Monday's "The Wire" Stuff

TV Guide interview with Tristan Wilds (Michael Lee):

TVGuide.com: Why doesn't The Wire get its due?
Wilds: The show is real enough to strike a chord in [everybody], and most of the time people don't want to see realness like that. Or maybe they think that it's fake TV and we're just being violent for no reason. What you see on the show is really happening, and not just in Baltimore. It's happening in a neighborhood two blocks down from where you live. People don't want to open their eyes to the truth.

TVGuide.com: What makes The Wire different from other cop shows?
Wilds: I don't want to say it's a cop show. What makes The Wire a beautiful story is how true to life it is. In other shows, you have a good guy and a bad guy. In The Wire, bad guys are trying to be good, good guys are doing bad. You have real life. The people who do bad get bad things done to them.

San Diego Union Tribune:

It was a harsh night on"The Wire" this week, and a beautiful one, too. Beautiful because it was so true and so human that it hurt. And when a television show can make you care the way "The Wire" makes us care, it is worth its weight in tears.

Slate Magazine:

Like the rest of you, I've been watching this story slowly crack open for several years now. It's been 59 hours of TV time; there's one more hour to go, and I can't wait for it. But for now, this hour, this episode, felt like a coming together. It was simply breathtaking -- the logical, perfect conclusion to all those hours, those years' of stories, at once exhilarating and devastating, just like you knew it would be.

I watched this on Tuesday, and it's haunted me in lonely moments ever since. I'm still a bit hopped up on it, so please forgive my sounding overwrought. The thing is, it wasn't just the plot developments that got me, though these were obviously huge: Marlo! Snoop! Namond! Kima! McNulty! Bubbs!

But there was also something more complex here, something more intricately beautiful. In describing "The Wire" to friends, we've all remarked upon on its novelistic properties. This episode felt like the climax of that novel. Every scene hangs on the subtext of years' of accumulated storylines; the story, now, is not just the script but also all that we've learned of these people's motivations, their impulses, their relationships, the constraints in which they operate. The story is the system, and now, finally, we're seeing the system in full.