Results tagged “The Wire”

The 58th — and second-to-last — episode of The Wire, David Simon’s sociological HBO drama about Baltimore, is titled “Clarifications,” and one scene succinctly serves that purpose.

When McNulty takes his faked serial killer of homeless men to FBI profilers, they nail the detective’s character in a few sentences based on his “evidence”: The murderer, they say, is a high-functioning alcoholic who works in a bureaucracy and has a problem with authority. McNulty — in Dominic West’s performance, always lacking self-awareness — can barely cloak his petrified amusement. He seems to be thinking: Am I that easy?

The scene confirmed for me that the fifth season of the lauded show is a comedy. More crucially, it summarized The Wire’s outlook: It knows people, and believes that you can know them, too, with just a few clues. It has a storyteller’s belief in the telling detail, and the reporter’s faith that people are consistent, and reducible to a few key traits.

In honor of the final episode of The Sopranos, Culture Snob takes a look at five minutes from The Wire — a show that probably wouldn’t exist were it not for that crime family from Jersey.

This brief audio commentary — part of the “Five Minutes” series — looks at one scene from The Wire’s first season. In these five minutes, the only dialogue that passes between Baltimore Police detectives Bunk and McNulty are variations on the word “fuck” and one utterance of “pow,” but the audience pieces together how this particular murder went down through visual storytelling and acting devoid of meaningful words.