BOOK OF THE DAY: The Wire: Truth Be ToldBy Rafael Alvarez Canongate 581 pp, £20
SO MANY people have described The Wireas probably the finest television series ever made that it has begun to sound like an empty marketing gimmick, the TV equivalent of a certain Danish lager.
However, people who have closely watched David Simon’s epic Baltimore-set crime series are disinclined to include the qualifier “probably”.
In creating a televisual novel in 60 chapters, with a sprawling cast of characters, intricate plot and immense thematic ambitions, Simon dramatically expanded what TV is capable of and what viewers now expect of such drama.
As Simon says in his introduction to this hefty official companion to the series: “As a medium for serious storytelling, television has precious little to recommend it W. . . Until recently, all of television has been about selling. Not selling story, of course, but selling the intermissions to that story.”
In this fascinating essay, Simon not only criticises the corrupting influence of capitalism on television, beholden to the interests of advertisers, but also capitalism’s corrupting influence on the modern American city, deprived of industry and increasingly neglectful of its citizens, “the excess Americans . . . the America left behind”.
This is telling, perhaps unwittingly, in that it casts light on two of The Wire's primary achievements – exposing most television as unbearably banal and exposing the modern capitalist institution as unsustainably self-protecting.
While Simon credits HBO, the cable TV network that produced The Wire, as providing the economic model that allowed the show to exist, it is the popularity of the DVD box set that has sealed The Wire's place in many viewers' affections, allowing for intense viewing of two or three episodes at a time.
This engenders a powerful sense of ownership over the programme, a sense of personal discovery that is rarely experienced when watching a programme on a schedule determined by a TV station.
That keen sense of ownership means that many fans of The Wirewill eagerly buy this companion, desperate for another dose of Simon's imagined Baltimore.
This is an updated version of an earlier guide to the show, published in 2004.
Written by Rafael Alvarez, with some excellent essays from many of the shows writers and producers, such as George Pelecanos, Bill Zorzi and Joy Lusko Kecken, as well as novelists Laura Lippman (Simon’s wife) and Nick Hornby, this companion is both an episode guide and compendium of articles and essays.
Alvarez was a Baltimore Sun colleague of Simon, as well as a staff writer on the show.
His style is an occasionally distracting staccato, which might work when penning rat-a-tat dialogue, but doesn’t always serve the material here so well.
His episode synopses are disappointingly bland, summarising events while only rarely illuminating thematic developments or offering behind- the-scenes detail, although chapters on the principal characters, casting, production design, music and so on cover a lot of that territory.
Also, amid quotes from The Wire ' s writers, producers and actors, Alvarez includes opinions from fans, an odd juxtaposition that doesn't quite prove the merits of critical democratisation.
The contributions are rather confusingly introduced – the writer’s name appears at the end of each essay, rather than the beginning, so it is frequently unclear whether it is another chapter by Alvarez or a discrete piece from a contributor.
Those criticisms aside, this book deserves to find a place on the bookshelf of any fan of the series.
Viewers often find that the Baltimore of The Wirestays with them, subtly informing their world view – about poverty, the war on drugs, institutional corruption, the importance of a functioning education system, and the interconnectedness of our society – the wires that bind us all together.
In helping to illuminate how and why The Wiretackled those issues, this book proves that, as Det Lester Freamon put it, "all the pieces matter".
Davin O’Dwyer is a freelance journalist