[KenDouglas]

Spoiler Alert!

Several years ago HBO showed a series called The Wire. It is regarded by some (probably many) critics as the best TV series of all time. Actually, it was well done, well acted, quite engrossing. I eagerly awaited what would happen next.

The most interesting, likable character was a gay criminal! The twist was he only stole from other criminals. He was so intelligent they never could catch him. He drove the bad guys absolutely crazy. He ended up being shot and killed by a kid. What a bummer. But it was a clue to the worldview of the show.

That leads me to the ending which floored me.

After a long, painstaking investigation the police finally got the goods on a vicious, murderous drug kingpin. He was jailed. But for some arbitrary humbug that I no longer remember, he was released ! To continue on his merry, vicious, murderous ways.

In another thread, an obnoxious, corrupt politician was arrested and put on trial. He was found not guilty!

In still another thread, a journalist won the Pulitzer Prize. But it was for a story he made up. And it was never discovered! He kept basking in the glory until the end.

The message has to be that evil wins and there is no such thing as justice.

Ragnar and I are appalled.

[AdamSchmitz]

I too enjoyed “The Wire.” I think it is a much more intellectually stimulating show than “Breaking Bad.” (The two shows are often compared for the superficial reason that drugs are involved.)

What I think the show’s biggest strength to be is the concretization of the “War on Drugs” and how this war affects individuals in the communities of the Baltimore area. Over the course of the five seasons you see how the police deal with the drug dealers, how the addicts get by, how the citizens in the communities are adversely affected, and how crime is a necessary outcome of prohibition.

As with so much in our culture the show is a mixed bag although I do believe it is worth watching. The second season is by far my least favorite. It deals with the “death of the middle class” and, not unexpectedly, does not have a reasoned cause or solution to whatever the creator thinks the problem is. (David Simon is the creator of the show and is an avowed Leftist.) Seasons 3 through 5 each focus on an institution such as the schools, the city government, and the press. (Season 1 is an introduction and does not focus on anything except the cops and the bad guys.)

The ending is pure fatalism. Through a series of scenes you see previous characters who either died of an overdose, overcame their addiction, or were murdered being replaced by a new crop of people who fill the role. For instance, you see a 15 year old kid descend into heroin addiction replacing a character who recently became drug free. You then see a new drug dealer becoming quite powerful eventually towering over all the others, replacing a character that was earlier murdered. You come away with the sense that nothing will ever change and that crime is an inevitable way of life. (It is unclear if this fatalism is due to the continued prohibition or the creator’s metaphysics. So many of the story lines center around drugs and the huge sums of money flowing from the drug trade.)

In short, if you are in need of a show to watch and can handle a fair amount of language and violence you should try the first season.

[ZacharyKauble]

Spoilers!

“The message has to be that evil wins and there is no such thing as justice.”  

 

You’re absolutely right about that, Ken.   That’s the underlying premise for most of the shows on HBO.  Of course this is true in general of modern cinema, but HBO really emphasizes it…and they do so on a much more intellectual level.  

One series I enjoyed was Rome.  It is quite violent, but the production quality is amazing.  I was enthralled with it primarily because it offered a unique view into a pre-Christian world.  Of course HBO portrayed that world as an anything-goes malevolent universe.   But there were still accurate tidbits included that kept me interested.  

One of the main characters in Rome was  Lucius Vorenus.  He was the only character that had any virtues or integrity.  His sidekick,  Titus Pullo, was effectively a moral relativist.  You can guess who dies and who lives happily ever after in the end.

There are two notable exceptions to HBO’s nihilistic realism in my opinion….Band of Brothers and Entourage. Band of Brothers does have qualities of realism and once again is quite violent, but relatively speaking, it’s a largely romantic work.  It has positive themes and strong, virtuous, likable characters…some of which believe it or not survive in the end.  Again, the production quality is extraordinary.    

Entourage is the only TV series to my recollection that has a very clear theme about achieving success in life.   One of the most American characters in the history of modern television, Ari Gold, is portrayed in a largely positive light.  Of course we are living in the age of realism, so beggars can’t be choosers…Ari does lie and cheat from time to time, but on a relatively small scale.

And what does HBO do to him in the end?…he effectively gets eviscerated..giving up one of his one most important values (his job) for his shallow, cheating wife. 

[CedarBristol]

I have watched the first three seasons of The Wire 3 times now, and have loved it more every time. I have been thinking for a while of how to explain the greatness of this show to Objectivists, and I don’t have a good answer yet, but now is a good time to present what I do have.

There are no heroes in the story, but there is a theme and just about every scene in all five of the seasons supports the theme in a way that gets better each time I watch it.

David Simon is very much like a leftist, but different in ways that matter. Look at this quote from this talk.

“. . . I’m utterly committed to the idea that capitalism has to be the way we generate mass wealth in the coming century. That argument’s over. “

That quote is out of context, I could cherry pick some others that make him sound more like a typical leftist, but zooming in on that spotlights what’s different about David Simon vs. most writers today. He is willing to commit to something, even though in the same speech, he explicitly invokes pragmatism.

There is a Great Gatsby kind of grandeur to many of the characters in the Wire, only it resonates for me a lot more than F. Scott Fitzgerald’s work, which I hated, but read again a few times because there were elements in it that I liked. In a way, one sub-plot of The Wire amounts to the same story only with prohibition playing a bigger part, and romance playing none. I won’t name the character, but you will know who I’m talking about when you get to it.

Simon was a reporter for the Baltimore Sun for many years, that’s the paper that HL Mencken and William Manchester got their start at. He followed the police closely and wrote a book on his observations of Homicide detectives at work which became the basis for the show “Homicide”. Here’s another of the differences between Simon and the average leftist, he respects and admires law enforcement. The opening scene of The Wire, which establishes the theme which will go on to drive every scene is a word for word transcription of a conversation that actually occurred between Baltimore homicide detective Jay Landsman and a witness at the scene of a murder.  Jay Landsman appears as an actor in The Wire.

The theme is the irrepressible power of capitalism.

[Author]

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