Re-Wiring - Season Two
My 20th anniversary reexamination of The Wire brings us to Baltimore's docklands.
More characters. Yeah, that’s what everyone was calling for come the end of Season One of The Wire: What this show needs is more characters!
So it is that David Simon drops us off not at the Baltimore Police Department but at the docks, a place that was once the beating heart of the city but is now rapidly rusting its way towards extinction. And who do we find there but, yes!, a whole load of people we've never met before.
The first person who really registers if Frank Sobotoka, the Polish-Catholic head of the local chapter of the International Brotherhood of Stevedores. Sobotoka is played by Chris Bauer (above right, with Pablo Schreiber), an actor so good, he even made True Blood a sight easier to suffer through. Sporting a wet suit to give Sobotka a bit more bulk, Bauer's remarkable at playing someone who's every wrong move is informed by good intentions.
As well as Frank, we meet his screw-up son Ziggy (James Ransone, later of Simon’s Generation Kill), Ziggy's cousin Nick (Pablo Schreiber, brother of Liev), and union heavy Thomas 'Horseface' Pakusa (Charley Scalies), together with the men who profit from the goods the stevedores spirit away from the docks, principally Season Two big bag The Greek (Bill Raymond), his lieutenant Vondas (the ever excellent Paul Ben Victor) and their Ukranian connection Sergei Malatov (Virginia’s own Chris Ashworth), known to most everyone as 'Boris'.
All these guys plus Beatrice 'Beadie' Russell (Amy Ryan), the dock cop who stumbles upon the people trafficking case that will provide Season Two with most of its momentum - Christ, with so many new personnel, would it have killed them to have the newcomers wear nametags?
As for anyone worried that we've left our Season One favourites behind, they ought to be breathing a sigh of relief by the end of episode one. For sure enough, Stringer's still trying to run a respectable disreputable business, Bodie and his boys are still on the corner, Bunk and Lester are still looking a little too overdressed for police work and Jimmy McNulty's still giving a fuck when it isn't his turn.
I believe it was Grace Dent who superbly summed up Season Two of The Wire as the one where guys just sit around in vans and/or behind desks. Though it might feel more sedentary that all four other seasons, there's an argument to be made for Season Two representing The Wire at its most accessible. Slinging drugs, busting cons, fighting addiction - these aren't things most viewers will have too much experience of, one hopes. But working in an industry that's going to the wall, the number of audience members familiar with that scenario must run into the millions.
Season Two's also satisfyingly self-contained. Most of the new characters I've mentioned will cease to trouble us once Steve Earle's done singing 'I Feel Alright' and Nick Sobotka's stopped crying in the rain. But, God, how we miss them when they're gone. Still, our days at the docks have done much to alter the tenor of Simon's show. For while Baltimore's drug scene appeared very much a black issue during Season One, our encounters with 'White' Mike McArdle and his crew leaves the audience in little doubt that the matter actually has more to do with class than colour. And as legitimate work dries up, the working men of Maryland will have to get increasingly creative to make ends meet.
An entire class obliged to break bad - it's no wonder the local pOlice have such a hard time keeping order. Despite the best efforts of Jimmy and Bunk and Kima and Lester (whose “tweedy impertinence” never fails to delight), Baltimore needs a higher power to get a handle on things. Which isn't to say that religious intervention is required; after all, so many of the sorry events of Season Two stem from a childish argument over the commissioning of a stain-glassed window. Rather it's up to the politicians to rush to the aid of their city.
Or to put it another way, cometh the hour, cometh Tommy Carcetti...