the wire

TV Beat: The Remaking of the Cop Show

Tuesday, February 10th, 2009

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After The Wire perfected a new urban social realism, and CSI (and its offshoots) took Law and Order’s procedural drama to absurd technical heights, the cop show had to get a new angle. The answer: Police the realm of the spirit and cast a non-American English-speaking actor as a brainy detective with a life-changing problem and no easy love interest, and watch him struggle to make sense of life and of time. This is the strategy taken by both Life and Life on Mars.

The past week saw two metaphysical detective dramas return. After a seven-week break in its second season, Life’s Zen detective Charlie Crews resumed unraveling why he’d been framed for a triple murder (NBC, Wed., 8/9c). After an out-of-order episode aired last week, Life on Mars (ABC, Wed., 10/9c) finally delivered the belated conclusion to its mid-November mid-season cliffhanger and brought its contemporary cop, Sam Tyler, a step closer to figuring out the nature of reality-and why he’s stuck in 1973.

Life is the more straightforward of the two. Los Angeles detective Charlie Crews (played cucumber-cool by London’s Damian Lewis) spent twelve years in prison for allegedly killing his business partner and his wife and son. By the time DNA evidence exonerated him, his friends and family had turned against him, and he’d been brutalized by inmates with grudges against the police, fallen hopelessly behind on technological matters, and found comfort in Zen Buddhism. Crews is slowly piecing together why he was set up as a killer, sporadically pining for his since-remarried ex-wife, and gingerly dealing with his partner-in-policework Dani Reese (The L Word’s Sarah Shahi), whose no-longer secret boyfriend is their captain and whose father is connected to the set-up. Zen gives Crews a wealth of  koans to use as ambiguous comebacks—and a sense of peace and interconnectedness that keeps Crews calm as he faces the fact that he’s been screwed out of life (which his $50 million settlement doesn’t nearly make up for.)

Based on a British series of the same Bowie-inspired name, the David E. Kelley-initiated Life on Mars (currently helmed by Josh Appelbaum, Andre Nemec, and Scott Rosenberg, the trio behind the short-lived but watchable writer-can’t-go-home-again drama October Road) has a lot to live up to. Dubliner Jason O’Mara—he’ll pass for The Wire’s Sheffield-Irish Dominic West if you squint—plays Sam Tyler. A detective with New York’s fictitious 125th Precinct, Tyler was hit by a car when rushing to investigate a case. When he gets up, he’s still Sam Tyler of the 125th, but it’s 1973. Is he in a coma in 2008 dreaming that it’s 1973, or does his head injury just make him think so? Is something even stranger going on, or is this just how strange life is anyway?

The coma explanation initially seems most likely; that turned out to be the truth in the BBC version, from which the ABC show is already diverging. Within that framework, Tyler goes about his police duties as he tries to get back to 2008 by learning whatever life lessons or enacting any time-traveling plot-changes the universe is demanding of him. He dreams of his 2008 love and fellow detective, Maya (Lisa Bonet)—we assume the allusion to the Hindu concept of maya as a veiling, illusory reality is intentional—while maintaining a careful distance with his 1973 animas, a pioneering lady cop who serves as his confidant (Gretchen Mol) and a sagely hippie neighbor who opens his mind (Tanya Fischer). He encounters his parents, his young self, future mentors and criminals, real or products of his mind.

1973’s primitive technology is a continual source of amusement for Tyler; 1973’s police force, less so. Michael Imperioli plays a detective who thinks Tyler stole a promotion that should have been his. Harvey Keitel, in the casting coup of the century, nearly reprises his Bad Lieutenant role by playing the hard-drinking, suspect-beating station captain. If the show is largely missing the opportunity to revisit the crime-infested, recessionary New York that may be the future, it balances an infatuation of the style of 1973 (in terms of both visible fashion and a late-hippie aura of freedom) with a rear-view moral righteousness that rarely exceeds its place. Sam Tyler is the voice of progress and tolerance, yet he’s painfully aware that 2008 is little better than 1973. When he dusts himself off after being hit by that car, he barely registers that the housing projects that had surrounded him have been replaced by rubble and by billboards announcing that new apartments will be available on the site in 1974; it’s only when he sees the World Trade Center in the distance that he begins to understand the full magnitude of what’s happened. He rails against his colleagues’ treatment of women, gays, minorities and anti-war protesters; but when he speaks against the war in Vietnam, he also means the war in Iraq, and he has to hint to 1973 of horrors yet to come.

Life is, unsurprisingly, a bit more detached: the closest we get to a sociopolitical history is watching Crews’s former cellmate, pension-raiding ex-CEO Ted Early (Adam Arkin) humbly teaching business school and managing Crews’s money during a recession.

Next week, both shows deal with crimes against musicians and try to figure out what the Russians have to do with their heroes’mysteries. We’ll be hoping that Life on Mars, with all its shadow-dwelling robots and shadowy conspiracies, isn’t going to start emulating Lost and its nonsensical twists, but will continue probing inner and outer realities; and that Life will more fully communicate its Zen mindfulness as its arrow approaches its bullseye. A good detective or two of the human experience might be just what we need.

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Wire’s end

Sunday, January 6th, 2008

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The final season begins tonight. It’s the last chapter of HBO’s “visual novel” of institutional dysfunction, and this time it’s all about media dysfunction, about the “press,” that is, the so-called watchdog of democracy, which most would agree has mostly gone off dozing or gnawing at table scraps, for the past few decades, found its place in the corner of the room! As a primer, check out the existential meta- post- post- something of an ending the creators wrote and shot but may or may not air: it kinda says it all.

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A dog’s life

Wednesday, December 5th, 2007

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Felicia “Snoop” Pearson’s memoir is out and our regular readers at Grand Central Publishing were good enough to acknowledge our plea a few weeks back and drop us a copy, thank you very much.

Snoop Pearson, the current memoirist and former dealer, plays Snoop, the crazy hitwoman and dealer-soldier, on The Wire— HBO’s cinema verité experiment on the “war on drugs” that’s now in its fifth season. The Wire, as much as anything ever will, documents the systematic failures and hypocritical philosophy of America’s long-running disastrous anti-drug crusade and draws on as much real-life reporting as it can to tell the story. Most of the writers on the show are ex-cops and city lawyers and many of the actors have been pulled from the drug corners in Baltimore where the series is set. Snoop Pearson is one of them. Her memoir, Grace After Midnight, is essentially the back story for one of the coldest, most real, oddly sympathetic TV characters ever.

The book is a very fast read intended for young people, a “coming of age cautionary tale” that also speaks directly to the ills plaguing our country’s reviled overwhelmingly black underclass. In fact Snoop’s story is a cultural cliché, so predictable, so made for TV, it would be laughable if it weren’t also a cultural reality that we seem politically intent to extend forever without end.

In brief: Felicia Pearson was a crack baby born to an addict and raised in a foster home. The good people in her life had no money or power. The bad people ran the streets. She was a good student, smart as a whip, an open lesbian, a street tough and, soon enough, a dealer. She watched people get robbed and jailed and murdered and then, at 14, committed murder and got jailed, for eight years. When she came out, she tried to go straight, was intent to go straight, felt a divine light leading her straight. She got a job at an auto plant and then at a book warehouse and then at a car wash. But her record followed her to each. She was fired from the first two for being an excon and walked out after one too many hassles at the last. At 22 she had $500 in honest money saved and had had enough of it all. In her mind there was no choice: she went “Back to the dog-eat-dog world. Back to get it when you can. Back to the goddamn block.”

Take that $500, buy me a half-ounce of coke and work off that. That’s it. That’s the start. Put that Mickey Mouse go-straight shit out of my head. Think like I used to think. Think ahead. Start dealing with this coke and move up to heroin. More money in heroin. Got one thought and one thought only: start slow, stay cool, but wind up the biggest drug dealer in East Baltimore. This time fuckin’ go for it. I know the game. Now I’m playing to win.

The way her commitment to the “Mickey Mouse go-straight shit” melts after repeated humiliation is the story at the heart of the book. Snoop seems a good person with good intentions. She’s amazingly brave and resilient. And she’s painfully young throughout. But the book, like her life, leads inevitably toward the world of the game.

There’s little arguing with the logic. She goes from earning tens to earning thousands of dollars a day. That she was also destined to be murdered by her rivals or jailed for life by the authorities doesn’t really lessen the rationality of the choice. East Baltimore, like Washington DC, like Hollywood, is a one-industry town: you get in or you fall out; you either take your shot at getting paid or you resign yourself to invisibly scraping at the dregs of the American dream while ignoring the great money machine buzzing all around you. Only a fool or a hypocrite or a privileged outsider would expect young people to choose the latter.

The fact that Snoop was saved from the fruits of her success as a dealer by The Wire makes her a crazy exception that proves the rule. That there was ever a TV show with the payroll and the plotline and the will to hire Baltimore corner kids is something beyond the realm of fairytale. Michael K Williams, who plays Omar in the show, saw Snoop in a bar and asked her to come to the set and meet the producers. She did. Only later, after she was hired and getting paid, did she quit her corners. In the book, she does an incredible job of capturing the absurdity of the deus-ex-television turn of events that changed her life:

Suddenly… real is pretend and pretend is real. Snoop is real and Snoop is a TV character. The script is flipped. I wake up, get dressed, leave my work on the block to walk into a world about make-believe work on the block. But because I ain’t sure the make-believe work is real, I keep my real-life work. My shops stay open… TV cats talking about We want real people on this show. We want to show your reality. But by showing my reality, these motherfuckers are changing my reality. The shit’s confusing. By showing who I really am, they’re changing who I really am.

It’s pretty much guaranteed that Grace After Midnight won’t change any policymaker positions. But it should. The book is another dispatch from the land that for decades it seems only popculture artists and social workers have been willing to sincerely approach. It’s one of a mountain of American cultural artifacts currently begging the question: Why the disconnect between what we appreciate as true as music and paperback and screenplay consumers and what we have come to accept as tolerable bullshit as neighbors, voters and citizens?

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Snoop weekend

Friday, November 9th, 2007

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Felicia (Felecia?) Pearson, the woman behind the wildest most-intriguing character on TV, hitgirl Snoop on The Wire, came out this week with a memoir called Grace after Midnight. We haven’t had the honor of peeping it yet (G-C publishing, send us a copy already!) but the stories in that book are sure to be the real stuff that the people behind The Wire have tapped into and why it’s one of the best shows ever about topics that have otherwise been buried under nuclear-war-safe Yuka Mountain-size loads of cliche.

Awhile back, the big fans at Fader did a Q&A with Pearson. This is our favorite section:

Are you from the area where they film the show?
Yes sir, right in it, right where they film it in the hood.

Do people recognize you now?
Yes sir.

Do they treat you differently?
No, because they are people, they don’t play with me. I’m just the same old person, I don’t act different or nothing like that, I mean some family members come and put their hand out like I got millions or something like that, but you know family always have the tendency to get on your nerves.

Weekend recommends: The memoir and all five seasons of The Wire, download or dvd. Don’t answer the phone. No need to get dressed. Everybody at your house has to be watching or reading. Drinks start only after six pee emm.

ps: Can we decide (HBO uh and uh) how we’re spelling girlfriend’s name?

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automaton for the people

Tuesday, December 5th, 2006

wire

Another of the million daily reminders that we humans have to take back control of the government is the fact that that other failure of a war, the one on drugs, continues without an end in sight, a war hinged on a strategy that simply arrests black folk randomly in greater numbers every day—a plan plenty good at putting folks in jail but seriously less good at stopping drug use or trafficking. The plan’s apparently really good in Baltimore at routinely shepherding actors and actresses on The Wire into the clink after late-night filming on set. Do these people look like Robert Downey Jr to you, officer? Read the Slate interview with one of the show’s creators here. Mmm, it’s so good.

Here’s another reminder, a special nod to our former perpetually put-upon and pissed-off sec of defense. Hated to see you go, sir.

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