The Wire

I’ve been renting episodes of The Wire from Netflix. It's scope is surprising. It goes from the lowest to highest level drug dealers and the cops who chase them. It even goes into the little ghetto kids that run errands for the street dealers and the school these kids go to and some insight into how and why the schools are so screwed up. And the story of the cops is put in perspective by the story of the police administration that tries to keep street level cops away from the upper level drug dealers because the politicians who run the police are in the pay of the dealers. It also gets into the newspaper people who cover all of this plus a long look at the dock union that helps bring in the drugs. It does this all with a large cast of funny and fascinating characters in a series of connected stories with endless plot twists. Oh, there are also the girls who work at the titty bar where one of the big dealers has set up an office and also some guys that make a living stealing from drug dealers. It also spends some time on Narcotics Anonymous showing the clean and the not so clean (a common dichotomy throughout the series). It presents a realistic view of the long and difficult road an addict wanting to clean up must travel. The viewer also gets to see something about the court system, the judges and the prosecution and defense lawyers. And I’ve probably left someone or some facet out.
I especially enjoyed the way The Wire has portrayed bureaucracy in its day to day ugliness. I had become disgusted by this evil while working as a nurse for over fifteen years. Many hospital employees punch in and then spend the day engrossed in mindless pursuits unrelated to their jobs. This was especially painful to me a couple of years ago when I spent months hospitalized after major surgery and found that it was frequently impossible to get help from nurses and others who did not want their day disturbed by patient needs and requests. In The Wire there are a couple of drunken cops who will not work. And there is nothing their bosses or peers can do to get them off their asses: an attempt by another cop to get these drunks to do something is more trouble and aggravation than the cop just doing it himself. I worked with a charge nurse who watched this kind of thing on our unit in a mixture of frustration and amusement. She said that if you ever got one of these people to do something they would mess it up so much that you would be unlikely to ask anything of them again. I found these people maddening and have wanted to write about their indifference to their patients, their jobs and their fellow workers. But I don’t need to write about it since The Wire captures them perfectly.