Philadelphia Weekly

A spacious City Hall gathering room: grand chandelier, high decorative ceilings, walls ringed with portraits of Philadelphia's dead white mayors stretching back to an era of powdered wigs. It was in this ironic setting Sunday evening that a group of roughly 150 journalists, public employees, and lucky newspaper raffle winners joined Mayor Nutter to watch the series finale of HBO's The Wire, acclaimed for its multivalent, deeply human portrait of urban blight in Baltimore.

According to Nutter, this screening signified "a way of doing things a little differently in city government." It's part of his plan to "bring people into the building," perhaps with an ongoing series involving movies, performances and other events. The Wire, given its social and political resonance here in Philly, was obviously a good fit.

An ardent fan of the show, Nutter managed to involve Philly in the big finale buzz on short notice. Nearly a dozen familiar faces were seen during the prescreening reception and postshow Q&A, including Clarke Peters ("Freamon"), Wendell Pierce ("Bunk"), Michael K. Williams ("Omar"), Jermaine Crawford ("Dukie"), Seth Gilliam ("Carver") and, perhaps most notably, Clark Johnson ("Gus"), who directed the final episode as well as the 2002 pilot.

In a prerecorded video greeting to the small Philly group, the show's creator David Simon described The Wire as ultimately about "a lot of places in America, places that have been divorced from the viable America of the 21st century." With Philly making national headlines for its record-high homicide rate, the connection isn't a stretch.

"Baltimore and Philly have such an interesting relationship, and I've spent so much time in both cities," remarked Johnson, a West Philly native. Currently he's working on a script called Ogden Street, inspired by the lives of his parents and the rise of the civil rights movement. One scene involves a sit-in outside the very building in which he was standing. "Until tonight I'd never been inside City Hall," Johnson said.

So, how was the final episode? No spoilers ahead, so read on. It was satisfyingly long at 93 minutes. Outcomes piled upon outcomes, justice bumped up against injustice. There were triumphs, failures, shades in between, ambiguities to ponder, laughs to be found. If anything united this patchwork of happy and unhappy endings, it was the notion of the city as a space of moral compromise--some of it appalling and untenable, some necessary, some neither here nor there.

Ambitious politicians and police commanders, disgruntled detectives, deceitful reporters, corrupt lawyers, gangsters, prisoners, addicts, teachers, the homeless: The Wire presented them all with a depth rarely matched on TV. It was the cop show as urban studies seminar as Shakespearean tragedy. It took the temperature of society and was well regarded for its efforts. The Newshour With Jim Lehrer spent a recent segment dissecting The Wire's gritty realism. Jack Shafer of Slate, even when faulting David Simon for an incomplete understanding of the newspaper business, seemed to approach the series as a legitimate forum for ideas.

But what will be the show's lasting legacy? That question was thick in the air during the Q&A session, and it also spurred a Time magazine editorial co-written by Simon and his four creative partners. "What can we do?" they asked, mulling the possibility of real-life social change. After making sound arguments about our country's incarceration epidemic and the failure of the drug war, the five concluded by advocating jury nullification:

"If asked to serve on a jury deliberating a violation of state or federal drug laws, we will vote to acquit, regardless of the evidence presented. Save for a prosecution in which acts of violence or intended violence are alleged, we will--to borrow Justice Harry Blackmun's manifesto against the death penalty--no longer tinker with the machinery of the drug war."

This is a step too far. Clinging to a conclusion "regardless of the evidence presented" is pretty close to a definition of dogma, and it runs afoul of the deliberative democracy that the jury system seeks to uphold. Not all drug cases are the same, and jury nullification, apart from the caveat for violence, rests on a refusal to draw distinctions. Lamenting a world of moral compromise, the show's creators seem to suggest a course of moral compromise in turn. (Here was another irony: Philadelphia's City Hall is in part a courthouse. To reach the lavatories at the screening, one had to walk past actual courtrooms.)

The Wire may well continue to influence opinion, and Simon and his partners are right to have pushed the health of America's inner cities to the forefront of public consciousness. Let's hope that the best of their insights and ideas, not the worst, exert the greater pull.

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