Word: wired
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TIME's Lina Lofaro spoke to Amy Ryan (The Wire) about her role as Helene, the terrifying, alcoholic mother of a missing child, in Ben Affleck's directorial debut Gone Baby Gone...
...worth the effort, not because The Wire is good for you but because it is fantastic entertainment. Like The Sopranos, it's laugh-out-loud funny, full of gallows humor and hustles. In the first scene of Season 5, detectives use a low-tech scam to work a confession from a perp: they load a photocopier with papers reading TRUE and FALSE and convince him it's a lie detector. "The bigger the lie," says a cop, "the more they believe...
...Simon's progressive politics, The Wire betrays a kind of small-c conservative nostalgia for hard work and honor, for shoe-leather police work, for reporters who pound the pavement, even for criminals who try to follow some kind of code. The Wire offers a bird's-eye critique of society, but it doesn't look down on individuals. Its heroes are flawed, fated people who try even without hope, who teach kids with horrid home lives, who try to kick unshakable addictions, who do the hard labor of investigations even when their bosses punish them...
...Season 5 damns the media, it finds some love for Gus Haynes (Clark Johnson), a sarcastic Sun city editor with an unkillable work ethic and a fine-tuned b.s. detector who, despite those qualities--or because of them--knows he's a dinosaur. Maybe the greatest hero on The Wire is Lester Freamon (Clarke Peters), an old-school detective who explains to a young colleague how tediously scouring documents to connect a politician to drug money is better than collaring gang members on the street: "A case like this, here, where you show who gets paid behind all the tragedy...
...could be talking about The Wire, which doesn't just show the tragedy but gets behind it, demonstrating how we're all complicit in a more-with-less culture, but also all cheated by it, all frustrated by its vicious cycles and all called on by small voices to rise above it anyway. This common humanity--call it stubbornness or call it conscience--is the final connecting wire of The Wire. It may be frayed, it may be poorly maintained, but it is all we have left. For four seasons and what is shaping up as one searing, elegiac season...