Season 1 Episode 2: The Detail

Yeah, I think it's him, not necessarily the cops, that the audience is supposed to connect to right away. He's the soul of the show (at least in the first season, before we get to know more of Baltimore in S2).

Parts of this show do seem dated - and I'm not sure whether it's that it's been over ten years, or just that I've seen The Wire. The world it insists on showing us, like, now we've seen it, so rampant police incompetence and cover-ups aren't really news. Nor is the shooting of the witness from last episode. Of course he got shot!

The opening sequence also seems dated, but I'm trying to convince myself it's on purpose. The use of, like, "telephones" brings us back to a hardboiledish, gumshoeish feel. The Wire here is a wiretap on the real America: Simon is letting us listen in on what's really happening here. But he shows it in the title sequence with analog images. I dunno.

The interrogation of D'Angelo totally doesn't work for me. I know we're establishing D'Angelo as a softy, but shit, how dumb do you have to be for that to work?!

The idiot raid on the towers does work, though - and it has a little added resonance for me right now, after the murder of Michael Brown. You could clearly see in Brown's case how at first there were a lot of stories, most of which sounded pretty damning against the killer; but by the time he did an interview, he had his story straight. He'd developed a narrative in which his shooting seemed justifiable. I suspected when I heard it that he didn't come up with it himself; it was too careful, too cross-all-the-t's. Someone helped him out: "Here's the only story that might get you out of this." Just like in this ep, with Daniels creating a story for Prez to explain blinding a 14-year-old by pistol-whipping him. In both cases the stories are false, but tough to find hard evidence against; in both cases it doesn't matter so much that there are witnesses who can contradict what happened. As long as we can get to a "He said / he said" situation, the cop will get off.

I also liked Daniels having dinner with his wife, where she delivers a classic Wire speech: "You can't lose if you don't play." The Wire is often super on-the-nose, in a Furious Styles kind of way, but nobody writes those cynical philosopher speeches like Simon does. The chicken nugget bit was right there too.