The Wire & Social Problems

What happened? Episode opens with D’Angelo Barksdale’s trial McNulty’s leak to the judge about how the trial was rigged by Avon

Barksdale D’Angelo is released and reunites with his uncle, Avon Barksdale D’Angelo is demoted to the low rises We meet Bubbles and his “apprentice,” Johnny, who is later beaten by

the low rise crew Daniels is ordered to organize a detail to pursue Barksdale (in a half-

hearted manner) Everyone is pissed at McNulty for starting all this trouble McNulty visits a friend at the FBI, and learns about wiretap technology Social lives: we meet McNulty’s drinking/work partner Detective Bunk

Moreland, D’Angelo pursues a stripper, and Kima arrives home to her girlfriend

Bubbles volunteers to inform on Barksdale, as revenge for what they did to Johnny

Episode ends with a dead body in the street. The victim: William Gant, the man who identified D’Angelo as the shooter in his murder trial. D’Angelo sees him and walks away with his conscious weighing on him.

Was created by David Simon, a former homicide reporter for the Baltimore Sun and Ed Burns, a former Baltimore homicide detective

Style is often called “fictional ethnography,” loosely based on real events & characters

The Wire is not like traditional television in 5 ways:1. Its writing aims for authentic depictions of

real life; how the audience views these depictions is not a concern

2. The show respects the intelligence of the audience and does not hold their hand

3. It is not beholden to advertisers4. Each season looks inside different institutions and how the

drug trade is affected by each institution. Season 1 – cops/dealers, Season 2 – the ports, Season 3 –

politics/government, Season 4 – education system, Season 5 – the media

5. No one is the hero

Once the center of Baltimore's Jewish community, it has undergone white flight since the 1960’s and has become an almost exclusively African American area.

Once a major industrial town, with an economic base focused on steel processing, shipping, auto manufacturing, and transportation, the city suffered a deindustrialization which cost residents tens of thousands of low-skill, high-wage jobs.

Crime Stats: 276 homicides in Baltimore in 2006 (2nd highest rate per 100,000 of all U.S. cities of 250,000 or more population). The homicide rate in B’more is 7X the national rate, 6X NYC, and 3X LA.

Simon: “The point of the show is not that Baltimore is any more f**** up than a lot of places. We have these problems and we're going to speak to how they feel to us, since most of the writers are from Baltimore. But presumably these problems are universal problems, or at least American problems.”

Social InstitutionsTwo WarsSocial ExclusionThe Game

Social Institution: the more enduring features of social life that contain a set of rules shared by members of a society Bureaucracy: carries out the policies, rules, and regulations

embedded in institutions Institutional/Organizational culture: the values of the

institution Conflict Perspective: stresses the ways in which cultural

assumptions can stifle dissent and reproduce management propaganda and ideology.

Functionalist Perspective: management’s approach to keep institution alive

The social institutions in the Wire are BROKEN! Lesson of the Wire: It is folly to place your faith in

institutions, because they're designed to protect themselves and not you, the individual.

Background: show was written during a time in which institutions were in upheaval: corporate white collar crime at Enron, institutional dysfunction in the Catholic Church, dysfunction in education and the media, merging of corporations and govt.

What happens to people in institutions when money and resources are transferred from one “war” to the next?

“We don't have enough love in our heart for two wars?”- McNulty

“Wrong war brother. Most of those squads have been transferred to counter-terrorism…we just don’t have the man power to get anything big.” –Agent Fitz

Simon: “We were filming this pilot two months after 9/11, and even though the FBI hadn’t announced it yet, any priority in the drug war was going right out the window. They have 10, 12K agents available. And counter-terrorism is a huge effort…”

Underground Economy of the Urban Poor by Sudhir Ventakesh: explores how people work beneath the radar, earning a living and providing for themselves and their families. How does a community survive when it works with a different set of rules than the rest of America?

The parable of Snot Boogie is a “metaphor for what’s going on in the American city. Those that are excluded from the legitimate economy make their own world. And we’re trying to paint the world that they created upon being excluded from the rest of America”.

This theme of exclusion is most clear in episode 4, when Bubbles visits the suburbs with McNulty

“The game” is the overarching metaphor for urban struggle, as everyone must play or get played—as Marla Daniels tries to warn her husband, “the game is rigged – you can’t lose if you do not play”

The Game is the rules of the institution and its players—whether at the corners, City Hall, the police station, street-level junkies, corrupt politicians , cops looking for promotion.

The Game is also why nothing changes or gets fixed. The Game runs smoothly because a fiend “gonna chase that

s*** no matter what” and that this “s*** right here is forever.” Stringer’s statement shows why social problems persist and never get solved.

Winning the Game is a motivation for action: “It’s just business. It’s not that I am personally invested in getting drugs off the street, or that I am going to fix this neighborhood, or I am conscious of trying to uphold the law of the land. That detective nonsense continues to exist on most American television shows. A good detective, it’s really a sort of act of professional vanity to say ‘I’m better than this guy, I’m not going to let him beat me, I’m going to win.’”

McNulty in a traditional cop show: the enterprising detective who solves cases because he cares about the public good. A crime fighter!

McNulty in this show: the detective who solves cases because he doesn’t want to lose. A professional asshole!

When he investigates the murder of Snot Boogey, we see that he is the series' symbol of what happens when you start asking the right questions to people who think they're the wrong questions. He continues to do this throughout the series, to his detriment.

Bunk says to him “There you go, giving a fuck when it isn’t your turn.” McNulty is screwing around with the hierarchies because he sees that his bosses are following a rigid and often nonsensical set of rules (bureaucratic rationality).

Daniels is a “company man,” Loyal to the organization to a point He’s being pulled horribly in both directions

(which often happens in middle management): Burrell wants this Barksdale mess to disappear

and is setting Daniels up to fail McNulty: McNulty, thinking he is smarter than

Daniels, puts him in positions where he has no choice but to come down on McNulty.

His response to the three cops’ mess is to make the politically expedient choice instead of the morally correct one. The “good guy” does what is easy instead of what is right.

Has an iron edge but the banality of someone who had lived too long in a dysfunctional institution. Reduces all murders to index cards to

keep track of them. Simon on Rawls: “he cares about

preserving himself and his clearance rate, more than the ultimate mission of police work. But there are moments where [he] redeems himself. That was important.”

Burrell is constantly spinning his wheels in his police car, giving the“appearance” of taking action but doing nothing to solve the deep-rooted problems in his department.

He is an example of leaders doing what they need to do to survive at the top of the institutions.

Simon: “Burell is not an effectively corrupt character. He is just self-preserving. He cares about preserving himself and ultimately the dept. more than he cares about the department’s ultimate purpose of police work”.