Fiction and "The Wire"

Back to "The Wire" for a second.

A couple months ago, someone raised an interesting objection. The line goes that the show's realism actually just feels real because it conforms to our racist stereotypes and expectations about how drug dealers are in real life. The critical praise of this realism only served to further entrench "The Wire" and its problematic racial overtones.

This idea never sat well with me because "The Wire" strikes me as patently, even overtly, fictional in just about every moment. In other words, it still behaves like a TV show more than anything else. The dialog is clever and snappy, there are lines that are setups for punchlines. There is a blind guy who knows everything, aka an oracle, which has existed as a literary device since fiction was invented by the Greeks (true story), and which has continued through the stillborn run of "Freaks and Geeks" (Harris). Also, the characters are obvious foils to one another (Daniels relates to McNulty because he has a tarnished reputation going back to the "bad old days," McNulty relates to Bubbs because they're both fuckups, etc.).

So it's an uncomfortable position to take that the show really goes all that far in perpetuating stereotypes when it seems so palpably fictitious at every turn. Yeah, there are a lot of persuasive, moving, or resonant aspects of "The Wire." But it's hard for me to see anyone as believing in its truth any more than they would any other show (except "The Office," which is, like, exactly what work is like [barf]).