This Ain't Your Daddy's Cop Show

HBO’s The Wire is gritty, honest, and seriously entertaining

By Matt Lynch

Let’s hear it for strike season! Because of those rascally WGA union members, I find myself low on material to crow about to you guys. A few scripted shows are back this month for one or two new episodes that were completed pre-strike, but all in all you won’t see this many “season finales” outside of May sweeps. So what’s a TV junkie to do? Go to the movies? Too expensive. Go outside? Too cold, and there are bugs and no TV. Spend time with friends and/or family? Too lame. But, as luck would have it, I actually have a few suggestions for your strike survival kit.

Like Superman rescuing a cat out of a tree, HBO has arrived to save you from collective bargaining by offering you the fifth and final season of The Wire. As I have said many, many times before, The Wire is the greatest piece of art that the medium of television has ever produced. If you don’t already know, it is a sprawling, ambitious show about the American city and the failure of our many institutions to protect and nurture us. Okay, that’s making it sound a bit too highbrow. On a more grounded level, it details the crossroads of the police, the gangs, the drug dealers, the politicians, and pretty much everything else in the city of Baltimore. This new season extends the reach of the series to encompass the media, more specifically Baltimore’s biggest newspaper, The Sun, for which The Wire’s creator, David Simon, was once a crime reporter for many years.

Distinctively featuring a noticeable lack of both heroes and villains, The Wire shows us a world in which, intentionally or otherwise and for good or ill, everyone at every level is compromised. Not necessarily corrupted, but intellectually and morally weakened in their service to whatever institution they answer to. And we are all, it tells us, subject to someone or something else. What hope it does offer is always provided at an often excruciating cost. Lest I make it sound too depressing, The Wire is at times also a deeply hilarious black comedy. In fact, having seen the first seven of the upcoming ten episodes, I would call this new season an exercise in pure, ugly satire.

Make no mistake, this is a bleak, sometimes confusing and intensely challenging program. For the uninitiated, jumping into the narrative now may be nearly impossible. But for those willing to take the plunge, there is no more moving, realistic, funny and rewarding show on television, nor may there ever be again. Yes, it is a country mile better than even The Sopranos. I say this without hyperbole.

In contrast, for those of you with a taste for a mere good time, FOX has unveiled a show that I’m sure you’re all waiting for. Yes, that’s sarcasm, but I’m here to tell you that Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles is a hell of a program. Spun off from the popular series of films, Terminator is a new weekly drama series detailing the attempts of Sarah Connor and her son John, future saviors of humanity, as they attempt to fend off Judgment Day, the day the evil machines nuke humankind. Hopefully you guys don’t think you’re too hip for a ridiculous show about robots from the future coming back to blast the hell out of us humans, because this show is really cool.

300’s Lena Headey takes over the role originated by Linda Hamilton in the films, and she makes an adequately convincing heavily armed suicidal nutjob, which goes a long way to making this show convincing and entertaining. It also helps, for those of you who consider yourselves sci-fi nerds, that it features none of the highfalutin posturing and pseudo-intellectual pretension of programs like Battlestar Galactica. Chock full of great special effects and loaded with gratuitous violence, The Sarah Connor Chronicles is like summer escapism lodged quietly on your Tivo.