Pubdate: Sat, 13 Jul 2002
Source: Kansas City Star (MO)
Copyright: 2002 The Kansas City Star
Contact:  http://www.kcstar.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/221
Author: Ben Nuckols, The Associated Press

INTELLECTUAL COPS STALK THE STREET OF BALTIMORE ON 'THE WIRE'

"The Wire" is only nominally about Baltimore detectives' protracted 
investigation of a drug gang in the city's west side housing projects -- 
it's also a conduit for David Simon's exploration of the futility of the 
drug war and the pervasiveness of corporate culture.

In Simon's view, the police department and the drug organization are 
dysfunctional corporations that treat their employees as expendable and 
have lost touch with the public they serve, existing just to sustain 
themselves; and his two protagonists -- homicide detective James McNulty 
(Dominic West) and midlevel drug dealer D'Angelo Barksdale (Larry Gilliard 
Jr.) -- are frustrated middlemen whose iconoclasm puts them at odds with 
their bosses.

"McNulty's working for Enron, and so is D'Angelo Barksdale," Simon, the 
show's creator and executive producer, said during a location shoot on 
Baltimore's notoriously violent Pennsylvania Avenue.

"What we're trying to do is a TV show that is masquerading as a cop show, 
but it's really about what happens when a policy goes awry and 
bureaucracies become entrenched," Simon said. "The police bureaucracy is 
fixed and permanent, and the drug bureaucracy equally so, and they both 
treat their middle management the same."

The 13-episode series kicked off with McNulty sitting in on Barksdale's 
murder trial. The young killer walked free after his cohorts intimidated 
witnesses. Afterward, for motives that remain unclear, McNulty spilled his 
guts to the trial judge about the drug gang run by Barksdale's uncle, Avon, 
and the 10 murders it has committed without a conviction.

The confession creates a whirlwind of shakedowns and finger-pointing within 
the police department, and McNulty is banished to the narcotics unit to try 
to bring a case against the Barksdale crew and placate the judge. But the 
department clearly isn't committed to the kind of investigation -- with 
wiretaps and sophisticated surveillance -- that would net any major arrests.

Meanwhile, Barksdale is banished by his uncle to a low-rise housing 
project, where he becomes increasingly disillusioned with the violence 
necessary to sustain the drug trade.

Simon, a former police reporter for The (Baltimore) Sun, previously worked 
on two other Baltimore-based TV shows: "Homicide: Life on the Street" and 
"The Corner." But he wanted to return to the streets of Baltimore because 
there were aspects of the police department and the drug war he hadn't yet 
explored.

"This is the department I covered in all its dysfunctional glory, where 
everybody was careerist and where nobody lost their pension by failing to 
do police work," Simon said.

Edward Burns, Simon's co-writer, was a Baltimore detective for 20 years and 
specialized in the kind of protracted investigations that "The Wire" 
dramatizes -- investigations that, in the end, did little to change the 
city's poorest neighborhoods.

"Whatever damage that the drugs themselves haven't done to these 
neighborhoods, the war against them has managed to do," Simon said. "It's 
impaired the police department, it's alienated whole subcultures of 
Americans, and it's solved nothing."
- ---
MAP posted-by: Jackl