Word: copping
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...really know what The Wire is you have to know what the wire, lowercase, is. In the first season of the series, in 2002, the wire was a wiretap, which a team of Baltimore cops used in a season-long probe of a drug gang. At first blush, it sounded too conventional for the home of The Sopranos. A police drama on HBO? What's next? A sitcom about a friendly Martian? "We were the 'gritty cop show,'" David Simon, the former police reporter who created the series, recalls of some dismissive early reviews...
...gritty cop show revealed itself to be something much bigger. The first season humanized the drug soldiers without condoning them--following them home, speaking their language and showing how they were used as cannon fodder. And it showed how cops who want to do painstaking police work are frustrated by bosses who prefer cheap, fast street busts that boost arrest statistics but simply move the crime around. Each season afterward focused on another dimension of Baltimore life (see chart)--the working class, the politics, the schools--pulling back like a camera on a crane to show a complex ecosystem, with...
...wire is something that connects. All The Wire's characters face the same forces in a bottom-line, low-margin society, whether they work for a city department, a corporation or a drug cartel. A pusher, a homicide cop, a teacher, a union steward: they're all, in the world of The Wire, middlemen getting squeezed for every drop of value by the systems they work for. "Every day, they matter less as individuals," says Simon...
...exist without the kind of long-form journalism it's hard to pay for today. As a Sun reporter, Simon spent a year on Baltimore's drug corners in 1988 for an assignment that turned into a book and then an NBC series, Homicide. His next project, with former cop and Wire partner Ed Burns, became the book and HBO miniseries The Corner. But then, frustrated at being unable to fit the complexities of street life and the drug war into the news columns, he took a buyout and went into fiction full-time...
...tragedy about fated individuals, not Shakespearean tragedy about heroic individuals--but his show doesn't play like a tract or a thesis. It's full of memorable characters, like Omar (Michael Kenneth Williams), the principled bandit who robs from drug dealers; Detective Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West), the boozy, dogged cop trying to work cases the city won't pay for; and Bubbles (Andre Royo), the recovering junkie fighting his addiction like Sisyphus pushing a boulder of dope up a mountain...