New Cops On The Beat

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The Wire sometimes oversells this point, as when D'Angelo teaches his crew members chess to show that they're pawns in a game (chess metaphors are always a reliable didacticism ahead sign). But it slowly develops into an engrossing look at the methodical nature of police work and the limits of individualism. Cop dramas are dispatches on America's relationship to authority, and like The Shield, The Wire is a daring and timely one. We responded to 9/11 with a national narrative of teamwork: unite behind our institutions, and let's roll. (Waco? Diallo? Old news.) The rhetoric of good and evil was ascendant; anything in between smacked of moral equivalence. And yet the news since then has been Enron, the fbi, the church: institutions failing their charges.

Read this way, the network whodunit is like the mainstream post-9/11 superego, telling us that the system may make mistakes but it works. Evil is knowable, crime solvable, justice swift and attainable. The Wire and The Shield arrive like an unconscious (and just as American) response: It's O.K. to doubt, to question, to acknowledge the bad among the good. Decades of cop shows have schooled us on our Miranda rights, chief among them the right to remain silent. Cheers to these cable cops for exercising their right to make some noise.