Monday, January 07, 2008
The Wire is back...
...I'm guardedly optimistic about this season. This post pretty much sums up my feelings on this season's "theme". If you don't want to read it, basically the focus of the show is expanded again to include journalists, and from the first episode and all the surrounding scuttlebutt about this season it just seems like David Simon is settling old scores as opposed to saying something trenchant. It doesn't really help that I disagree with his entire premise regarding journalism. If you read what he has to say about the subject (and he brings it up in every interview, every chance he gets), Simon thinks journalists have some sort of god-granted role to watch-dog for the public. Which is bullshit of course -- newspapers exist, and always have existed, to make money for their owners. No more, no less. One of the great things about The Wire is that it's so damn cynical about everything: the government, the police, the schools, reform, etc; the one huge theme of the show is that we're all fucked. I don't see why Journalism (with the capital "J", of course) should be exempt from that worldview. Of course, there is still plenty of time for it to straighten out; I almost stopped watching after the first episode because the show had painted McNulty as some kind of lone savior of the police department, and I still enjoy The Shield despite my problems with it. But that doesn't mean I'm still not worried.
