The Wire: too "bleak"?

In the January/February issue of The Atlantic Mark Bowden, addresses the issue of truth-telling in HBO's The Wire. Bowden thinks the show's primary creator, David Simon, a former newspaperman for the Baltimore Sun, has dropped the search for (journalistic) truth and substituted in its place his own personal, changeless Idea about how the city of Baltimore works. For Bowden, journalism is an open-ended practice in which the truth you know one day can be completely undercut the next day by new information. In contrast to this, fiction -- no matter how closely it attempts to mimic the jumbled to and fro of reality -- will always present a falsified, because static, view of any given historical moment. With this schema in mind, Bowden, while not denying The Wire's realism or depth of insight into Baltimore's street-life, the collapse of unions, the bureaucratic machinations within city hall and the police department, and the city's educational apparatus, nonetheless believes the show, because of its relentlessly negative depiction of these issues and spheres, tells us more about Simon's passionate and artistically vital views on contemporary Baltimore than about what's actually happening on the ground there now.

Simon is the reporter who knows enough about Baltimore to have his story all figured out, but instead of risking the coherence of his vision by doing what reporters do,…he has stopped reporting and started inventing.

Unfortunately, Bowden doesn't really dig into the differences between what's actually going on in Baltimore and what happens on The Wire. He doesn't follow any given story-line to tell us how it differs from reality. Instead, to prove that Simon's vision of Baltimore is "unfair" he quotes the Yale sociologist Elijah Anderson (whose own work doesn't offer any pollyannish vision of American ghettos) to the effect that the show has left out the good and brave people working for change in the poorest sections of the city. And then he spends the last part of the article chronicling Simon's apparently notorious penchant for harshly criticizing those whom he disagrees with, especially former colleagues at the Sun.

I think Bowden has seriously missed the mark here. His section on Simon's personal life comes across as more ad hominem argument than actual insight gleaned through biographical knowledge. But it all really comes down to his assertion that The Wire is too "bleak." Is it? Does Simon leave out all the good, decent, brave folk? I don't believe so. What I think Simon has done is show how those working for justice in a densely flawed system struggle against the extremely course grain of bureaucratic, economic, and political forces which work in the service of prestige, power, and the status quo. But more importantly, Simon has decided to devote a series to the fallout of post-industrial America. The Wire is an extended ethnographic expose on the fate of a city devastated by the decline of skilled and unskilled manufacturing jobs. The fragile opportunities and stark limitations faced by so many inner city black Americans in such an economic landscape gets fuller treatment here than anywhere else on TV, save a random Frontline special. And, yes, the picture is not pretty. Should Simon, like Jim McKay, spend more time on the no shame in my game kids? Sure. Are there more chances than the show allows for retraining or going back to school for those first fired when the economy moved to service sector positions? Perhaps. But these seem like quibbles when weighed against a show as rich and detailed as The Wire. No show on cable or network tv comes close to giving us such a subtly drawn tableau of a segment of society which faces institutionalized racism, last-hired & first-fired "policies", and the seemingly unending difficulties of breaking-out of ghetto-life. How often do we see these lives in anything more than racist “Cops” shows? Yes, Simon and his fellow writers could give us a show less “bleak” than the one they produce. But given the fairy tale land most of us live in compared to life in the ghetto, wouldn’t that be a failure to honor truth?