On this blog I try not to spend time talking about popculture or other trash that the mainstream media shoves down our throats hoping we won’t ask them to cover the more difficult topics including why our world is in such a state and who made it this way. That means I also don’t talk about television or film unless it is something I feel worth talking about and directly related to the aforementioned troubled world we’ve somehow created. But here comes one of those times where I MUST talk television.
The greatest television show, for me, is probably the show the fewest people have heard about or watched. It is called the Wire, and I call tell you that from what I’ve seen – it is the single most important television show to have ever been beamed into people’s homes.
By important.. I mean just what I say.. this is important. This program deserves to be studied.. discussed.. replayed.. and revered. How can that be? Because The Wire is about a dying city; like many cities in this world. It is about people; possibly-good, corrupt, and lost; like many people in this world.
The Wire encompasses a never ending list of the problems we have as a society. A society with institutions that are supposed to serve people but that actually serve themselves, or maybe serve nothing. A society that doesn’t value human life equally, where some people count more than others. Whether they’re showing you the day-to-day life if a low level drug dealer, a drug kingpin, a beat-cop, a chief of police, a mayor, a school teacher, a dock worker, a junkie, an ex-convict, a child… The Wire is like one big mirror being held over people, places, and relationships that we are often unable or unwilling to really look at… and see all that is wrong with our world and what we make of it.
I watch The Wire… I dream about The Wire. Instead of being a television show that helps you forget reality, this program wraps you in reality once and for all. I’ve even heard from friends who say they can’t watch it too much because it is “too real”.
That is what I call a show that everyone should be watching if they care about anything at all. A show that is.. too real. Forget every other program you once loved, put to the side your preconceptions about police dramas or mafia-dramas or any other incling you get that this show is not of your concern. If you live on this earth, what goes on in the Wire, goes on where you are in some way, shape, or form. And if more people were to watch and truely think about it… I shutter to think people might even start changing a thing or too in their own communities.
Watch this show. Nevermind not having HBO or a television. There are plenty of ways to get episodes of the Wire from your millions of friends on the internet.