Idea IS the format

I’ve just finished watching the final few episodes of the final season of The Wire.  I feel compelled to post something, even though it’s late and I’m still trying to get my head around it.

I guess the main thing I’ve taken from it is that, if television has one great advantage over cinema, it’s the opportunity to develop characters over a period of days, rather than just a couple of hours.  By my reckoning, across the five seasons, I’ve watched almost sixty hours of television.

I’ve developed an intimate fondness for at least a dozen characters representing every strand of Baltimore’s civic DNA, and a working familiarity with maybe a hundred more.  Not one of them stands up as the paragon of virtue, nor one could be written off as being all bad.  Real people don’t live at those extremes, we simply orientate ourselves by the notion of them.

Part of the reason The Wire works so well is because its not written episodically.  It has none of the clumsiness of 24 or Heroes, clumsily contrived to reach a cliff-hanger finale at regular intervals of 45 minutes.  Instead it ebbs and flows, a tide of circumstance and observation carrying the rhythmic narrative back and forth.

As each a season ends, the camera may take a moment to reflect upon on the themes it has explored, or the particular context in which it has been situated, but an abiding sense prevails that though the characters may come and go, the city lives on, a constant, making gods of men, then turning them to ashes.

Maybe the producers realised that it would never reach its full potential for as long as it was being shown in weekly chunks, broken up into twelve minutes of drama for every six of advertising.  I tried watching it as such, and gave up after a couple of episodes, preferring to watch it in film-size portions, comfortably enjoying three or four hour-long episodes back-to-back without more than the occasional tea break.  Even if I stopped it was often only because I was forcing myself to prolong the pleasure, giving me time to digest the latest developments, and to reflect upon some new defining moments.

As far as I’m concerned, this is the future of televised drama.  Call it long-form cinema.  Draw me in, involve me, make me feel a part of the world the story lives in, then sell it to me by the boxset. When it’s as good as this, I don’t care what it costs, I’ll beg, borrow or steal if I have to. I just want more.