Entertainment :: Television
The Wire - The Complete Seriesby Kilian MelloyTuesday Dec 9, 2008 HBO has brought us a wealth of televised stories that remain unsurpassed for excellence in writing and production. Some, like "Band of Brothers" and "The Sopranos," have deservedly become popularly recognized classics; others, like "Carnivale" and "Deadwood" departed the air before their time, leaving DVD viewers to savor (or discover) unfinished, but unquestionably brilliant, TV sagas.
Then there are rarities like "The Wire," a show that is both ingenious and under-watched, and yet--despite the usual rules of the business--are granted leave by the powers that be to continue to fruition.
With the new release of The Wire: The Complete Series, the viewer can feel that sometimes even the businesspeople behind decisions about shows continue and which get the axe have the capacity to put art before commerce. Only through the grace of HBO’s executives did The Wire hang on for its full five seasons, telling the story that its creators, David Simon and Ed Burns, envisioned from the first.
The series is a labor of love and a valentine to the city of Baltimore, and each season of the series tackles a new aspect of the city. Season one starts off as cops-and-robbers... or, in the update of the genre, cops and drug dealers. The "wire" of the title is a wiretap begun by officers looking to get the goods on the men who are bringing drugs into the city, packaging it, and distributing it. Subsequent seasons follow the money, and the network of influence, into every tributary, from City Hall to the labor unions to the private lives and dynastic struggles of the street dealers and their bosses, and even into social institutions affected by the economic and social perturbations of the drug trade and the money and corruption it emanates: the schools and the media.
The series grows more and more complex as the narrative threads proliferate and cross-connect; the city itself becomes a character in the story, and its human protagonists and antagonists (often the very same characters serve in both capacities) struggle, die, or inch their way toward redemption.
The Wire is remarkable for its scope of storytelling, but also for its realistic mix of characters. Black and white, straight and gay, male and female; the combination crackles with energy, and there’s no stereotyping. People of all colors land on every point of the moral spectrum, as do people of all sexual persuasions.
Burns and Simon have a keen, discerning ear for street patter; as one featurette explains, the two often introduced actual slang into their scripts before the actors had even heard it used in real life. (The two later brought this sensibility, and sensitivity, for language into their military-based miniseries "Generation Kill.")
The Wire’s complete series box set contains five gate-folded sleeves, one for each season. Most seasons are comprised of 12 or 13 episodes, with Season Five getting only 10 episodes--but managing to fit 13 episodes’ worth of story and action into that shorter season order.
The first couple of seasons don’t have much in the way of special features, but by the end of the series run there are promotional featurettes and even a featurette on the show’s ending.
No doubt you’ve heard, many times, about The Wire: its brilliance, its complex layers of storytelling, its ultra-contemporary mix of grimness and humor. For the long-time fan with all five seasons, in separate releases, already in his or her collection, the new box set offers a little new material, in the form of two previously unreleased special features (including three flashback scenes that show Proposition Joe as a schoolyard businessman, Omar as a barely pubescent street thug, and McNulty and Bunk’s first meeting and a series-spanning gag reel: five seasons of blunders and buffoonery), though the packaging is certainly handsome and will save shelf space.
For everyone else, this is one more opportunity to delve into a show that hardly anyone watched, and which, conversely, explored issues of universal importance. In other words, this is great literature: it just happens to have been filmed.
Special features include:
- Audio Commentaries on select episodes by series creators, actors, and others
- Q & A With David Simon and Creative Team, Courtesy of The Museum of Television & Radio
- Conversation with David Simon at Eugene Lang College, The New School for Liberal Arts
- Behind-the-Scenes Documentary, Part One: It’s All Connected
- Behind-the-Scenes Documentary, Part Two: The Game is Real
- The Wire: The Last Word
- The Wire Odyssey
- The Wire Prequels (Young Prop Joe, 1962; Young Omar, 1985; Bunk and McNulty, 2000)
- From the Wrap Party Gag Reels
- Episodic Previews and Recaps
- Series Index
Kilian Melloy reviews media, conducts interviews, and writes commentary for EDGEBoston, where he also serves as Assistant Arts Editor.
|
|
|
Email
Print
Share