Earlier this year I watched all 60 episodes of The Wire via a five-set DVD package I'd bought from Amazon. Conceived and mostly written by former police reporter David Simon, the show originally ran for five seasons on the US's cable network HBO until 2008.
It made a profound impact on me. Many laudatory comments have been written and uttered about this extraordinary television series since it screened in the United States (including by President Obama), and most of them are justified. Apart from the fact that you'll appreciate the first few episodes more by turning on the English sub-title facility (which I wish I'd realised), it has a depth and breadth that is rare in any medium, let alone television.
The writing, casting, acting, and production values are exceptional. But, more importantly, it a fully realised, integrated, and highly disturbing portrayal of what most us prefer not to know or think about the modern city.
While the show is ostensibly about life, work, and death in Baltimore, it is really about endemic corruption and the vanity of human wishes. Each institution it scrutinises -- whether it's the police force, city hall, the stevedores' union, the education sector, or the newspaper industry -- is engaged, to a greater or lesser extent, in a conspiracy against its decent members and the public at large.
In this universe, statistics are always being fudged and manipulated, grudges and vendettas are always being pursued, the wrong people are being shafted or promoted, the good guys usually have bad motivations, and the bad guys are often better than everyone else.
Violence is a way of life, pursued with insouciant, breathtaking brutality. Whether it's the local drug-dealers or the various mafia engaged in big business, the rules of civil society don't apply to them. In between the protection they've bought and the subservience they enforce, they are lords of all that they survey -- until they overstep.
Virtually nobody gets the fate they deserve, and everything gets inexorably worse. Of all the bad things that happen in this series, the killings are the worst. All of them are shocking, as you might imagine, but the hardest to take involve the slaying of those who should be beyond our sympathies -- drug dealers and hard-core criminals. In fact, the individuals with the most admirable characters and codes of honour turn out to be the ones we would ordinarily dismiss as beneath our contempt.
This is a searing, deeply uncomfortable vision of urban life in the modern world. Seen through the unblinking eyes of its creators, the average citizen is merely fodder for these vast forces playing their own ruthless, predatory games. No institution is reliable, no politician is credible, no friend is durable.
Once you've absorbed and understood the messages of The Wire, it's hard to see your own society in the same way again. Where I'm writing this, for instance -- in Melbourne, Australia -- we've heard any number of narratives that now sound familiar. We've got a health minister in the state government who claims not to have known that public hospitals around the city have been inventing patient numbers and treatment statistics for years. We've got a Country Fire Authority that managed not to warn rural and outer-suburban residents of catastrophic threats to their homes and lives last summer. We've got a government that won't tell people that the city is running out of water, while it commits to emergency measures that can mean nothing else.
Around the country, take your pick. There are non-stop sleazy deals between developers and whoever they need to pay off; ex-politicians lobbying their former colleagues for outrageous favours on behalf of their corporate clients; large corporates growing more and more powerful while pumping out blander and blander advertising campaigns; and cynical training rackets for foreign students, in which the governments desperate for income and the purely mercenary 'service providers' both have a vested interest in lying about what they're doing.
And that's not even talking about entrenched police corruption, out-of-control violence on the streets, tabloid newspapers and television 'current affairs' programs that are getting tackier and tackier, or a culture that is becoming dumber and dumber. Or global-warming denialism, which is a way of dancing with the stars while the planet burns.
And yet, it's not the whole story. Against the odds, and despite being treated like rubbish, there are many people who live modest lives, who care about real things, and who try to help others. There are even politicians -- I know some myself -- who are incorruptible, and who are committed to public life as a way to improve their society.
There is a tremendous core decency to Australians. Perhaps that is why we have tended to think of ourselves as less corrupt and more moral than other Western societies. This is, to some extent, a comforting -- and perhaps necessary -- illusion. Individuals, as well as societies, need to maintain their self-esteem to be able to function.
I suspect that Americans would say the same about themselves, and that this is one of the reasons that The Wire never attracted high ratings, even while it was garnering critical praise. It is determinedly non-redemptive and non-comforting, and there's only so much of this that most people can bear.
The Wire is a complex, multi-layered television novel, in an era when fewer and fewer real novels are being written and read. Like the best of its nineteenth-century predecessors, it tells its own truths in an unforgettable way, and the ripples it sends out never seem to stop lapping our shores.
Henry Rosenbloom