A lot of love for The Wire, but a snub from Emmy
The final series of The Wire begins airing in the UK on Monday night, an event that has given newspapers here the opportunity to pull out all the stops and give the show some of the adulation it richly deserves.
The highlight of the coverage in unquestionably a three page spread in today's Observer, that asks the question: Is this the best TV series ever made?
The Observer asks a number of writers, including Irvine Welsh, Michael Connelly and Mark Billingham what it is that makes The Wire quite such a brilliant piece of art. Among the numerous reasons touted is that producer David Simon has been bold in his selection of writers for the show in bringing the rigour and insight of the novelist to the scripts, including celebrated crime writers including George Pelecanos and Dennis Lehane, who is also interviewed in The Observer.
Reading this piece has given me one of the best Sunday mornings with the papers I've had in a while, so hats off to team at The Observer for such a great approach to the topic.
Among the gems in there is this observation from Irvine Welsh: "A lot of things interest me about the programme: the huge ensemble cast and the fact that there are no stars, the sheer honesty of the writing. It makes just about all of the writing on British TV look absolutely shit. It maddens me that BBC or ITV put out crap after crap after crap and they don't pick up something like this. We don't know what to do with quality. We wouldn't recognise it if it bit us in the arse. All of the HBO stuff shows up how poor and puerile we are, and how our TV people completely patronise the public."
Quite. Want to know where you have to go to watch The Wire on Monday night? A channel called FX. A channel so deeply buried in the Sky guide you'd need a GPS system to find it. Absolutely ridiculous. This should have a 10pm slot on BBC2, or surely ITV could find a home for it amidst the piles of shite they schedule on their four channels? Or perhaps Welsh has hit the nail on the head. Having The Wire would just illustrate the poverty of the rest of their output.
Another utterly incomprehensible decision is that which has left The Wire bereft of any Emmy nominations, which is the subject of this Reuters blog. I couldn't even begin to start explaining what might be behind this decision, and as I have never watched any of the other shows nominated it might not be a good idea to comment. After all they might all be better than The Wire, although it seems pretty unlikely.
But what I will say is this. As a piece of television, The Wire is so far ahead of its time as to be unrecognisable from the vast majority of the rest of the genre. The sheer brutal honesty of the story-telling, the bravery of the writing in avoiding the stereotypical view of crime, criminals, justice and policeman marks it out not just as a special piece of television but also as compulsory viewing for politicians, journalists, commentators and public officials who appear to be unable utterly to view the world in monochrome.
To my mind, the pitifully predictable and vacuous responses to the apparent epidemic of knife crime in the UK - "Lock 'em all up" or "Take them to A & E to visit the victims" - is evidence that society has become so fragmented that those at the top have absolutely no ability to understand those wielding the steel at the bottom. As a consequence their responses are inevitably framed solely by their own understanding of society - black and white, perhaps literally in many cases - and therefore they cannot even begin to think laterally enough or creatively enough to initiate policies with even the faintest chance of actually succeeding.
Aside from anything else, The Wire serves as a much needed reminder that there is nothing black in white in this world apart from chess boards, and to begin solving the problems of a complex and fractured society you need to be able first to see and then to think in colour.
