The Wire

To be honest I don´t usually watch TV but, thanks to the Internet, that is not a problem when it comes to talk about series. One of the things I hate most is waiting one week to see the next chapter. In order to avoid that, I just download series that are already finished and, if I really like them, devour them like an animal. Which one is my favorite TV series? If you had asked me that question some years ago I would had said Twin Peaks without any doubt. I must say that I can´t be impartial with it as I just love David Lynch´s work. But, 2 years ago, I discovered the new top of my list, and it´s going to be really difficult to snatch his crown. I´m talking about The Wire, the TV series that shows us a deepest view of the city of Baltimore focused mainly in the crime. I´m going to tell you the reasons why I fell in love with it.

First of all, I should start saying that The Wire tells us the story of the city of Baltimore from the point of view of a police department. But the crime is just the vehicle in which the series draws the big picture of an American city layer by layer. In each season, The Wire introduces a new layer and manages to fit it perfectly like a puzzle piece. These pieces are, for example, the drugs organization and the life style they generate around them (from the lowest drug addict to the highest kingpin), the failures of the school system, the problems of the urban working class, the masquerade played by the government and the politicians, the media and so on. This is maybe one of the most important reasons to love this series, the raw realism that avoids any kind of dulcification. I think that is important to say that the writers of The Wire are a former homicide detective and a news reporter, both from Baltimore, for what I think they have been able to give this project a heart that makes it feel like a living story.

Watching The Wire is like a full time job. It is slow, big and with complicated plots. You just can´t stare to the screen and turn off the brain. Of course, we all like to have some innocent fun with a repetitive-fast-food-style series like Lost, House or Grey´s Anatomy. I´m the first one to admit that when I return home tired the only thing I want is a quick and direct entertainment. But I think that The Wire can´t be seen that way, it demands something from the viewer. That is the second reason why I like it. Written between lines, The Wire whispers (never shouts) the big truths and problems of the society today. It also has the most human characters I have ever seen in a TV series, where there are no good or evil, where the line is so thin that you can´t even realize when someone cross it.

The humor is the third ace of this winning hand. With its cynical point of view of reality The Wire can make you laugh in the darkest moments. There is no space for cheap jokes here, it also demands a huge knowledge of the American culture that is impossible to achieve for an European guy like me.

Finally I have to say that even if you don´t care about everything said before, The Wire is a great police drama and I have always liked a good cop story. While in the CSI TV series the characters are capable of solving 53 cases in a single day, The Wire shows us how a real police department works, where a single case lasts years and several seasons to get solved. You can see how cops have to deal with the frustration caused by the institutional power, the lack of money and resources, how they drink to death and cheat their wife.

To finish this brief overview of one of the greatest series in the last years, I would like to quote one of the writers, David Simon:

“We are not selling hope, or audience gratification, or cheap victories with this show. The Wire is making an argument about what institutions—bureaucracies, criminal enterprises, the cultures of addiction, raw capitalism even—do to individuals. It is not designed purely as an entertainment. It is, I'm afraid, a somewhat angry show.”

The balance

I can´t imagine a bigger burden and a more difficult task than the one of being a father that tries to educate a child in the world which we live. I have put myself in the place of those parents several times and, believe me, the fear of not doing the correct thing is overwhelming. How do we know we aren´t taking the wrong decisions? The answer, of course, is elusive and never absolute, but I think that we can identify and highlight the most basic and important ideas.

Through the human history the family has been the custodian of the culture and the values of the society, trespassing all this knowledge from parents to sons. But the family is also responsible for maintaining and perpetuating all sorts of errors, fanaticisms and social defects. In order to avoid this problem parents should encourage their children to find their own path, their own ideas and their own perspective of the society in which they live. We, as fathers and mothers, have the obligation to help our children in this task giving them all the tools we have in our hands that will let them question everything and everyone.

But, where are the limits of that freedom? Should we draw a line on the floor with a white chalk and just tell them that they can´t cross it? The answer is yes. One big yes. As hypocritical as it may sound, children are exposed to all kind of harm and manipulation, and if we are talking about the ones raised in the circumstances previously described, the danger is even bigger. Parents have the obligation to protect their children from these external agents.

At this point we face another big problem: the protective wing of the parents will interfere strongly in the freedom of choice that we described before. How can we fix this? There isn´t a correct answer for this question. Parents have the difficult task of finding a good balance and equilibrium between both factors.

It is hard, or nearly impossible, to do a list of good examples, but in my personal opinion I think that children should be encouraged to learn from the beginning to respect life, the importance of feelings above material things, the way to find pleasure in the different ways of human expression (i.e. literature, music, etc) and more. But, first of all, the child has to be taught to trust himself in order to help him finding his own way. That implies letting him see by himself that all his actions have a consequence and he might burn if he plays with fire.