"It's about the characters, stupid"

Having finished the first season of The Wire (and the first episode of season two), I think I've figured out what my problem with it is: I'm not engaged by the characters. I don't mean to say that I don't like The Wire; I think it is brilliant, and great, and powerful, but so far it isn't the best show on television to me, because I don't love it. That sounds cheesy and it's about to get worse. There's no beauty in The Wire (for me). I am cognizant of the quality of what I'm watching, but I don't care.

As a writer I'm a character guy. My first priority in a story is always making the characters true and real; while of course I think about themes and motifs and structure and mechanics and what have you, if it undercuts the characters, it goes. On The Wire, I can't help but feel that the characters are working for the story and not the other way around. A part of it is likely simply that the characters are for the most part quite pedestrian--McNulty, setting aside the quality of the series and simply looking at the substance of his character, is a character I've seen a thousand times before in nearly every cop show ever: self-righteous, arrogant, intelligent, divorced, battling with his wife for custody, fucking another woman. This is more-or-less the sum total of his character at the end of season one. There's nothing interesting here. And the same goes for almost all of the characters. (I find Stringer Bell fascinating, but that may just be me.)

This is a problem of writing that's, if not easily, at least forseeably fixable. Develop the characters more, write them better, actually care about making them interesting. From what I've heard of the rest of the series, though, I'm not holding my breath, and the reason is not because of poor writing (or at least, writing not focused on the characters, because very little of the writing on The Wire is actually poor). It's because the show isn't about characters. Creator and show-runner David Simon has famously stated that The Wire is a portrait of a city; more generally, it is regarded as a show about the bureaucratic brutality of institution (or organization, system, structure, order). Supposedly, it's about how individuals are compromised by being part of institutions, and how institutions rarely serve the individuals that make them up. Ironically, it seems, The Wire is a demonstration of this phenomenon: the quality of the individual characters is subordinated to the services of crafting its thematic message.

At least, I think that's what it is. The other quality The Wire is famous for, its absolute commitment to realism, could also be responsible--David Simon was a journalist before getting into the television business, and much of The Wire (along with his other television projects) is based on his experiences shadowing the actual Baltimore Police Department. I recall reading that the characters of The Wire are almost entirely combinations of people that Simon actually met in the course of this journalistic work. But if I say it's this realism, or (God forbid) lack of imagination, then the question becomes: was there no one actually interesting in the Baltimore Police Department? (Aside from an old man who made doll house furniture in his spare time, at least.)

And here, as I reconsider the characters, I think that a lot of them have potential. Freamon is awesome, Prez is amusing and fun to watch, the two old guys who get out early have hints of greater things, Daniels is great as the guy stuck between Scylla and Charybdis and doing the best he can. Really, I think the problem with the characters of The Wire is minor, one that may well be entirely my personal preferences, and one that could be fixed with just a little bit of spice. Push the envelope just slightly more, make it slightly more extreme, slightly more out-there, slightly more intense (maybe even slightly more comedic), but move just slightly beyond the limits of journalism and documentary and realism. This is a television drama, not a journalistic work of non-fiction. It isn't realistic and trying to be robs it of its power. (But then, I don't think journalistic works of non-fiction are realistic, either; to me, everything's a narrative, and "facts" are a bit of a joke.)

The Doctor (David Tennant) and Rose (Billie Piper) in "The Impossible Planet", Doctor Who (2006).
Fiction, I think, works because it isn't real. Even realistic fiction, like The Wire, is beyond real, and it's at its best when it accepts this. I'm reminded of Doctor Who, the monumental British sci-fi series perhaps most famous for its supreme cheesiness. But at least the new series of Doctor Who, launched in 2005, couples that cheesiness and absolute disregard for sensical plots with a serious dedication to true characters. It takes The Doctor--a 900-year-old alien "Time Lord" responsible for the genocide of both his greatest enemies and his own people--and plays him as a manic-depressive compulsive wanderer who is friendly towards everyone but makes actual friends with no one (at least until he meets Rose Tyler). The quality is highly variable, but when it's at its best the new Who is some of the most powerful stuff currently on television (in particular, the two-parter from season three set in 1913, "Human Nature"/"The Family of Blood").

I'm not suggesting that The Wire should abandon its commitment to realism, or focus exclusively on its characters, or any serious, extreme shifts that would change the fundamental nature of the show. (Besides, the show's finished now anyway, and I'm playing catch-up.) I'm just using Doctor Who as an examle of the extreme. I think The Wire would have benefited greatly from just a little bit of fantasy, a little bit of over-the-top, a little bit above and beyond. Not just because it's easier to get to the point and tell a story that way--worrying about realism is really hard work after all--but because life, at least the way people live it, is always a little bit of fantasy, a little bit of over-the-top, a little bit above and beyond. People don't see their own lives as ordinary (even if they're depressed and call it that, they're considering their lives to actually be below ordinary); they seem them as just a little bit more. And they're right.