The Wire may or may not be the Greatest TV Show Of All Time, Now And Forever, In Any Language And Genre, In The Whole World, And Throughout The Whole Extent Of Spacetime — but one thing’s for sure. It’s definitely The Most Praised Show Of All etc. Time, Entertainment Weekly and the Guardian have all labelled it the greatest, as have lots of other folks with and without column space. Metacritic.com assigned the fourth season an aggregate score of 98%, which is higher than the rating for God Himself; more strikingly, it’s even four points higher than the score for Kanye West’s most recent album.
The Wire‘s legion of enthusiasts regularly point to a couple of features that merit especial praise: the show’s realism; its panorama of an entire society at every level; its giving voice to the marginalised and disempowered. Realism: swearing! Panorama: Drugs! Unions! Politicians! Schoolkids! Settling old grudges Journalists! The marginalised: Black people! Gay people! Gay black people!
In interviews during and after the show, creator David Simon consistently claimed the highest ambition for the show and its themes. In particular, the show would
with each season, slice off another piece of the American city, so that by the end of the run, a simulated Baltimore would stand in for urban America, and the fundamental problems of urbanity would be fully addressed.
First season: the dysfunction of the drug war and the general continuing theme of self-sustaining postmodern institutions devouring the individuals they are supposed to serve or who serve them. Second season: the death of work and the destruction of the American working class in the postindustrial era, for which we added the port of Baltimore. Third season: the political process and the possibility of reform, for which we added the City Hall component. Fourth season: equal opportunity, for which we added the public-education system. The fifth and final season will be about the media and our capacity to recognize and address our own realities, for which we will add the city’s daily newspaper and television components.
Throughout the whole show, however, there’s one group of marginalised and disempowered that is not given proper representation; one type of individual that gets eaten by institutions but is not explored; one group which has historically faced, and continues to face, massive inequalities of opportunity.
That’s right: I’m talking about the ladies.
Simon identifies The Wire‘s great theme as “institutions devouring the individuals they are supposed to serve or who serve them”. And throughout all five seasons, the show develops this theme in detail, in a variety of institutional contexts and with a variety of individual players. Institutions fuck over McNulty, Daniels, Bubs, Wallace, D’Angelo, the Sobotkas, Bunny, Randy, Bodie and plenty more besides.
But, from Snot Boogie’s sad demise at the very start to the much-exploited homeless guy at the end, The Wire is singularly unconcerned with how women fare in these institutions, the fates they face, the options open to them.
Consider: by my count, over the course of five seasons, thirty-seven cast names appear in the opening credits. Of these, four are women. These are the actors playing Beadie, Kima, Pearlman, and (!) Alma Gutierrez. Beadie is in the credits only for season 2, despite playing a sizable role in the final season too. Shardene and Snoop never make the credits. By contrast, Burrell, Rawls, Sydnor, Clay Davis, Clarence Royce, Maurice Levy and Chris Partlow do.
Chris Partlow makes the cut and Snoop doesn’t.
(This gender imbalance is presumably, totally unrelated, in any way whatsoever, to the fact that ten out of the eleven writing credits throughout the show are men)
Or consider: of those thirty-seven cast members, the relationship status of three of the women are plot points. Pearlman fucks McNulty and then Daniels; Beadie fucks McNulty; Kima struggles with her (de facto) wife and child. Alma gets nothing, but that’s only because she has no internal life to speak of or, really, any kind of life to speak of, beyond learning at the feet of the great David Simon Gus Haynes.
Sure, much is made of who the guys are fucking, too — McNulty and Omar in particular. (And, of course, if Pearlman is fucking Daniels, then Daniels is fucking Pearlman too). But, for a lot of the male characters, it’s simply not an issue. They may be married or have a girlfriend, but it doesn’t matter much to their character. Prez has a wife onscreen for all of one scene, as I recall; Bodie, Herc and Carv take dates to the movies and that’s about it; Marlo and Avon are mostly asexual; Rawls’ sexuality is a throw-away gag (well, two gags, if you include the graffiti in the homicide toilets); and who the hell knows about Royce, Davis, Burrell, Levy, Sydnor et al. The point isn’t that the show isn’t interested in who the guys are fucking; it’s that the show is much more interested in who the women are fucking.
And once you get beyond the “main” cast — even if you include a couple of extra characters not in the opening credits, such as Shardene, Snoop, Prop Joe, Jay Landsman and the like — it gets even worse. Most of the tertiary female characters are WAGs, would-be WAGs, one-night stands, or mothers. Going down the cast list, if we skip the few women who actually do appear in the opening credits, we get: Snoop; Marla Daniels, who’s fucking Daniels at first and then she’s not; Cheryl (you know, the one with her coupons); Theresa D’Agostino, who fucks McNulty and then tries to fuck Carcetti; Grace Sampson, who used to fuck Cutty; Donette, who fucked D’Angelo and then Stringer; Elena McNulty — look, it’s too depressing to go on.
The biggest missed opportunities comes in season four, with the introduction of the school. Here you have an environment with a lot of women and a lot of girls, the powerful and powerless. Maybe they couldn’t fit in a new major character as a teacher, given that they already had Prez undergoing his learning journey and growing into his new role. Maybe there wasn’t any need. But surely — surely — they could have made one of the four kids that we track a girl?
For the point of season four is, in part, to show the options available to black children in marginal environments. Randy, the budding entrepreneur who ends up traumatised by his glancing contact with crime. Michael, the child of abuse, who’s recruited to crime by way of protecting his family. Namond, who’s too weak for the streets and lucks into a way out. And Dukie, poor Dukie whose fate seems sealed from the moment we see him.
We see what the boys can do, what can become of them, what few roles are offered by the system — the systems — that surround them. But what are the fates for girls? Do they become dealers, junkies, citizens? What specific options do they have that the boys don’t have? Questions not answered by the show; worse, they’re not even asked.
The show isn’t altogether clueless on gender. There’s a nice bit in season four when all the neighbourhood mothers converge on Cutty, as one of the few eligible bachelors going. Or the bit in season one when D’Angelo lets his casual misogyny slip to Shardene. And the instigating incident of season two — the dead sex slaves — suggests a show not entirely uninterested in how women are used by power. But is that enough for a show that aims to reveal an entire society, and how that society grinds down its members? Is that enough for the Greatest TV Show Of All Time?
Or, to quote the great Bunk Moreland: Happy now, bitch?
_________________
The entire Wire roundtable is here.
I think you make a lot of great points here…but you may be overstating the case slightly. For one thing, you don’t mention one of the more interesting characters in the series, Brianna — whose relationship status is never discussed. Brianna also touches on a number of the issues you raise — that is, how do women deal with institutions (the drug trade in her case) and what does it cost them.
On the other hand…I’ve seen people note in a couple of places that the maleness of the drug trade in the Wire is one of the most *unrealistic* things about it….
Also, I’d like to stand up for the Daniels/Pearlman relationship. It’s one of the few television/movie relationships I’ve seen where the woman is significantly less hot than the guy. (Not that Rhonda’s ugly or anything, but she doesn’t really have movie star good lucks, and Daniels kind of does.) I feel like the schlubby guy, hot woman dynamic is one of the more omnipresent ways in which mass culture caters to male fantasies, and it’s nice to see it undermined at least in one instance.
On the subject of normal women: http://ca.jezebel.com/5786058/why-do-movies-hate-nerd-love
There is of course the depressing possibility that Rhonda is in Daniels league because she’s white…but actually Daniels’ wife isn’t as good looking as he is either. And the show makes a good bit of effort to suggest that what he likes in Marla is her ambition and intelligence…which presumably would transfer to Rhonda as well. He’s just a really hot guy who’s attracted to smart women. As the Jezebel article suggests, that is not a very common trope in our popular culture.
Noah,
Consider why your response to a post that asks why women are omitted from The Wire, except in terms of who they’re fucking, is to evaluate the fuckability of the scant female characters on offer. You are promoting the problem, my friend. Way to miss the point.
For a second I thought you were our Alex; but you are in fact a different Alex.
As for your comment: I get the point. I said I liked the post. I think it’s mostly on target.
But — I’m evaluating the fuckability of Daniels as well, you know? Equal evaluation of fuckability of men and women. Can’t get more egalitarian than that.
For the record: the all-time greatest TV fiction series is the ’70s BBC adaptation of Robert Graves’ “I,Claudius”.
Carry on.
P.S. This is official.
A supportive comment from Sudhir Venkatesh’s “What Do Real Thugs Think of The Wire?” series:
“‘Where I come from, women run most of the things [that the show] talks about. It’s the women that have the power in the ghetto. This show totally got it wrong when they made it all about men. Women are the politicians; they can get you a gun, they got the cash, they can get you land to build something on.'”
Like Noah, I think you overstated your case, Jones. There’s no question that the show is built around men, but it’s telling that your rundown of the women, designed to show their marginalization, leaves out some key characters–Brianna, Marcia Donnelly (both strictly business), and the incomparable De’Londa Brice immediately come to mind.
I also think that if we disqualified all the men who have relationships as “plot points,” we’d run out of principals pretty quickly. Beadie Russell is much more than her relationship with McNulty, as Griggs is with Cheryl (Caroline Massey is the coupon-clipper, btw–also strictly business), and the show is a lot less interested in Marla Daniels or Grace Sampson’s sex life than it is in, say, Omar’s or Cedric Daniels’. Surely there’s more to these women than being wives, girlfriends, or mothers. (Hell, Grace Sampson doesn’t want to date Cutty again and she turns him down repeatedly, but this is enough to place her on your list of women defined by their relationships to men.)
The point about the show’s lack of interest in how women fare in institutions is an important one–it devotes so much attention to racial politics, so little to gender politics–but I don’t think it’s The Wire that’s reducing every female character to who she fucks.
The best TV series ever is LWT’s _Upstairs, Downstairs_.
Excellent points, but I think Marc’s comment above is very valid as well. I love discussing The Wire just as much as the next person, but what I immediately thought when I read the first couple paragraphs of this post is: What do we expect from one of the greatest shows ever, perfection? For a TV series that accomplished so much in just 5 seasons, it almost seems like nitpicking to harp on one aspect of society it didn’t dedicate a season to. Perhaps we should also point out that it didn’t fully address the issue of immigration: all the non-Americans were Russian mafia, and there were almost no Latino characters!
Well…women are half the population, though. And their relative absence led to some real weaknesses in the series, I think. I don’t think it’s wrong to point out that it’s a problem.
And besides, what’s wrong with nitpicking?
Lots of good comments here; I’ll respond in reverse order. First, Stutz. Actually, I’ve read interviews with Simon where he has said that, if they had had a sixth season, they would have gone into Latino immigration, which has apparently boomed in recent years in Baltimore (as elsewhere in the US). There’s a very glancing reference, in S3, to the disempowerment of non-anglophone latinos, when Cutty starts doing gardening work for the bloke with the ute.
That said, I don’t feel that the omission of the latino or broader immigrant experience is really a glaring one, in the way that the omission of women’s experience is. As Noah said, women are half the population–to be precise, 53.4% in Baltimore according to the 2009 census. Indeed, I strongly suspect the proportion of women would be significantly higher among marginal black communities than that figure (which is for the overall Balt. population), for a couple of reasons. (a) Life is presumably riskier for young men than for women in such communities (as it is, with some important exceptions, throughout the world), so mortality rates are probably higher for men too–and, indeed, black male life expectancy in Balt. is nearly ten years less than black female; and (b) high incarceration rates for young black men means that there are fewer men actually in the community.
By contrast, according to the 2009 census, Hispanics/Latinos represent just 3% of the B. population. I don’t know whether that figure includes an estimate of illegals or not, so the actual figure might be higher than that once you factor them in. On the other hand, not all that 3% would be first-generation immigrants, so the actual figure might be lower. In any case, the experience of immigrants doesn’t seem as important as the experience of women, if we just look at the raw stats.
Here are some other devalued/marginal/oppressed groups they don’t address either: the mentally or physically disabled (other than Butchie and that one politician in the wheelchair); queer sexualities other than just gay (where’s the transsexuals?); people with a mental illness (unless Herc counts…and I guess there’s the homeless people in S5). Yet these “omissions” bother me not a jot; I certainly don’t mean to demand that the show do *everything*.
But the show has high ambitions, chief among which are to give voice to the oppressed (for lack of a better word), to represent the society as a whole, and in particular to show how that society and its institutions devalue individuals. It seems to me — although others may disagree — that, for a show with such ambitions, a failure to reflect in any serious way on how women fit within the system(s) is a failure for the show tout court.
One more thing: you might worry that, although their experience of devaluation may be sometimes different from men’s, that focussing more on women wouldn’t really add anything to the show’s central theme, viz. the devaluation of individuals by contemporary institutions and systems. So there’d be no need to deal with them specifically, any more than there would be to deal with immigrants specifically.
But the devaluation of women specifically *is* a major factor in devaluation generally. Women remain, I expect, primary caregivers in Baltimore (justly or unjustly) and so what affects them, affects the whole family. And one of the chief messages of international development over the last few decades, it seems to me, has been that the cheapest way to improve quality of life in developing countries is to help women (with money, education, etc). I wouldn’t be surprised if the same went for developed countries, too. So: the plight of women seems to me just as important as drug-enforcement, the decline of organised labour, the difficulties of political reform, the education system and the media. I don’t want a sixth season to deal with women — I want all five seasons to deal with women!
Now to Marc. My case probably *is* overstated–but what else are blog posts for?
I’ll grant that it looks as though I cherrypicked my examples by omitting Brianna, Delonda and Donnelly. But I chose the secondary/tertiary females characters that I did list, by just going down the cast list at imdb and skipping over the few women who made it to the opening credits, until I ran out of steam. Granted, imdb’s ordering seems to be based on how many episodes the actor appeared in, so it’s not quite an exact sign of their importance to the show, but it’s still suggestive.
But I don’t think Brianna and Delonda contradict my point at all. I didn’t say there were no good female characters on the show; I said “Most of the tertiary female characters are WAGs, would-be WAGs, one-night stands, or mothers”. And, well, Brianna is Deangelo’s mother and Delonda is Namond’s.
And that’s not just incidental to their roles in the show. If Brianna hadn’t been Deangelo’s mum, she wouldn’t have talked him out of snitching. And then the Barksdale organisation would have been hit harder by the S1 investigation, Avon would have gone to jail for a much longer time, Deangelo wouldn’t have gone to jail and been assassinated, and ultimately Stringer wouldn’t have been killed. Brianna’s status as Dee’s mother (and, secondarily, as Avon’s sister) is crucial to her role in the show.
And Delonda’s role would be meaningless if she weren’t Namond’s mum; she would be entirely superfluous.
(For the record, Delonda is my second favourite outright villain in the show — the first being Rawls. Delonda is such a monster!)
I totally agree that Beadie is much more than McNulty’s girlfriend, at least in S2. In S2 her eventual relationship to McNulty is very much a footnote. But her later role does seem to me to be reduced to exactly that: McNulty’s girlfriend, who he cheats on or doesn’t cheat on. And Kima is more than her relationship with Cheryl (d’oh!) and the baby, just as McNulty is more than whoever he’s fucking.
But my point about the main cast was different from my point about the minor cast; sorry if I didn’t make that clear enough. My complaint about the minors is that they’re defined through their relations to men, which Beadie, Rhonda and Kima most definitely aren’t. My complaint about the main cast was that, other than Alma (who really is a non-entity character, as is pretty much everyone in the media storyline), the relationship status of all three is a part of the plot. Yes, so is that of McNulty and Omar and C. Daniels…but there are many, many other men in the 34 out of 37 total in the opening credits for whom their relationship status is irrelevant or secondary. For the major women, relationship status always matters; for the men, it only sometimes matters.
Fair cop on Donnelly, and I did stretch by trying to include Grace Sampson.
Finally, Katherine and Noah. Katherine: thanks for the link, I remember reading that freakonomics discussion at the time. I wonder whether the importance of women is explicitly acknowledged in those subcultures or is just an open secret. I can readily imagine that it would be the latter; “honour cultures” like the drug trade or organised crime generally have uh…regressive views about the roles of women.
And Noah: I like the Pearlman/Daniels romance, just as I like both of those characters, despite their not really getting many great lines. Pearlman is smart and good at her job; and after S1, Daniels is the model of integrity. Their pairing is believable and healthy.
JonesJonson: “Delonda is such a monster”
I don’t think so. She’s a villain from a rich people’s point of view. If you draw a parallel between the mainstream economy and the parallel economy Delonda is just a (admittedly, not very good) mother having high expectations for her son.
Another point is drug enforcement: in a society without a place for huge chunks of the population the parallel economy is the only way to survive. Drug enforcement is hypocritical.
Domingos: De’Londa pushes her son into an incredibly dangerous and socially destructive profession for which he’s completely unprepared, all so she doesn’t have to work. She’s a monster from a parent’s point of view. Or a child’s, or a teacher’s, or a citizen’s, or a viewer’s. There are characters within the drug trade who conduct themselves with dignity and their own (industry specific) code of ethics. De’Londa ain’t one of them.
Jones, I had a feeling that would be your reply on Brianna and De’Londa; my point is that discounting a character simply because they’re someone else’s mother makes about as much sense as discounting Prez because he’s Stan’s son-in-law. Yes, familial relationships are essential to how all three of those characters fit into the show; that strikes me as a pretty accurate reflection of institutional politics (and perhaps an especially accurate one of the drug trade, if we trust Venkatesh).
Nor do I think it’s especially troubling that seasons that focus on the police, the stevedores union, city hall, and the newspaper focus predominantly on male characters: these are all predominantly male institutions. They could do a lot more (i.e., anything) to show how women fare within those male institutions, and of course they drop the ball by making the teacher storyline about not one but two male ex-cops, but I would expect most of the cast to be male given the subject matter. Frankly, I’m glad The Wire didn’t populate its cast with the kind of glamorous lady detectives who fill every other TV cop show. (Is Megan Russert anybody’s favorite Homicide character?) That kind of artificial, guilt-allaying diversity actually elides the sexism that holds sway in such institutions.
The Wire runs into trouble for all the other ways it elides that sexism: it presents a series of male-dominated institutions but never considers how women like Pearlman or Griggs or Beadie Russell have to cope with them. (Or Alma Gutierrez, but I guess we dodged a bullet there.) Just tallying numbers or writing off any woman who has a familial or romantic relationship obscures the real problem. If anything, Brianna and De’Londa (and Shardene and Donette?) might give us the show’s best picture of what women have to do to thrive within that particular institutional culture.
Megan Russert–ha! But I doubt that the Wire, had it included more female cops, would have gone the glamour route–given that there are so few glam characters in the rest of the show.
And, again, I don’t mean to discount Brianna and Delonda so much as to observe that they, like almost all of the women, matter to the show because of their familial/romantic relations to men. Yes, that’s true for some of the men, too–notably Prez, Deangelo, Ziggy and Nick. My point is, again, that it’s disproportionately true for the female characters.
Good call on the maleness of 4/5 of the key institutions. Still, S1 is as much about the drug trade as cops, and it seems that women are very important in the former. S3, city hall–yes, women aren’t well represented in city councils (about 25%, according to one figure I saw). But if the show could make the improbable move of a white mayor, it could just as well have had a female mayor instead–after all, that’s how the show ends!
As for the stevedores union, again, that’s definitely a place with very few women. But, to make its points about the shrinking power of labour, the show didn’t have to focus on that workforce (and I say that as the proud son of a unionist stevedore). At least here in Australia, women are disproportionately represented in the service industry and in part-time or casual work. These areas are particularly vulnerable and powerless, and it might have been interesting to see how “women’s work” is (de)valued by society.
Or not. Despite appearance, I don’t really put much faith in armchair quarterbacking…
I don’t think these decisions are quite as arbitrary or easily changed as you make them out to be. If the writers wanted to do a season about the economic forces that have driven Baltimore and cities like it into decline, that dictates that they focus on manufacturing or related industries. In Baltimore, that pretty much means steel or shipping, and shipping offers the obvious connection to the drug trade needed to keep the season within the series’ remit. A season about the service industries would be compelling television but it wouldn’t explain why people are turning to the corners in a city where no one else is hiring. (Expanding the focus to the newspapers in season five, with their tenuous connection to drug crime, is probably one of the fundamental missteps that hobbled the final season.)
Similarly, the “improbable move” of a white mayor wasn’t all that arbitary, or all that improbable–Martin O’Malley was elected in 1999, and he was followed by Sheila Dixon in 2007. (Nerese Campbell, incidentally, would be another on the list of female characters with no visible family or romantic ties.) It’s worth noting that Baltimore had many, many white mayors before O’Malley, and as recently as 1987; Dixon was the first woman to become mayor, and only the third African American.
The Wire is generally more reactive than we imagine, and it reacts to the institutions its writers know best: institutions that are still dominated by men.
Other fun facts: two of those former white mayors of Baltimore were Nancy Pelosi’s speaker and brother, and Martin O’Malley is married to the daughter of Maryland’s former, long-serving attorney general. So I think the show’s emphasis on familial and marital ties is pretty accurate. If anything, Simon’s city hall should be even more of a nepotistic swamp.
Er, Nancy Pelosi’s father and brother.
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