The Wire, Season 1, Episode 3, "The Buys" (Newbies edition)

Once again, we're going to talk about season one of "The Wire" in two different versions: one safe for people who are brand-new to the show (or who haven't watched all the way through to the end), one where we can talk about anything from first episode to last. This is the former; scroll up for the veterans edition if you want to discuss things that are still to come, both this season and in later seasons.

Spoilers for episode three, "The Buys," coming up just as soon as I walk on broken glass...

As I've written many times before, I'm grateful that HBO sent out the first four episodes of "The Wire" for review instead of just one or two. Because the show proceeds at such a measured pace, because it has so many characters and stories going, and because it so often refuses to play by the normal rules of TV storytelling, it took a while to really appreciate how great the show was. For some, that revelation didn't (or won't) come for another episode or two. For me, it was the chess scene contained right here in "The Buys."

If the first two episodes established D'Angelo as more thoughtful than your average TV drug dealer -- and "The Wire" as more thoughtful than your average cop show -- then the chess scene, where he schools Bodie and Wallace on both the game (chess) and The Game (drugs) is the moment when I realized that I was looking at someone -- and something -- very special here. Not only does the chess/drug metaphor work, but it shows how well D'Angelo understands the rigged, unchangeable nature of The Game, and how deep this series intends to go.

Bodie and Wallace using the chess board to play checkers -- a fine game, but a simpler one where it's easy to play in a relaxed, reactive fashion -- are standing in for every TV crime drama that preceded "The Wire." They had the same pieces at their disposal, but they chose to play an easier game with more instant gratification, where David Simon and company are in this for the long haul, setting up pieces for moves that we won't get to see for weeks or months or, in some cases, years. The pieces are not interchangeable; each one has its own unique role to play on the board, and each one's actions affect what happens to every other piece. And if you stick around for all those moves, it'll be clear that, as D'Angelo says, chess is the better game, yo.

The show is absolutely in opening gambit mode at this point. We're three episodes in and the Barksdale detail has accomplished next to nothing. They don't even have a photo of their target until late in the episode, thanks to "cuddly housecat" Lester Freamon demonstrating more game than anybody expected of him, and the raid on the low-rises turns out to be as useless as both McNulty and Daniels knew it would be. But pieces are being moved all across the board, defenses are being probed, and all of this will turn out to be brilliant storytelling strategy by the end.

Simon's fondness for parallel dialogue and behavior continues here. In the opening scene, D'Angelo echoes McNulty's thoughts about how stupid it is for the drug business to be conducted in such an agressive, violent manner compared to every other (legitimate) American industry, and though McNulty planted a seed, we know that D has already been questioning how things get done. Meanwhile, we see that both a low man on the drug side like Bodie and a high man on the cop side like Burrell can be equally clueless about how things really work. Bodie is positive that he has the ability to advance in The Game, to get all the way to the other side of the board and win, no matter how many times D tries to tell him that he'll likely always be a pawn. Burrell, meanwhile, is so complacent and far removed from the street in his position as Deputy Ops that he believes Daniels' detail can get to Barksdale with nothing but quick and dirty street-level arrests, when Avon is so far removed from that sort of action that he doesn't even appear in this episode.

Avon's number two man, Stringer Bell, starts to come into focus here after being an equally shadowy presence in the first two episodes. Like D'Angelo -- better than D'Angelo, really -- he has an intuitive grasp of how The Game is played. Where D is shocked by the idea that the "new package" will be the same as the current, stepped-on, impotent brand of dope they're slinging down at The Pit, String understands the power of rebranding, particularly to an ignorant, desperate client base like dope fiends. His take on the drug war is as chilling as it is accurate: "We do worse and we get paid more. The government do better, and it don't mean no nevermind. This s--t here, D, it's forever."

"The Buys" keeps playing with our expectations of these characters based on what we've seen of them so far and what we know from other police show archetypes.(*)

(*) And by now I should probably throw in the obligatory disclaimer about "The Wire" not really being a cop show, but in this embryonic stage of the series, it's using a familiar cops-vs-crooks paradigm to get its points across.

McNulty and Daniels continue to go at it, as McNulty refuses to go along with the pointless raid on the low-rises, which might be an admirable moral stand if he didn't insist on taking it in the most public, petulant manner possible. Daniels, loyal servant of Burrell though he may be, understands just as well as Jimmy how stupid this raid is, and he gives Jimmy opportunity after opportunity to bag on it without being so obviously insubordinate to Daniels, and Jimmy refuses. And just when we're starting to take Daniels' side in all of this, we find out from Jimmy's FBI buddy Fitz that Daniels might be dirty.

And during the raid, there's that wonderful, hilarious moment when Bodie takes a swing at boozing old Pat Mahone, Carver starts wailing on Bodie in retaliation, and we see Kima -- upstanding, forthright Kima, in some ways even more the hero of the piece than Jimmy to this point -- sprinting over. And just as we assume she's going to break up the fight, she instead starts beating on young Mr. Bodie herself, even harder than Carver and the others were doing. Kima just wanted to make sure she got her licks in on a punk who'd hit a cop (useless though Mahone may be), and the ferocity and joy Kima takes in the moment isn't the sort of thing you would ever expect to see from a "good" cop on a different show.

(Punctuating the comic genius of the scene is the quick cut to the equally useless Augie Polk lighting up a cigarette for his prone partner to enjoy during the fracass.)

And then there's the scene at state's attorney Rhonda Pearlman's house, which bounces back so often between the cop show cliche of the secret cop/lawyer romance (going back at least to "Hill Street Blues") and the notion that Jimmy's just there for work reasons that it becomes not a chess game, but a ping pong match. Ronnie's pained reaction to seeing Jimmy at her door makes it clear that this isn't the first time his charming Irish ass has appeared here at a late hour, and as she tries to decide whether she wants to answer his booty call, he instead starts asking her about warrants for cloning pagers... which actually pisses her off more than if he was just there for sex... and so of course Jimmy admits that he's there for that, too, and flashes her that devil grin that he knows she can't resist... and then Ronnie tells him to go... and then we cut to them making the beast with two backs. The constant reversals take what could have been a stock situation and make it into something more interesting and much funnier.

We're not even close to having a sense of the endgame, but things are (very) slowly starting to happen, and a fuller picture will be visible very soon.

Some other thoughts on "The Buys":

• If Avon's the king, Stringer the queen, muscle like Wee-Bey and Stinkum the rooks and slingers like Bodie and Wallace the pawns, what does that make the newest piece on the board, shotgun-toting stick-up boy Omar?
• Bubbs' "What Not to Wear" dope fiend fashion intervention for the undercover Sydnor was another darkly hilarious scene in an episode full of them. Bubbs is yet another character on the show who's never quite what you expect him to be. He's so at ease with himself, and so perceptive about those around him, and yet, as Jimmy notes, if he has the answers, why the hell is he a dope fiend?
• Continuing last week's discussion of the show's rules for background music, the titular buys by Sydnor and Bubbs are accompanied by a low-rise boom box blaring out Rob Base and DJ E-Z Rock's "It Takes Two," which was also prominently featured in Simon and Ed Burns' non-fiction book "The Corner" as the signature song during the summer that Simon and Burns were hanging around on the Fayette St. drug corner. (NOTE: Whoops. Several people pointed out to me that "It Takes Two" was the signature summer song in Simon's "Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets." That'll learn me to act like I read books and whatnot.)
• More music: while the rest of the detail is at the low-rises and Prez is stuck doing a crossword puzzle, Jimmy is going over his notes while listening to The Pogues' "Dirty Old Town." Get ready to hear a lot from Jimmy's favorite band over the course of the series.
• Though D'Angelo last week talked about getting an apartment to live with his son and baby mama Donette, it would appear that's more about being there for his kid than any major loyalty to Donette, seeing that he decides to spend the bonus from Stringer on buying a "drink" from Shardene the near-sighted stripper.
• Early in the episode, we're introduced to Prez's odious father-in-law, Southeastern District commander Stan Valchek (wonderfully played by Al Brown). I love Burrell and Daniels' post-mortem discussion of the meeting, where Burrell calls Valchek "a necessary evil" and Daniels asks what's so necessary about him.

Coming up next Friday: "Old Cases," in which Jimmy and Bunk demonstrate the single most useful word in the English language.

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

The Wire, Season 1, Episode 2, "The Detail" (Newbies edition)

Same rules as established last week. We're going to talk about season one of "The Wire" in two different versions: one safe for people who are brand-new to the show (or who haven't watched all the way through to the end), one where we can talk about anything from first episode to last. This is the former; scroll up for the Veterans edition if you want to freely discuss things to come.

Spoilers for episode 2, "The Detail," coming up just as soon as I show you just how light my trigger pull is...

David Simon modeled "The Wire" on Greek tragedy -- every bad thing that happens to characters on this show (and many bad things will happen to many characters) is pre-ordained and unchangeable -- but there are also elements of heroic quest narratives, at least from the point of view of our "heroes," the cops. One of the most frequent recurring features of hero narratives is the gathering of the team, whether it's the Argonauts or the Magnificent Seven or the Justice League. As the title of "The Detail" suggests, this episode's largely about the forming of a team, the detail tasked with putting a charge on Avon Barksdale as quickly and quietly as possible. But this is no collection of bad-ass gunfighters or noble superheroes. In true "Wire" fashion, it's mostly a bunch of humps.

Yes, there are McNulty and Kima, whom we already know to be clever police, and near the end of the episode, Lt. Daniels guilts the auto theft squad commander into loaning out his best man, Sydnor (he's the young black guy in the suit who shows up right before Daniels gives his speech to the troops two-thirds of the way through the episode). But beyond that, near as we can tell at this point, are humps as far as the eye can see. The worst offender, obviously, is Det. Roland "Prez" Pryzbylewski, a clumsy menace to himself and others who would be easy to laugh at if we didn't witness him blind a 14-year-old boy in one eye for no particular reason. There's also the duo of Herc and Carver, Kima's crude, knuckle-headed (and knuckle-dragging) Narcotics partners who enable Prez's assault on the kid by deciding to go down to the high-rises in the first place while drunk at 2 in the morning. We also have Polk and Mahone, the two wheezing old drunks, about whom Daniels was likely not exaggerating when he said they hadn't made a case in 10 years. There's Lester Freamon, the "cuddly housecat" from the pawn shop unit, who says little and whose only activity of note here is to work on assembling miniature furniture. And there's Detective Santangelo from Homicide, who doesn't do anything particularly egregious here but who can't be very useful if Rawls consented to give him up to this doomed expedition.

And then there's Lt. Cedric Daniels, who dominates this episode almost as much as McNulty did the pilot. What are we to make of Daniels?

Daniels is a company man, no doubt about it, but his loyalty to the organization in general and Deputy Ops Burrell in particular isn't blind. In the meeting with command about the Gant case, he's the only one who seems at all interested in exploring the possibility that Gant was killed for testifying at D'Angelo's trial, and he definitely has the respect of Kima, Herc and Carver. But he's being pulled horribly in both directions. On one side is Burrell, who just wants this Barksdale mess to disappear and is setting Daniels up to fail by ensuring that he gets assigned all the aforementioned humps. On the other side is McNulty, who actually cares about making the case, but is so quick to judge Daniels -- and so sure that McNulty himself is the smartest, most dedicated guy in the room -- that he keeps going around chain of command and putting Daniels in positions where the boss has no choice but to come down on him, and hard.

Though McNulty doesn't get it nearly as badly as Prez, Herc and Carver do the morning after their assault on the high-rises. (There are actors who try to play hard-asses but are clearly only playing; when Lance Reddick starts dressing down those three, he's intimidating enough that I start edging towards the back of the couch.) And even there, Daniels' handling of the situation is all in shades of grey. His three cops have just done something completely FUBAR, and something that has terrible racial overtones, even with Carver present -- note how he refers to the high-rise residents to Daniels -- but what can Daniels do? Not only is Prez politically connected to an influential commander in the Southeastern District, not only is it against the unwritten code for cops to cover for each other in situations like this, but the entire detail is already under a microscope, and so Daniels makes the politically expedient choice instead of the morally correct one. But given the pressure on him from all sides, what the hell else could he do? This is far, far from the last time on this series that we'll see one of the good guys do what is easy instead of what is right; that's "The Wire."

While Daniels is getting a handle on the flaming bag of crap that Burrell left on his doorstep, McNulty (with major assistance from The Bunk) has his first face-to-face confrontation with D'Angelo, and has the good timing to be approaching his man at the exact moment when D is starting to experience some doubts about the business he has chosen.

There was already a taste of that in the pilot, when D complained to Stringer Bell about the beating of Johnny, but now that he has the death of a second man on his conscience -- and a civilian, at that, as opposed to the player he shot in the Terrace lobby -- the questions really begin. First we get that brilliant scene on the orange couch where Wallace and Poot assume that the inventor of the McNugget made a fortune off the idea, and D'Angelo has to set them straight about how big corporations -- or police departments, or drug organizations, or any of the many institutions that this series distrusts -- really works. The way it is, D explains, the McNugget inventor is just some anonymous grunt who found a way to make more money for his corporate overlords. Poot says that's not right.

"It ain't about right. It's about money," D insists, one of several series-defining statements in this episode.

Another of those comes during the extraordinary interrogation scene at Homicide. (That scene's the first indication that Larry Gilliard Jr. is going to do something really special here. In typical Hollywood fashion, nobody in the business noticed, and his post-show profile is just as low as it was before. It's sad how excited I got when I saw him in a small role in a screener for next week's episode of "Fear Itself.") McNulty has already explained to the Pit crew that all he cares about are the bodies, not the drugs, and right before he and Bunk try guilting D'Angelo with the tale of Gant's (fictional) orphaned children, McNulty asks D'Angelo a very simple question:

"Why can't you sell the shit and walk the fuck away? Everything else in this country gets sold without shooting people behind it."

This is one of the show's fundamental tenets about the drug problem in America. On the one hand, law-enforcement wastes far too many resources policing low-level dealers and users, resources that could be far better-used elsewhere. On the other hand, the drug players bring much of the police attention on themselves by beating, stabbing or outright killing folks in a way that the cops just can't ignore. As McNulty asks here -- and as several other characters will ask throughout the run of the series -- wouldn't things be a lot better for everybody if they could sell the dope without dropping bodies along the way?

And in the third major movement of the hour, Kima puts Bubbs to work at getting to know the crew they're going after. The red hat scam is a lovely idea, and the first sign we get of Bubbles' immense charm. (He spends most of the first episode either trying to get high or being high.) As I said last week, "The Wire" teaches you how to watch it, and part of that is in the way it slowly and carefully explains who all the characters are and how they relate to each other. The Barksdale organization is large and populated by unknown actors, and so we get Bubbs helping Kima identify them one-by-one on the detail's cork board. So now we know three of Avon's muscle: Wee-Bey (the muscular guy with the beard and close-cropped hair), Stinkum (the bald guy who vaguely resembles Stephon Marbury) and Little Man (the ironically-nicknamed heavyset guy). And in a less organized fashion, we're getting to know the crew down in the Pit, all of D'Angelo's young assistants, and how they relate to one another.

There's still plenty of people to meet and things to learn about them, but many balls are now rolling.

Some other thoughts on "The Detail":

• We get our first semi-human look at the detail's target when D'Angelo takes his son and baby mama, Donnette, to a neighborhood barbecue hosted by Avon. For all the bad things that Avon has done and will do, he fancies himself a benevolent kingpin -- think young Don Vito strolling through Little Italy during "The Godfather Part II" -- and will make the occasional community-minded gesture like this one.
• I suppose I should make some mention of the show's main title sequence. While the Blind Boys of Alabama's cover of Tom Waits' "Way Down in the Hole" is my favorite of the five versions of the song used over the years (even though I still think the lead singer sounds like Andre Royo as Bubbs), I've never loved this particular title sequence, because so little of it comes from the actual episodes, especially compared to later years. If you want some deep analysis of the credits sequence, Andrew Dignan did a nice breakdown of the first four seasons' sequences at The House Next Door back in '06. (Newbie alert: Even before he gets to discussing the season 2-4 sequences, Andrew gives away some major plot developments from both this season and the future, so you may want to bookmark it for reading much later.)
• I'm half-tempted to keep a weekly tally of Dominic West's most explicitly British line readings. This week, it was his pronunciation of "Narco" as "knocko."
• One of the stylistic choices that Simon and Robert Colesberry insisted for this show was -- with one yearly exception, for the montage near the end of each season finale -- to eschew the use of any music that didn't come from a practical background source. No score, no songs that appear as if from nowhere. If the song doesn't originate from the sound system at a club, or somebody's car stereo (as in this episode's use of "American Woman" during the terrible trio's middle of the night arrival at the high-rises), it can't be used. Eventually, the producers would find ways to bend their own rules -- there's a montage midway through season two that's scored to Johnny Cash's "Walk the Line," but it's justified because the character who appears at the beginning and end is listening to it on a portable stereo -- but for the most part, the lack of musical cues helps the show's aura of realism, as well as Simon's desire not to hold the audience's hand and tell them how to feel at any given moment.
• The show is fond of having two characters in unrelated social strata utter the same sentiment, independently of each other, to illustrate the connectivity of society and the way all problems are the same, just on different scales. Here, we get something slightly different: McNulty shoots down Daniels' lame defense for not treating the witness killing as such by pointing out that everybody on the street already knows, but when he goes to accuse Judge Phelan of ratting him out to the newspaper, Phelan throws the argument back at McNulty by pointing out that everybody in the courthouse knew, and therefore could have talked to the reporter.
• This episode gives us our first glimpse of McNulty's apartment, and I applaud the production and set design team's anti-decorative approach to the place. It's rare to see a character on a TV show live in such a barren rathole -- even a poor, maladjusted single male cop like Sipowicz had a tropical fish tank and other interesting decor in his place -- but this seems like exactly the kind of place a post-divorce McNulty would call home. All the money that doesn't go into child support goes to supporting his drinking habit, and so does any time that might otherwise be spent on making the place look even slightly nice.
• The show rarely dipped into the "Homicide" casting pool, other than Clark Johnson coming out from behind the camera to play a central role in the final season (far more actors came from "Oz"), but there's a handful of "Homicide" fringe players here in the early going. Most obvious is Peter Gerety (Stu Gharty) as Judge Phelan, but we've also now seen Clayton LeBouef (Col. Barnfather) as Orlando, who fronts the strip club that Avon uses as his headquarters, and this week we get the first appearance by Erik Todd Dellums as medical examiner Doc Frazier. On "Homicide," Dellums played Luther Mahoney, a charismatic drug lord with a family-run organization who eventually drew the attention of a persistent Homicide cop. Much as I loved "Homicide" in its early years, the difference between the cackling two-dimensional Luther and this show's depiction of Avon illustrates just how far "Homicide" eventually fell, and how "The Wire" rose far above its most obvious TV inspiration.

Up next (as in next Friday morning): "The Buys," in which Daniels deals with more fallout from Prez's rampage, D'Angelo gives Bodie and Wallace a very valuable chess lesson, and we meet a fella by the name of Omar.

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post

The Wire, season 1, episode 1: "The Target" (Newbies edition)

As discussed frequently, it's time to start revisiting the first season of the best drama in TV history, "The Wire." Because I know some readers will be starting the series for the first time, while others will be "Wire" die-hards not ready to let the show go just yet, I'm going to post two slightly different versions of each review: one for the newbies, with minimal discussion of what happens in later episodes (and seasons); one for the veterans, with a section at the end discussing ways that each episode ties into things that happened further down the line. The newbie edition will always be posted about a minute before the veteran one. Please confine any comments that would spoil later developments to the veteran post; anything too spoiler-y in the newbies comments will be deleted by me.

Newbie-friendly spoilers for episode 1, "The Target," coming up just as soon as I haggle over the price of wood...

David Simon likes to say that the first scene of each season of "The Wire" encapsulates the themes of that season. In the case of Detective Jimmy McNulty investigating the murder of one Omar Isiah Betts, known to friends and family as Snot Boogie, Simon gets to explain what the entire series will be about.

As a surprisingly helpful witness (by "Wire" standards) explains, Snot Boogie played in the local craps game every week, and every week after a few rolls, Snot would grab all the money in the pot and try to make a run for it, and someone would chase him down and beat his ass and take the money back. McNulty, being the inquisitive sort that he is -- and the series' symbol of what happens when you start asking the right questions of people who think they're the wrong questions -- has to interrupt his witness' narrative to ask what is, to him and to us, but not the witness, the obvious question: if they knew Snot would rob the pot every time out, why did they keep letting him play? And the witness, confused by the very premise of the question, lays out the basic message of the series:

"Got to. This America, man."

The America of "The Wire" is broken, in a fundamental, probably irreparable way. It is an interconnected network of ossified institutions, all of them so committed to perpetuating their own business-as-usual approach, that they keep letting their own equivalents of Snot Boogie into the game, simply because that's how it's always been done. It doesn't matter that it makes no sense. Only a rugged individualist/cocky narcissist like McNulty would even think to suggest that things could and should be run differently.

Without giving away too much about what's to come, the first season of "The Wire" is the story of two men on opposite sides of the drug war -- McNulty with the cops, D'Angelo Barksdale with the dope slingers -- and what happens when each one starts to notice that his bosses and co-workers are following a rigid and often nonsensical set of rules. When McNulty needles his partner, Bunk Moreland, for taking a Homicide call when it was someone else's turn in the rotation and, therefore, "giving a fuck when it ain't your turn to give a fuck," it's the last time he'll speak up for established department protocol. (Bunk takes no end of pleasure in turning the phrase back on Jimmy later in the episode.) The entire series, essentially, is about people who decide to give a fuck when it isn't their turn.

And the chilling thing about the show is that, when someone like McNulty decides to care out of turn, he's not confronted by corrupt or otherwise evil people. Bill Rawls, the middle finger-raising Homicide chief, isn't a bad guy, though he seems like one when he bitches out McNulty. He's just a guardian of the system. His job is to keep the murder rate down and the clearance rate up, which in turn helps the department get funding to keep doing its job, keeps cops on the streets, etc. You'll note that the thing that angers Rawls most is the fact that Jimmy dragged in the Gerard Bogue case, which happened in the previous year and therefore has no bearing on this year's stats. Bogue may have had family and friends who loved and miss him, but he is of no use to Bill Rawls in his quest to make the numbers look good, and therefore he doesn't matter. That's not evil, not "one bad cop ruining the system for everybody else." It's just cold, cruel pragmatism, the best way Rawls knows to do the job he's been given.

Even more ambiguous is our introduction to McNulty's temporary new boss, Lt. Cedric Daniels from Narcotics. Because we first get to know him through his relationship with Detective Kima Greggs -- who herself was introduced as a good and sympathetic cop, and who clearly likes and respects Daniels -- we take it that he's a decent guy. But we also see that he's a company men, one willing to take explicit and limiting orders from Ervin Burrell, the department's "deputy ops" (the number two man on the organizational flowchart) and loudly try to impress those orders on a renegade like McNulty. There's no obvious black-and-white, good-vs-bad conflict here. "The Wire" is all shades of gray.

Now, if you're brand-new to the series, you can be forgiven for not getting much, if any, of that from the experience of actually watching "The Wire" pilot. Though it has some roots in previous TV shows -- most specifically NBC's "Homicide," which was based on Simon's non-fiction book (and which Simon himself wrote for in its later years) -- for the most part, "The Wire" took a very different approach to narrative from any series in American history, so much so that it essentially had to teach you how to watch it. The cast is huge -- and the season one cast is tiny in comparison to later seasons, which would bring in new characters from the Baltimore docks, City Hall, schools, newspapers, homeless community, etc. -- and almost everyone you meet will play a key role in the unfolding storylines.

Back in 2002, I would say it took me at least three or four episodes to get even a tenuous grasp of who all these people are, what they're about, to whom they owe their loyalty, etc. (If you are, in fact, watching the series for the first time -- or even for the first time in a long time -- I'd strongly suggest watching at least that many in a concentrated burst before attempting to move to a weekly schedule, even though that's the rate at which I'll be doing these reviews.)

In the DVD commentary for this episode, in the official "Wire" companion book, and elsewhere, Simon has complained about the flashback at the end of the pilot, the glimpse of William Gant testifying against D'Angelo. HBO made him insert it, he said, because they were afraid that people wouldn't understand the significance of the dead body and why it upset D'Angelo so much. While I appreciate Simon's desire to respect his audience's intelligence and hope that they would get it, this was, again, the first hour of a series attempting a denser, more complex form of longform narrative than any drama that preceeded it, and one that, again, had to teach you how to watch it. The end of hour one wasn't the time to risk the audience not understanding the climax because they weren't able to keep track of the 50 or so characters wandering in and out of the narrative, you know?

Beyond the clumsy and/or necessary flashback, "The Target" doesn't do a lot of audience hand-holding. McNulty's there in the first scene and prominent throughout, so it's obvious he's important. Ditto D'Angelo, who gets to close the episode. After those two, the episode's a bit like a kid's game of memory match. You see a face and have to try to remember it as other faces are introduced, wondering who belongs with whom. But if you focus long enough, the picture starts to make sense. When we meet veteran junkie Bubbles (aka Bubbs) and his rookie partner in scamming Johnny, it's not clear what they have to do with anything that's happened before, and then Johnny gets beat up by D'Angelo's underlings (which sparks D's first questioning of the way things are done), and then we find out that Bubbs has worked as an informant for Kima Greggs, who's just been reluctantly assigned to the joint Homicide/Narcotics task force put together after McNulty started mouthing off to Judge Phelan, etc...

Still, you can be forgiven if you weren't clear on who was giving D'Angelo the lecture about talking in the car (that would be Wee-Bey Brice, lead enforcer for the Barksdale/Bell crew), or who outranks whom in the police and crime hierarchies.

(Interestingly, but on point, both the pilot and the series as a whole tend to give more screen time to each organization's number two man -- Rawls for the cops, profane cartoon-doodling Stringer Bell for the drug players -- than to the actual bosses, Burrell and drug kingpin Avon Barksdale, D'Angelo's uncle. It's a nice comment on who actually does all the dirty work in an organization, and "the Wire" features a whole lot of dirty work.)

Though Simon, writing partner Ed Burns (the real-world inspiration for McNulty), director Clark Johnson and the late producer Robert Colesberry for the most part hit the ground running as much as they could with something this sprawling and unusual, there are some definite growing pains evident in the pilot. D'Angelo's growing unease with the violence of the drug game -- specifically, his objection to the savage beating of Johnny after he got caught passing off the fake $10 bills -- doesn't really track with the guy who was laughing off beating a murder rap earlier in the episode. (It, and other complaints he'll voice, works better after this episode's end, when he realizes Gant was murdered simply for testifying against him, but I suppose there was a desire to establish D as an unorthodox thinker as early as possible.)

Meanwhile, when Rawls chews out McNulty, he complains that Jimmy is talking to Phelan about "some project nigger," which is phrasing that's too loaded for our introduction to a character who's supposed to be more nuanced (and smarter) than that. We hear politically incorrect and flat-out racist language from characters in all walks of life as the series moves along, but in that scene, this early in the series, it stacks the deck too much against Rawls.

Overall, though, "The Target" succeeds at the ambitious task it sets for itself in trying to introduce a huge cast of characters, a new model of narrative, and a more complex moral compass than viewers had any right to expect from a cop show.

But then, as anyone who watches the show for even a handful of additional episodes can tell you, "The Wire" is much, much more than a cop show.

Some additional thoughts on "The Target":

• In addition to Ed Burns as the inspiration for McNulty, the Barksdale/Bell crew is modeled on a number of Baltimore drug crews of the 1980s, most notably that of Melvin Williams, who would himself become one of the show's recurring players (as a church deacon) starting in season 3. The high-rises where Williams' crew worked were demolished before the series began filming, which is one of the real-world reasons why D'Angelo gets reassigned to the courtyard of the nearby low-rise housing project (aka "The Pit"). Whenever we see characters hanging around what are supposed to be the actual high-rise towers, you'll note that the scenes are shot in a way that keeps you from seeing how big the buildings actually are.
• A stylistic conceit introduced here by Johnson, and not really used again until the Johnson-directed series finale: scenes are frequently shot from the point of view of a mirror, or a window's reflection, or security camera footage, which suggests not only the number of ways people can be observed in Baltimore (and, therefore, modern America) but also the number of perspectives you can take on any person or situation.
• One of the mysteries of the show that I never quite cracked -- or, if I did, Simon never told me that I did -- is the symbolism of the train tracks where McNulty and Bunk frequently gather (as they do near the end of the pilot) to get drunk and complain about their jobs, their wives, etc. Just keep the tracks in mind as the season unfolds and we can make some more guesses again at the end of this project.
• Some fans complained that the fifth season featured dialogue that was too didactic and on-the-nose. To those people, I give you, from this first episode alone, Detective Carver's line about how the War on Drugs is misnamed because "wars end," or McNulty's line to FBI Agent Fitzhugh about how the War on Terror has superceded the War on Drugs: "What, we don't have enough love in our heart for two wars? Jokes on us, huh?"
• Though Carver and his partner, Herc, are introduced as complete lunkheads who can't even do a proper search of a vehicle for a weapon (which, in turn, quickly establishes Kima Greggs' bonafides as a natural police), they're great sources of comic relief. Here, I especially enjoy their debate about whether piss can flow downhill.
• Also very funny: Bunk cursing under his breath and threatening his corpse to not come back a murder, lest he get stuck with an unsolveable case. That moment is the first of many quintessential Bunk-isms that puts him near the top of every fan's list of favorite "wire" characters.
• Another questionable early element: Dominic West's American accent. It would get (slightly) better over the years, but it's especially shaky in the Snot Boogie scene.
• Though D'Angelo is presented as the leader and (relatively) wise old head of the Pit crew, you'll note that it's young Wallace who's the only one to know that Alexander Hamilton's the guy on the $10 bill, and that Hamilton wasn't a president, while D insists that only presidents get their faces on money. That scene is the first of many in the series to show just what a limited worldview the players on the west side of Baltimore really have.

Up next: "The Detail," in which Lt. Daniels discovers just what a terrible hand he's been dealt with this Barksdale task force, while McNulty and Bunk look into Gant's murder.

What did everybody else think? Click here to read the full post