The Blackest Show on TV

Queer to be here in Baltimore, especially after watching three years of The Wire on DVD in the last few months. I'm in the schmancy Inner Harbor area, so no corner crews, jackboys, etc. Plenty of black folks, though. Which got me thinking about the aspect of The Wire that, to me, is the most striking and, in many ways, the most significant.

But first, a bit about my trip. I'm here for two weeks of Introduction to Leadership. It's interesting, kind of, but now that I'm writing about it, I'm bored. Nine hours a day of ITL is enough.

So, back to The Wire.

It's just that it's so black. For those not in the know (I'm thinking of you, Mom!), The Wire is an HBO-produced drama about police and drug-dealers in Baltimore, Maryland. It's been praised for it's sharp writing, great acting, and for the way it keeps all the characters human, not demonizing the drug-dealers, not sanctifying the cops. It's a really good show, though not the pinnacle of TV greatness that I was led to believe by all the press it received after the fifth and final season had wrapped.

But it is maybe the blackest show on television.

Now, I'm not talking Cosby Show-black. That's the kind of show where they cast more or less everyone black because it's trying to be a "black show." The Wire isn't a black show, it's just that most of the characters are black because it's set in Baltimore and most Baltimoreans (Baltimorons?) are black. The mayor, police commissioner, the major (of the Western district, 3rd season), the lieutenant, the homicide detective, the special-unit lieutenant, and four of the six regular cops from the special unit -- they're all black. Oh yeah, and let's not forget Clay Davis, the state senator. He's black, too. As are, of course, all the drug dealers and fifty percent of the main character junkies (Bubs' friend Johnny* being, pretty obviously, a token white).

I love the "diversity" of this show because it's not diverse. It's not Star Trek, God bless it, with it's ridiculously-multicultural-Cold-War-era bridge crew. The Wire isn't saying black people are this or that. It's just saying that, guess what, black people are. They're bad guys, good guys, they're politicians, cops, businessmen, teamsters, longshoremen, priests, ne'erdowells, junkies, freaks, drug-dealers, whores, bartenders, cabdrivers... you get the idea.

If I may paraphrase Charlton Heston in Soylent Green, "They're people! Black folks are... people!"

*Aaron speculated that Johnny was played by "that kid from 'Kids'." I checked it out, and he was right. (Thanks, IMDb!) Johnny The Junkie is fucking Leo Fitzpatrick from Larry Clark's infamous 1995 movie about out of-control AIDS-infected adolescents in NYC. I reviewed that movie for the Eagle Newspapers of upstate New York when I was 25. Christ, I was so much wiser then. My intelligence and wisdom actually peaked when I was 19, and knew everything. It's been all downhill from there as I discovered in the most painful ways possible that I wasn't, in fact, the smartest person in the world.