I watched The Sopranos from the beginning, and came late to The Wire. I regret the error. Don't get me wrong --I am one of those viewers who insisted that even at its worst, The Sopranos was still one of the best shows on television. I'll tell you right now that I did not like the ending, no matter whether or not Tony got whacked. But what you should know, if you don't already, is that the fifth and final season of The Wire starts January 6 on HBO. And while I anticipated the final season of The Sopranos with little more than resignation and a willingness to see it over with, I'm looking forward to this last season of The Wire with nervous anticipation and serious, sincere, enthusiastic excitement. And when I think about what The Wire accomplishes in comparison to The Sopranos, it's easy to see why the former beats the latter, hands down. There are more than ten reasons, but here are my best of the moment.
1. Lance Reddick's walk. The actor who plays Maj. Cedric Daniels deserves a special Emmy just for his methodical, measured, inexorable locomotion. He's like a precision android with a titanium spine. Sure, both The Wire and The Sopranos are full of characters with strange and amusing physical tics, but if I could bio-graft Reddick's walking style into my own body, I'd be a happy man with excellent goddamn posture.
2. Baltimore. My wife and her family are from Baltimore, and it's putting it mildly to say that they don't move in the circles frequented by characters on The Wire. The show has made me fascinated with a city that otherwise seemed like not much more than a portly cousin to DC a few miles closer on the train. What physical character of setting ever manifested in The Sopranos? The anonymous suburbs of North Jersey? Those sets might as well have been in Vancouver.
3. Omar Little. Why is this character so awesome? Sure, he's cool and menacing and tough, and Michael Kenneth Williams is a genius of understatement. But Omar's also frighteningly smart, patient like the cobra, a true believer in his "code," and possessed of a tightly wound but genuine passion and affection for those he loves. And did I mention that he kisses boys on the mouth? Which leads to ...
4. The gays. Yes, Omar is gay. And other than his thug adversaries mentioning it as one of the many reasons they'd like to kill him, you can tell they've lumped his gayness in with his entire mystique -- his alien, legendary, scary rep in the streets. He's the most intimidating badass gay stickup artist you're likely to meet, and so what? Then let's mention Det. Kima Greggs, also gay, much to her het colleagues' dismay on the force. And yet she's got the same problems with her significant other as the very straight Irish drunk pussyhound Jimmy McNulty -- so much so that they cover for each other when one is cattin' around on her/his old lady. And I can't tell you how much I loved the very brief glimpse of hardass Deputy Commissioner William Rawls toasting the fun in a gay bar, looking quite relaxed and in his element despite the shock to the viewer. On The Sopranos side, tack all that against ... what? Johnnycakes? Never did a plot about a closeted gay man feel so very ... well, straight.
5. The little people. Not so little at all, the supporting cast of The Wire is always on. Everyone gets time to say great lines, get their licks in, get knocked down, get back up, finesse a problem, get snowed, and get back. And not with the self-importance of The Sopranos, where a supporting character occasionally laps up a few minutes' of subplot not consumed with James Gandolfini lying in bed or eating a leg of lamb. I'll never forget The Wire's Delaney Williams (as Sgt. Jay Landsman, not to be confused with the actual Jay Landsman, who plays an officer on the show) catching one of his detectives trying to dodge work, looming over a cubicle partition while sucking up a giant soda with greedy avarice. Everybody on The Wire gets bits like that, all the time.
6. Dialogue. The Wire does simple lines, flashy lines, speeches, curses, screams, wails, and most of all, blisteringly authentic street language and shop talk. Even the Baltimore street kids recruited as actors have remarked on how the range of lingo encompasses everything they know how to say, and then some. And they presented an entire scene using nothing but permutations on the word "fuck," which nevertheless is absolutely comprehensible. If you haven't seen it:
Sure, they said "fuck" a lot on The Sopranos, too. Quick -- think of a great line from that show. Something really revealing and crafted and true. I'm waiting.
7. Action. There's remarkably little gunplay or violence on The Wire. Action often takes place after reams of discussion and hours and hours of complicated, overlapping agendas acting in concert or cross-purposes or both. And yet by the time action takes place, it's achieved the inevitability of an avalanche. On The Sopranos, action often seems impromptu or foolish or, at worst, kicked up to get things moving. Characters routinely do the nonsensical or stupid or self-destructive or outlandish thing, no matter how many better choices are offered. For a long time this frustrated expectations in a pleasurable way. Eventually it became the expected thing, and thus boring, and you only wanted such characters to finally pay the price.
8. Tension. Dramatic anxiety builds so, so slowly on The Wire, it can feel like torture. Like knowing how many corpses were waiting inside those Baltimore row houses, and knowing how close the police were to finding them, and yet everything seemed to move glacially and also somehow with painful fragility. But the tension in The Wire is built expertly, managed with aplomb, and the payoffs come at just the right places and in surprising ways. Even as I still rooted for The Sopranos, I regretfully felt the same as many viewers of the show -- our chief tension was only "when will this finally end?".
9. Consequences. For at least a couple of seasons now, the major dynamic on The Sopranos was how Tony and his cronies could avoid suffering for all their mistakes and bad decisions. But in The Wire, decisions and actions have consequences -- usually many consequences, for many people. Because the show takes place within the living ecosystem of Baltimore, ripple effects fan out and reflect off other decisions, creating new, unforeseen ramifications. Characters are always reacting to this world, but they're also always acting in new ways, wriggling on their hooks or jumping from one frying pan to another. In contrast, Tony Soprano's Jersey mob world is a dead space inhabited by a handful of mordant sociopaths just playing the game until they inevitably keel over.
10. Closure. David Chase, the head brain and creative talent behind The Sopranos, hates his audience. That's my theory and I'm stickin' to it. He couldn't stand it when people incessantly questioned him about the Russian hitman left for dead (or not?) in the Pine Barrens, and whether or not Tony dies at the end of the show, the indisputable point is that Chase refused to tell you. Chase wants to frustrate expectations so maniacally that he'll torch any dramatic arc that looks like it might evolve naturally into a conclusion. The other David -- David Simon, head brain/talent behind The Wire -- is quite adept and insistent about challenging his audience, and rightly so. But he does so with a dramatic vehicle that operates cleanly with aesthetic grandeur, and it doesn't pull over when the driver gets annoyed with his passengers. This is the good thing about art and artifice, not a limitation. Closure in a TV show isn't a tidy bow on a plotline that would never be resolved in real life -- it's the answer to the question raised. Blowing it off makes an artist look like they don't much care about their own questions, or their own art.
This list is hardly comprehensive of course, so once the new season of The Wire begins, maybe I'll add more. Or maybe I'll change my mind! Early buzz is mixed from parties with a certain interest in the story at hand. But what do journalists know.
