Recommended reading (and viewing)
Last week’s New Yorker had a piece on “The Wire,” my candidate for best drama ever on television.
When HBO premiered “Rome,” I asked my son if he’d like to watch it with me. Given the show’s content networks — what the networks call “adult themes,” as well as what everyone calls “extensive nudity” — my wife was initially aghast; she was never a 14-year-old boy, though, and if I had already seen and heard all these things in the 1970’s I was confident he had as well. “Rome” went over big with all of us, my wife falling into line, and when the show was over Lex asked, “What’s next?” because now HBO on Sunday nights had become a ritual of sorts. So he started watching “The Wire” with me in its fourth season.
(And no, he is not watching “Tell Me You Love Me” with me; I do have standards.)
He grew to love “The Wire,” as I have, and in the same way: initially flat-out confused, but with growing respect. I put the whole series in my Netflix queue, and watching the show straight through in this way has only deepened my appreciation for an intricately woven storyline that seems at the same time to be utterly organic. Every character on the show has layers of shading and history — just like, um, real people.
“The Wire” returns for its fifth and final season in January. You’ve got just enough time to catch up if you start now. Whether you watch it or not — and given that seemingly no one here in LA has watched it, that means you probably haven’t already seen it either — this New Yorker profile of creator David Simon is worth reading. Simon sounds like someone who got into the newspaper business because he believed in its Camelot mythos; based solely on this profile, I’m not sure he yet realizes that that beatific past never existed.