Gotta keep the devil way down in the hole

So you've heard of The Wire, right? The HBO show every TV critic hails as the greatest drama in TV history, and you know about three people who have ever seen the thing, right? Those three people say it's the most amazing thing they've ever seen, right?

Well, let me be among the three people you know who tell you it's the most amazing thing I've ever seen. I say these days that I don't have time in my ridiculous schedule to watch entire movies, or that when I start to watch any movie I would just fall asleep, which is true and I would, but it's telling that in the week in which Ingmar Bergman and Michalangelo Antonioni died within a 24 hour period, I haven't rewatched any of their movies. There are images from Wild Strawberries and Persona - the two Bergman masterpieces I find most astonishing - that I cannot shake, of course, but I have not rewatched either, and I own both. Reading of Antonioni's death, Gary Susman began to write of L'Avventura: "L'Avventura changed the rules of movie narrative with its unresolved ending (a young woman goes missing early in the picture; she is never found, and her disappearance is never explained). The film was both a parable of human existence and a specific dissection of the society of his day, in which affluence and permissiveness had replaced humane values."

This is true. Also, until I read this, I'd forgotten I'd seen L'Avventura, a movie I now remember thrilled me. Oops.

What I'm not forgetting this week? To slip in hour periods into my schedule, sometimes at the expense of lseep, to watch another hour of The Wire. The Wire especially gets praise for its most recent fourth season, however, being where I am now, on episode 7 of the second season (just past half way), I cannot possibly imagine the show being any more perfect than it is right now.

The Wire in its first season introduces us to the two sides of Baltimore's war on drugs. First, the detectives of various moral fortitude, driven by ambition, greed, seniority, luck, nepotism, career aspirations, anger, sleaze, and everything in between - which is to say, it mirrors reality. Then, the dealers of west side housing projects - some with moral questions, some third generations of drug slingers, some secretly in business classes, some holding up lost in paranoia in strip club back rooms. Which is to also say, it mirrors reality.

I can't say that enough. The Sopranos, by virture of comparison, managed to be so incredbile because of its breadth of detail, and because it featured the full length of human personality in its group of mobsters, allowing their humanity and human-ness to exist so thoroughly over a realistic portrayal of time - it proved TV could be the real great mechanism to tell stories by telling a 7-year story in 7 years.

The Wire was touted as "difficult to follow" when it premiered, but I do not think The Wire was at all more difficult to follow than The Sopranos. It is incredbily detailed, often letting plot lines reveal themselves over many episodes. It is less flashy than The Sopranos, and is, if anything, even less respectful about the rules of narrative television - of what dramatic tics an hour of television is supposed to display. What a thrill that is, though - moments explode and shock, and do so with no way of knowing what will happen. It is, I must say, as unpredictable as life. I remember one extraordinary moment in the first season in which Bubbles, the heroin-addict police informant played fearlessly by Andre Royo, goes to an AA meeting, and, hearing a speaker, accidentally reveals his lost desire to live - it's told with a walk to a podium and just a flicker of the eyes during a ribbon presentation, but who could have expected that that scene would lead to that reaction? I like to think I'm good at that sort of thing, but I sure didn't see it coming.

What that life-like unpredictability does is re-assert the draw of the police show - if anything is possible, how do you solve crimes? The Wire frees itself from whodunnit sameness, making every uncovered bit of information hard-fought and stunning. In fact, it unfolded its myserties so precisely in season one, that I was at first reluctant to get into the change presented in season 2 - a focus on Baltimore's ports, and their effects on the drug and police world. Yet as that mystery's unfolded, I've begun to like it even more. And the breadth and unfamiliarity of its central case - about 13 murdered Eastern European sex trade workers smuggled in on the port - only make it more unmissable.

Season 2 appears, at first, to be about Frank Sabotka, played by Chris Bauer, the Polish boss of the ports for whom the detectives of season 1 re-assemble to investigate, but its focus has really been Sabotka's idiot son Ziggy (James Ransone) and trailer-bred badass nephew Nick (Pablo Schreiber) as they, out of desperation for more money, get deeper and deeper into smuggling. Ransone and Schreiber are key in the incredible vividenss of those characters, but its Bauer's Sabotka that is making this season such a mystery and an accomplishment - an episode-7 scene in which he rails at a Baltimore Congressman about the implications of a system of robotic dock equipment (meaning less work for the union, and less ways to smuggle goods) is amongst the most thrilling moments of rage I've witnessed. A climactic moment in which he throws a shoebox of money on the table is chilling in its anger, disappointing in its amorality, and full of human things like obligation and fear. Bergman and Antonioni helped us be able to express those emotions on screen. The Wire helped fulfill them.