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David Simon's Grand Scheme

This week I snarfed down the last half of The Wire's second season. Thursday, the combination of the last few episodes plus a bit of work I had to do kept me awake until 4:15 in the morning. Around the solstice, that's only an hour or two before the sun starts to come up; I definitely remember hearing the birds chirping as I feel asleep. Season one was a carefully cooked onion, where each episode reveals a linear expansion of the case against the Barksdale crew, the faint corruption of the brass at the Baltimore Police Department, or another level of messed up intra-office politics. Season two, on the other hand, is that big knot of pasta that you forgot to drizzle with oil after draining. You try to pick up a few strands of it and instead you get the whole wad, which is too big to fit in your mouth at once, and if you try to bite off a piece you'll nearly choke trying to get it down. I don't want to go into too many details, lest I spoil the show for those who haven't watched it yet, but both seasons are definitely money well spent.

At this point it's become clear to me that Simon's point is not to show us the pointlessness of the War on Some Drugs When Used by Some People, nor the undiscussed consequences gentrification has for the city-living working class, or the failure institutions (be they gangs, police departments, or even the courts). Nor is is his point simply to tell a good story that we enjoy. No, he has much a much darker motive -- the creation of a new subculture of addicts, hooked not on heroin, cocaine, the money, or the intoxicating allure of political power, but on his dang TV show. By 2006, Simon will be pushing his product on hundreds of thousands if not millions of users, HBO and the cable companies will all be getting points on the package, and he will have successfully cowed television critics who view him as a mythic force unstoppable in his quest; no one will snitch on Simon and his crew. He will have become the Avon Barksdale of pay cable, which I can only assume was his intention all along.

Where's my season three, darnit. I need another hit. Simon better get his re-up soon or I'm going to have to go find someone with an inferior product.

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Last updated by Nicholas Beaudrot on 12:31 26 June 2005