“You cannot lose if you do not play”

The value of the motion picture camera, as argued by the critic Andre Malraux, is that it makes possible the “furthermost evolution to date of plastic realism”.   Cinema and its nephew television, then, have long been considered the art forms most capable of capturing and duplicating life in its most realistic form.  Critics and audiences praise films and television programs for their efforts at “realism,” but how often do the subjects of this praise actually resemble reality?   Most TV shows touted as “the most realistic ever” seem to take the medium’s well-worn formulas and inject tired story outlines with a few extra doses of violence and sex per episode in hopes of holding viewers over past the next commercial break.  This stagnant bog of superficial development encompasses the bulk of today’s television landscape, where each week brings a new, more “realistic” take on a murder investigation that culminates in ludicrous stylization and cheesy one-liners.  Art directors drip blood and spongy brain pieces on stages until forcing the viewer to conclude that, yes, the corpse of an abused woman who has had her head blown off before being horribly burned and regurgitated by an alligator would probably look just like that in real life.  This is what passes today for “realistic”, and this is why David Simon’s The Wire, even with its own healthy share of blown off heads, slips under the mainstream realism-junkie’s radar despite the most accurate and biting depiction of the systems of real life in television history.  In an artistic environment where traces of blood and semen under black lights constitute insight into human lives, The Wire presents a radical and experimental critique of television and social institutions through its reverence for truly realistic representation.

By grounding the show in the genre of a police procedural, the creators of The Wire establish a representational framework from which radical experimentation is possible.  Aside from the sitcom, which hasn’t grown an inch since All in the Family, no TV genre is more standardized and predictable than the cop show.  Audience familiarity with the form works in the favor of these programs, evident from the 15 procedurals on Fall 2009 prime time major network schedules, as mainstream America turns to these repetitive tales of violence and justice as a sort of comfort viewing.  When tuning into one of these programs (generally recognizable by their acronymic titles), one can expect, nearly without fail, to encounter a series of standard elements.  First, the main police characters will model ideal intellectual and moral righteousness in their crusades against crime and pursuits of true justice.  While the criminal may have sympathetic moments, he will be evil opposed to the unassailable good of the police and the victims.  Additionally, the plot will follow a standard episodic formula, in which a crime is committed (on-screen or off) and the police interview a series of suspects leading to a bait-and-switch, in which the audience is led to believe in one suspect’s guilt before the true guilty party is exposed in the final five minutes.  Nearly always, the police bring the criminal to justice in the end.  Given these elements, the comfort derived from such programs seems easily explained.  Police shows confirm notions of right and wrong, reward faith in the justice system, and get the blood flowing strong before wrapping it all up in an agreeable manner.  The Wire is a cop show by appearance and definition, but it does none of these things.

Through the juxtaposition of a truly realistic depiction of the process of law enforcement with an audience’s expectations for the genre, The Wire criticizes not only the form of television drama but also the real life politics of the subjects it depicts.  The first major element of realism distinguishing The Wire from generic police shows (heretofore known as Lawyers and Officers: Comforting Intent, or LAO:CI) is the depiction of the police department itself as an active institution, rather than a moody setting for tense interrogations and convoluted revelations.  The word “active” here applies only in its most basic meaning, in that the Baltimore Police Department affects the characters and plot of the show.  It does not mean that the department “actively” does its duty to “serve and protect,” but instead that its institutional uselessness systematically prevents individual officers from doing so.  The Wire presents an ancient organization corrupted to the core, not by the inherent evil or stupidity depicted in the “bad cops” of LAO:CI but through the constant clash of irreconcilable self-interest.  If The Wire’s focus lay solely on individual character interactions, as with LAO:CI, it’s intended themes might not seem so unique.  The presence of nearly as many budget meetings as criminal interrogations, however, shows the creators’ slavish devotion to real-world relevance.  Certainly, daring detectives solve crimes through ingenuity and empathy in the real world, but not if no one pays them for it.  As stated on each season of The Wire, cases “turn green before they turn black [solved],” and when green must sneak its way through a massive bureaucracy, it seems that black rarely turns up.  Most cop shows neglect such systematic function entirely, and The Wire’s respect for its central role adds a level of realism wholly absent from the major TV landscape.

Because of it’s emphasis on the futility of real-world institutions, The Wire cannot function dramatically in the same way as the traditionally representational LAO:CI.  Since Dragnet, these shows have operated on the basic structure of the crime, the investigation, and the solution.  The Wire, as a narrative critiquing the institution, depicts many crimes and investigations but many breakdowns on the road to the solution.  The procedural aspect is present, and thus comments on the failure of traditional cop shows to represent reality.  The detectives almost resemble their LAO:CI counterparts, interviewing witnesses, tearing up, kissing girls and reviewing case files.  They usually even solve the “mysteries” of the crime accurately, but find themselves unable to achieve convictions because of the system’s small print and political soft stepping.  The characters grow in their outright disgust, not towards the criminals they investigate (like LAO:CI), but the hierarchy (established through a series of unworthy promotions) that prevents any true justice.  The audience shares this frustration with the characters, allowing a point of accessibility in a work that subverts the traditional areas of emotional entrance.  While LAO:CI maintains a massive audience by comforting the viewer with warm and cozy blood and guts morality, effective criticism cannot be comfortable, and as a serious indictment of the failure of law enforcement and society, The Wire seeks to infuriate the viewer.  The anger that The Wire inspires emanates not only from what the viewers see on screen, but from how closely it resembles what they read in the headlines of their local paper (or what they should read, as the show’s fifth season addresses), and how often their favorite “realistic” shows forget about it.

Although The Wire establishes an experimental mode through uncommon levels of realism and commentary, the show’s boldest experimentation comes through plot choices that not only illustrate the flaws of society, but also question how things could be different.  While the first two seasons model the adherence to reality discussed above, subsequent seasons build a sort of informed fantasy on top of the foundation of realism, creating social experiments whose results play out with respectable believability due to the apparent veracity of what has come before.  Like the LAO:CI special effects artists who convince the audience of the accuracy of their organ splatters, The Wire’s viewers believe that a controlled legalization of narcotics might resemble the drama shown on screen.  Such a plot development is fantasy, a trial utterly unlikely to exist in the political landscape of present day America.  It is a fantasy, however, based in the spirit of realism, using characters that exist believably in as complete a real world as television has seen, to ask questions about real society.  Although the creators fictionalize dramatic answers, the viewers know that the truth lies in the very asking of the question.  Mainstream society won’t ask, and neither will its television programs.  Indeed, the only significant (and believable) fictionalized answer the show presents is that those who dare to ask will be punished accordingly.  The LAO:CI networks, perhaps, don’t covet the position of The Wire’s mayor, stuck in charge of the few system cogs willing to turn the other way and see what might happen.

Television police dramas follow the blueprint so closely that their “art” seems to worship the establishment it depicts.  That a vast audience eats it up and swallows it all as “realism” sticks hard in the sides of the creators of The Wire.  While Lawyers and Officers: Comforting Intent “represents” very little with accuracy and still sits as mainstream’s definitive view of law enforcement, The Wire plays on this common acceptance with some representation of its own, striving to capture the disturbing big picture that the formula leaves out.  Crimes are committed, crimes are solved, and criminals go to jail.  These things often occur in reality, but the crime is all too often followed with nothing.  The Wire shows how the complexity of the system allows and even causes this nothing to follow, indicting the institutions of America and suggesting that even when the most well-meaning individuals come together, self-interest remains the unavoidable saboteur of progress.  LAO:CI cannot achieve these levels of critique and experimentation.  It must support the institutions that The Wire tears down, because the mainstream must retain its faith in their functionality.  The Wire has no comforting intent.