by Emmy voters.

But it is over now. And so I too bid a final farewell to the greatest show to ever be shown on the box, flip through the TV menu in vain and let Mr. Simon and Co. do the honors of concluding this eulogy with this excerpt from their thought-provoking TIME Magazine piece:

We write a television show. Measured against more thoughtful and meaningful occupations, this is not the best seat from which to argue public policy or social justice. Still, those viewers who followed The Wire — our HBO drama that tried to portray all sides of inner-city collapse, including the drug war, with as much detail and as little judgment as we could muster — tell us they've invested in the fates of our characters…

These viewers, admittedly a small shard of the TV universe, deluge us with one question: What can we do? If there are two Americas — separate and unequal — and if the drug war has helped produce a psychic chasm between them, how can well-meaning, well-intentioned people begin to bridge those worlds?

And to this question, they propose the following, not as a complete solution, but as an effective form of dissent:

If asked to serve on a jury deliberating a violation of state or federal drug laws, we will vote to acquit, regardless of the evidence presented. Save for a prosecution in which acts of violence or intended violence are alleged, we will — to borrow Justice Harry Blackmun's manifesto against the death penalty — no longer tinker with the machinery of the drug war. No longer can we collaborate with a government that uses nonviolent drug offenses to fill prisons with its poorest, most damaged and most desperate citizens.