Word: wiring
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...months and many of them with weapons. That's a combustible combination. On the road to Baghdad from the international airport last week, a twisted heap that had once been an Army humvee sat on the highway. Crouched behind a metal guardrail, an Iraqi had triggered a trip wire, detonating a charge. One American was killed. "The only person who knows how to do that is the Iraqi Baathist army," concludes a U.S. naval intelligence officer attached to ORHA. "And they are thinking right now, F___ the Americans; we'll gravitate toward the radicals...
Unlike its much-buzzed-about HBO brethren, the cop drama The Wire was not dubbed an instant cultural phenomenon when it debuted last summer. Not as operatic as The Sopranos, as sleek as Six Feet Under or as trendy as Sex and the City, it was not the kind of show that becomes an automatic pop-cult reference for op-ed columnists or lands articles about its stars' footwear in IN STYLE. Like its underfunded, workaday cops, it just plugged away until it outshone anything else...
...Wire is that rare specimen, a work about social issues that is not boring. Last season detailed a single investigation of a drug gang, which--just as rare for TV--got as much screen time and character depth as the cops. And as the police tangled with bureaucratic politics and the gang unfolded its secrets like a black Sopranos family, it became a story about the collapse of faith in institutions and the death of inner cities...
...second season, The Wire (Sundays, 10 p.m. E.T.) moves its action to Baltimore's port, where Detective James McNulty (Dominic West) has been exiled to the harbor patrol for ticking off his bosses. The waterfront is an ideal setting for The Wire's murky morality--a place that is neither here nor there, the porous membrane between America and the Other, the teeming intake for legal and illegal markets. Its shipping containers, stacked for acres like so many Pez, feed a ravenous economy with cameras and vodka and hookers--this season's case starts when a group of young women...
...speak, shows like CSI are called procedurals because they focus on the technique of police work. But The Wire shows what a misnomer that term is for a sprint in which DNA analysis puts a baddie behind bars in an hour. Here the cops use index cards and manual typewriters instead of electron microscopes and bite into paper trails like a dog attacking a steak. This attention to detail, plus a vast canvas of characters, makes for a dense boulder of a story that moves creakily for the first couple of hours. But once it gets rolling, it's irresistible...