Requiem for The Best Show On TV That Nobody Watched

I could be talking about “Breaking Bad” over on AMC, and another day I might, but tonight I lament the passing of the most intricately written, involving hour of television on pay cable, “The Wire.”

Remember how everybody was required to love “The Sopranos,” even when it had some dud episodes and whole seasons that didn’t rise above the quality of a really good soap opera melodrama, like the season where Tony and Carmella spent all 10 or so episodes yelling and throwing things at each other?

“The Wire” has never had a bad episode, much less a sub-par season. For five parsimonious HBO-length seasons (ie: individual runs of 10-12 episodes each), “The Wire” has been TV’s best-kept secret, in spite of the histrionic protestations of TV critics and pop culture nerds like me. We’d bleat endlessly to anyone who would listen about its tight plotting, its stellar acting, its deep, rich characterizations… the problem is, no one was listening — or watching. Fortunately, it was on HBO, a network that commits to quality even when the Nielson ratings don’t support the wisdom of their decision-making process.

Usually I don’t care much for art in any form, and my TV viewing habits trend toward the pulpy. Love “Lost.” “Breaking Bad.” “Battlestar Galactica.” Well-written, carefully thought-out TV franchises that serve up a Gotcha! moment every ten minutes or so, usually just before cutting to a commercial. Shit, I even watched “The Sarah Connor Chronicles” while it was on. Nothin’ wrong with that.

Where “The Wire” failed to grab a Sopranos-size audience, I believe, was in the show’s failure to follow the set-’em-up, knock-’em-down rhythm of the standard hour-long cop drama it mimics on the surface level. Audiences apparently found it off-putting to have to sit through a whole couple episodes of character development and intricate, inter-woven set-up to get to the Gotcha! moments that started occurring about mid-season. The thing is, in structuring the show that way, by the time it started bumping characters off, you were fully invested in them. Even the bad guys, the ones you waited seasons to get whacked, when it came their time to go, you had a genuine emotional involvement when they got what was coming to them.

Anther thing the show did was, in season one, it introduced a cast of characters and a plotline about drug-dealing in the run-down areas of Baltimore. When season two premiered, it focused on corruption at the city docks, but still followed the survivors of the previous season’s storyline. Third season, same thing; new storyline and characters, but previous seasons’ plotlines and characters were woven brilliantly into the new story they were telling.

The dialogue also made this show remarkable. Every character spoke in their own specific patois, some of whom it took three or four episodes for me to even begin to follow what they were saying. That’s why it’s so great on DVD. While I’m enjoying the fifth and final season (which wraps this Sunday with a 90-minute episode), I’ve watched season one again and am beginning a re-watching of season two. Now, in retrospect, I realize how necessary every short scene was, how indispensable every line of mumbled dialogue was in building the story each season had to tell.

It’s like reading a fine novel, where maybe the first hundred pages or so are a little slow, but once the time, place and plot are set up, it’s riveting till the last line of the last page. It reminds me of reading the novel “Ragtime,” which first few chapters took me forever to get through because of what I considered the leaden pace, but the payoff of which turned out to be well worth the investment of my time.

And the actors! I’ve never seen hardly any of them anywhere else, but with only one notable exception, every performance not only shines, they sparkle. Mostly east coast, African-American thespians, some of them holdovers from previous gritty HBO series like “Oz,” every performance is note perfect. Even the kids featured heavily in season four all drew subtle, distinct characterizations. (The only sour note, acting-wise, is singer-songwriter Steve Earle’s self-conscious performance as a drug-rehab worker. Don’t give up your day job, Mr. Earle.)

And like real life, the show was merciless when it came to punching its players’ tickets. Just last week, they off-handedly killed one of the most distinct, unstereotypical characters ever to grace a TV screen, played by one Michael K. Williams – a stone-cold killer who scared the crap out of everyone from the drug lords in their ivory towers all the way down to the street-level “hoppers” who sell the dealers’ deadly poison to the local dope fiends; a character who also just happened to be gay and observed a strict, self-imposed “no innocent bystanders” policy when it came to his profligate bloodletting, and not one second of his performance ever came off as anything less than genuinely authentic. I still can’t believe he’s dead…

This final season also deals with a subject near and dear to my heart, the sounding death knell of the traditional big city newspaper.

I’ve not seen its like before, nor do I expect to again any time soon.

My earnest advice is, start with season one (rent or Net-Flix it; HBO prices their DVD product like it was pressed on baby seal pelts) and work your way through chronologically; by the time you get to this season, season five, it’ll probably be out on DVD too. I’ve TiVo’d every episode this season, and can’t wait for Sunday night’s finale so I can start back at the first episode and see what I missed the first time.

I fear my exhortation is probably falling on deaf ears, but I suppose it’s appropriate for a show whose singular merits met the same unjust fate. Like Tom Waits, Townes Van Zandt, Leonard Cohen, “The Honeymoon Killers” and too many more first-rate entertainers and entertainments to list here, it looks like this series is doomed to remain a cult favorite of the truly discriminating, and nothing more.

Usually I kinda like being among the few, the proud, the cultural hoi polloi, but it’s damned frustrating not having anyone to share this show with other than the strangers raving about it on pop-culture websites.

Hey, smart people – Terry Gross is doing an interview with the show’s creator today on NPR – if it’s on NPR it has to be good for you, right?

I’ll close with an anecdote from an episode from the series’ second season. Two street-level dealers are driving to Philadelphia to pick up a “package” (a large quantity of drugs). The farther from Baltimore they get, the harder it is for them to keep their radio station tuned in. One of them asks the other, “Say, what the fuck is wrong with the radio?” The other explains that different cities have different radio stations. “Huh,” says the first. He continues to twist the dial until he comes across the unmistakably urbane, dulcet tones of Garrison Keillor’s “Prairie Home Companion.” He listens for a moment, then asks his comrade, “Is this a Philadelphia station?” “Fucked if I know, nigga,” comes the irritated response. And for the rest of the episode, their drug-run-gone-bad is completed to the hilarious-in-context accompaniment of “Prairie Home Companion” in the background.

It was just that kind of show.