The Wire: Craig's Final Grades

At the beginning of the season, I wondered if The Wire would break the entertainment industry’s record of getting urban education wrong by reducing it to a string of hackneyed set pieces about cardboard kids (either saints or hard-cases-with-hearts-of-gold) and heroic teachers (usually white) who swoop in to save them. I expected it to accomplish that by “spending a full year taking a close look at urban education.”

Were my hopes realized? The answer is both “yes” and “no.” The Wire gets a “B-” as an educational documentary, but an “A+” as television drama.

First the bad: It turns out that the writers never intended to give viewers the kind of complex, comprehensive picture of the education system they’ve presented of the criminal justice system. Yes, we did get a more realistic peek into a corner of the education world few ever see. And the writers nailed some things with enough realism that even briefly-glimpsed props could enrich the narrative. But by spending too little time on how adults interact with adults in that system, and doing that mostly through the eyes of a novice teacher and some outsiders running an alternative “pull out program,” we got a black and white snapshot rather than a rich tapestry.

Unfortunately, that limitation reduced other aspects of the education subplot to black and white, too. My inner ed wonk was disappointed that The Wire too often presented uncommonly simplistic takes on complex topics like the impact of No Child Left Behind and the phenomenon of “teaching to the test.” And my inner Wire fan was disappointed that it sometimes resorted to dramatic shortcuts and lazy writing for that purpose. How many times did Cutty’s ex-wife show up in the teachers’ lounge only to tell us, yet again, what Ed Burns thinks of NCLB?

Now the good: While my inner ed wonk will have to keep waiting for a TV show or film to tackle urban education systems in the nuanced way The Wire has tackled police work, my inner Wire fan is more than satisfied with the season we got. In fact, considered as a whole, this might be my second-favorite season of the four. (Time, and another full viewing, will tell.) Yes, some adult characters never transcended expositional cardboard, but the new kid characters shattered the mold. Brilliantly written and acted, those characters were literally “transcendent”—re-writing the rules for adolescents on television.

And their stories were devastating in the best tradition of The Wire—both dramatically and thematically. I’ll be haunted by Randy’s question to Carver in the hospital: “You gonna help, huh? You gonna look out for me?” I’ll be haunted by Prez watching Dukie selling drugs on the corner after bowing to his boss’s advice not to get too involved. I’ll be haunted by the look Michael gives his mother to let her know he’s had Bug’s father killed, the moment he loses not just his future but his soul.

I’ll even be haunted by the final shot that lingers on Namond’s new “corner,” symbolic of all the opportunities open to him now that Bunny and his wife have adopted him. In a show as carefully plotted as The Wire, it’s no accident that the least sympathetic kid character of the four is the one who’s saved. That’s the point: We can talk about America being a meritocracy all we want, but for kids in West Baltimore that word is mostly meaningless.

If America were a true meritocracy, one that rewarded talent—and developed talent for the common good—Duquan would attend an excellent school with a great math teacher, not a rookie who has no idea how to help him, let alone teach him. If it were a true meritocracy, budding and innovative capitalist Randy would be treated like the next Michael Dell, or at least someone who might actually own a store of his own someday. And in a true meritocracy (heck, even just in a halfway rational society) a kid with Michael’s practical smarts and immense leadership skills would be treated as a future business or civic leader—even a future mayor of Baltimore—and educated accordingly.

But for children in West Baltimore, making it has far more to do with luck than with merit. If The Wire is right, it has nothing to do with merit at all. How can we live with that?

-- Guestblogger Craig Jerald