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Who is the Protagonist of the Wire?
- Thread starter Gwenpoolshark
- Start date
Yeah, Royce and Carcetti have the chance, and even attempt to do some good, but fall short due to their flaws. Which contrasts with McNulty, Bubbles, D'Angelo, and others who work through their flaws for the good/memory of others (respectively Bodie, Grace, and Wallace).
I mean, if you have to pick a character, it's McNulty. It's no coincidence that he's both in the first and last scene of the show. Ironically, he's not featured that much in season 4 (iirc because Dominic West was filming 300), which many consider to be the best.
single characters, it rotates per season. If you're talking in totality, then there's no other character than mcnulty. He is the protagonist of at least two seasons (1 and 5), a deuteragonist in two more (2 and 3), and around enough in season 4 to still be memorable. He's designed to be the straight man to stand in for the audience and react (in his own flawed, self serving, but generally well meaing way) to the bullshit that approaches him (and the audience, by proxy) at all sides.
Which all ties back into why season 4 is the best season of the show - it doesn't have a main character. The presumptive protagonist has his role substantially reduced, because it isn't about him. The Wire's overall theme of legacy and cycles of corruption, and how the road to hell is paved with good intentions, shine through best here because of the egalitarian use of perspectives. So many critical decisions, payoffs, and setups occur in a satisfying manner thus.
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Look I'll say it again: looking for a protagonist in this show is an exercise in analytic limitation. I wholly understand that the show adopts a panopticon framework to get across its message and themes. Howeve, it's still a fictional narrative with characters and development. In the end, having just finished my sixth watch through of the series, I was drawn back to how the show breaks apart certain traditional narrative structures while also playing within the lines of convention. There's never going to be a simple answer to the question, which is why having the debate is fun and worthwhile.
We don't agree. Disagreement does not mean that we didn't read the post.
I read your post. I reject the weird and arbitrary restriction you placed on the discussion because it requires an intentionally incorrect reading of the show. My post was an explanation of why that is.
The fact that so many people are balking at the concept should tell you it's not a great discussion-starter, not that everyone suddenly forgot to read.
Mcnulty, that's pretty clear.
And sure, Baltimore. I think that would David Simon's answer too.
It's a story of failed institutions in most struggling, undeserved and segregated inner cities in America. It could be Detroit, Buffalo, Gary, East St. Louis or any number of cities dealing with white flight going through it from the 80s/90s/2000s onward.
And sure, Baltimore. I think that would David Simon's answer too.
It's a story of failed institutions in most struggling, undeserved and segregated inner cities in America. It could be Detroit, Buffalo, Gary, East St. Louis or any number of cities dealing with white flight going through it from the 80s/90s/2000s onward.
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The purpose of this thread is not to dismiss the notion of Baltimore as a protagonist, but to put it aside. Overall, it's almost certainly true that Baltimore is the protagonist while characters are caught up in its tangled web. The key words in the OP were "If you had to choose." I want to recognize that, while the Wire is in many ways unconventional and egalitarian in its approach to narrative, it is also a fiction with characters that we can relate to other fictions, and that we can deconstruct according to common codes.
I don't disagree with the notion of Baltimore as protagonist, it's just not really the point of the thread.
Well, sure. Your "easy/simple" answer is the correct one to the question you're asking. Otherwise you'd ask "who changed* the most over the course of the show?" Change is certainly not the bedrock theme of the Wire, at least not in a character arc sense. You put Bubbles in there for his redemptive arc, when he was mostly the same kind hearted dude abandoned by the system the entire show (we never see him alienate his family, we came to know he already was). Just because he got clean doesn't mean he changed, which was the point of Bubbles' arc, and why his win at the end felt good even though we never saw what put him into that space to begin with.
McNulty serves as the overall protagonist of the Wire - outside of Baltimore itself - for all the reasons the term exists, which is why S4 is the best of the show.
*I would argue McNulty's increasing cynicism over the entire series dovetailing quite closely with his self sabotage, leading him to literally create a serial killer just to do what he deems real police work ("fake it till you make it"), is perhaps the most thematically on brand "change" any character undergoes throughout the entire show (literally Bunny and Hamsterdam, but stretched out over the entire show), but I digress.
The show is about cycles. Cycles of crime, corruption, poverty, and violence. About Baltimore. That being said, it's Jimmy. Like you stated in the OP, he never really changes. In the show he even says "Shit never changes". Poot is one of the lucky ones who seemingly escapes his own cycle while Jimmy personifies Baltimore.
Just cleared a full series watch of the wire and the number of redemptive arcs for its enormous cast is so vanishingly small and depressing. Who gets what they want, or ultimately need, in the end? Kima? Sorta. Bubbles, certainly. Namond, yeah. Cutty, yup. Prez, yup!
Now ask me who the main villain in The Wire is and my answer is always Herc. Fuck Herc.
Now ask me who the main villain in The Wire is and my answer is always Herc. Fuck Herc.
Then you could have accepted my secondary premise that cocaine itself is the protagonist since it is the primary motivating force for every other characters growth or regression throughout the series. Even Baltimore itself.
This show was so damn good it's a crime it's not available on more platform. Everyone should have the possibility of watching the Wire. It's truly a classic, on a level that will written and talked about in the future. I have no doubt Simon will go down as one of the history's greats.
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Prez is a really interesting case because he's clearly not the main character of his first few seasons, but Season 4 completely reorients how you view him previously. I think he's an interesting counterexample to a clear cut case like McNulty, who's a strong presence throughout. Not sure I'd choose him over Bubbles though.
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OK I'll just say it: Cocaine and the city of Baltimore are not characters. They are important, more important than any characters, but they're not characters. I get that maybe some people object to this heuristic or find it inadequate for understanding the project of the show, but like, the whole reason I made the thread was to try and wrestle with a kind of silly and goopy question which will never really encapsulate the show's full themes. Nonetheless, I do think the notion of a "main character" is something that the show neither fully rejects nor fully embraces. You get fragments that the viewer has to piece together in their own way and seeing peoples' different answers in this thread is a testimony to how the show enacts its narratives differently, emphasizing different storylines to arrive at a grand design. If you find this type of reading objectionable I'm sorry, but it's clearly outlined at the start of the thread. It's supposed to be a fun way to revisit the show by thinking through character, something that we can often overlook when thinking about the bigger themes and ambitions of The Wire.
I realize I was being somewhat cheeky with my responses and I was with you until your last statement. No one overlooks character when thinking it soaking about The Wire.
Characters and the quality of then is probably the most significant characteristic of the show. You aren't unearthing some secret analysis of the show and to think that people overlook the characters is to miss the mark almost completely in your analysis.
Skip season 5.
The end of season 4 is special and the series should have wrapped up right there.
Season 5 was very self-indulgent and the writers went way over the top with McNulty doing Dumb McNulty Things to the extreme.
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Kind of yes and kind of no. There's still a lot of important stuff that gets wrapped up but it's definitely the worst season. Especially disappointing that it kind of flails around with the Newspaper stuff considering that was Simon's actual career.
