‘The Wire’ Season 3 continued in strong strides to reimagine what can be achieved in a TV series. Leaving aside the travails of the port stevedores we met in Series 2, the story reverts its focus fully to that of the drug trade which riddles Baltimore. This series looks to city hall, the mayor and councillors and the political management of the city and how it responds to the city’s crisis. As ever with ‘The Wire’, it manages to portray with such gripping effectiveness, a complex system, one which can be unfathomably unproductive and detached from reality. The political realm and street life of Baltimore could not be more juxtaposed; the people of both worlds admittedly talk of death as a commodity, the mayor, police commissioners and councillors talk in terms of statistics, the gang leaders talk in terms of revenge killings and make quick detached decisions to ‘pop’ people, operating within their own warped system of tradition and honour amongst thieves. From the lowest administrative ranking to the mayoral chamber, numbers are king, political ratings, crime statistics, council votes – its defies belief but is starkly real, in a world where opinion polls make front page stories, having numbers to manipulate is surely an easier way to communicate a job well done than ever try to tackle a systematic problem. This empty rhetoric looks pathetic contrasted to the fight for territorial rights in the gang war, syndicates sharing a drug supply and community groups and cops on the beat looking to salvage public health and order. The thing about ‘The Wire’ is that however much the line of good and bad blurs, and its blurs, people in all quarters are determined, so self-serving that they self destruct, some looking for redemption and meeting road blocks at every corner. There are fascinating characters to propel the story froward.   

These opposed vistas couldn’t be better portrayed than during a dinner date in which Jimmy Mc Nulty finds he has nothing in common with a woman he has to that point only had a physical relationship with. Yet both work in arenas that are inextricably linked, one a detective in a major crimes unit, tackling a gang behind the escalating murder rate in the city; the other is a political advisor, offering savy advice to aspiring mayoral candidate Tony Carcetti (played by Irish actor Aiden Gillen) who needs to construct a campaign that can assuredly convince a dejected public that he can tackle the problems they face on their street corners. There are no commonalities, no shared language, no experiences from which a mutual respect can grow, they each work in a cynical, ruthless environment of empty victories and debilitating red tape, but they exist for and work towards different ends.

These paths, over lapping lives and trajectories which have been slowly moulded over 3 years never become apparent to the players of course, even though Series 3 went further than the previous 2 in wrapping events in a bow. There is a huge scale of action for a viewer to survey. That is probably the gift of the show to the committed viewer, a reward for deciphering the street lingo, the street and political parlay, and for paying attention. Year 3 has been the most demanding and at times a little difficult to engage with fully, the political machinations of Baltimore were never to be portrayed in a favourable light; the aftertaste though of their empty debates doesn’t fill the void of the tragic family of the port that made such remarkable viewing in Season 2. Is this a suggestion of this being poor TV, or a decrease in quality? An adamant no! Season 3 resets the clock for a lot of ‘The Wire’ and Season 4 will be the first purchase I make come my next pay cheque.