It began as a scintillating exploration of Baltimore’s cops and crims. When it became The Jimmy McNulty Show, though, daftness started creeping in Almost a decade after it finished, The Wire still stands as the pinnacle of the boxset era: Baltimore shaken down block by block, institution by institution, in a peerless 60-episode stickup of the American Dream. Among its embarrassment of virtues was its nose for character. Not just the feat of conceiving a carefully individuated gallery of cops and robbers, casting them perfectly and watching each one pick their appointed path through the city’s tatty rowhouses and gleaming bureaus. But also knowing when the hour came to rein them in. From Stringer Bell’s fatal overreaching into legitimate business to Ziggy Sobotka’s faceplant entry into the world of drug-trafficking, it never lost its feel for how every player fitted into the polity, and when their actions would cause them to lose their place. Hamartia turned out to be just as applicable to the Baltimore badlands as ancient Greece. Related: ‘Progress is painfully uneven’: Baltimore, 15 years after The Wire Continue reading...
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