'The Wire': No Money, Mo' Problems
Things are tight all around in B'more: Budget cuts abound. No overtime at the cop-shop, where folks are pulling double shifts and getting paid for one. Forget about that raise Carcetti promised -- they can't even afford to repair the squad cars. And that case from last season -- the little bit with the 22 bodies entombed in empty rowhouses -- is put on hold because, well, you know, the whole budget-cut thing.
It's no better at the Baltimore Sun: Buyouts, bureaus closing, grizzled scribes (great cameo with Sun veteran/"Wire" story editor William Zorzi) smoking outside and kvetching about the bad new days. The editor who smugly insists, "We're just going to have to do more with less." Um, yeah. (Still, life at the TV version of the Sun can't be all that bad, if it means reporting to Clark Johnson, clearly the most sainted city editor to ever cross a newsroom threshold.)
(HBO)
The Mayor's getting screwed because he's dumped all his money into the schools and didn't make nice with the governor, so he's out of a cool $50 million. Which means he can say goodbye to his promises of cutting crime to the double-digit percentage points. His aide's assessment of him: "You're just a weak-[expetive] mayor of a broke-[expletive] city." Yeah, pretty much.
Even the drug dealers are getting squeezed: Johns Hopkins University is buying out property all along the East Side -- pushing out dealers, so they're contemplating branching out into Baltimore County.
And Bubbles, poor Bubbles. He's always getting squeezed, so why should this season be any different? Bubbles is trying so hard to stay clean -- and he looks good, too. No more of those nasty junkie lesions on his face. In his efforts to stay clean, he's taken to camping out in his sister's basement. Except she doesn't trust him, so when she goes to work as a nurse, he's got to go -- even if she's working the night shift.
Hard times, all around. But then again, you don't watch "The Wire" to be cheered up, right?
Not that there weren't some laugh-out loud moments, such as the opening scene: the close-up of Bunk's face as he wryly assures a young arrestee that he might as well confess to doing "your boy Pookie." Then, he straps him to truth machine -- with duct tape -- telling him that the machine knows all, can tell when he's lying. Poor schlub thinks the truth machine is an Oracle, especially when it starts spitting out "True" or "False" whenever he answers one of the questions. In no time at all, he's singing like a canary -- never mind that said truth machine is really a plain ol' Xerox machine. "The bigger the lie, the more they believe," Bunk cracks.
And therein lies the Big Theme for this season: We can expect all kinds of malfeasance, skullduggery and double-dealing. Which is to say that McNulty's back on the booze and lying to the spousal unit.
-- TERESA WILTZ
By Teresa Wiltz |
January 7, 2008; 11:12 AM ET
The Wire
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Posted by: Sunie X | January 7, 2008 01:25 PM
The misspelling of Marlo is almost as egregious as the Shales article which mentioned the show's great ganster names, and included Beadie and Bug (a harbor cop and an eight year old, respectively). We usually get a little better detail from the TV staff at the Post.
Posted by: wirethon | January 7, 2008 04:20 PM
Yeah what can we expect from folks who really aren't into the show. But anyway I thought the first show as great and I can't wait for more. The funniest part to me was when Chris Partlow goes to the court house to get some info and as he walks out he sees McNulty standing there and he just smiles and walks away. As if they don't know the police has been watching them and it really doesn't matter because they are going to keep doing what ever they want to do. I wish the show will keep going because there are a lot more stories to tell.
Posted by: Hungry | January 7, 2008 05:00 PM
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"Marlowe" - ??!!