DAVID BIANCULLI

Media matters

DAVID BIANCULLI — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 17:28:20 GMT

The Wire’s final season
No matter which side you’re on, you’re wading in a very strong, unpredictable, and treacherous current.

VIDEO: The trailer for the fifth season of The Wire

Every season, writer/producer David Simon’s HBO drama series The Wire rips the roof off a different element of Baltimore’s complex infrastructure — from the streets and the docks to City Hall and schools — and exposes the characters, rules, and anarchy feeding and starving the city from within. For the show’s fifth and final season, beginning Sunday (January 6) at 9 pm, The Wire takes aim at another rich target — the media.

Actually, it’s one medium: newspapers, as represented by the Baltimore Sun. The newspaper brings fresh eyes, and fresh characters, to continuing story lines, from the still-unsolved murders of drug-world players whose bodies have been found in abandoned buildings, and the feud between drug lords Omar Little and Marlo Stanfield, to Mayor Carcetti’s attempts to live up to his many campaign promises.

And if the medium is indeed the message, the message The Wire delivers, based on the first seven riveting hours of this new season, is this: no matter which side of the law you’re on, or whether you’re a newsmaker or a news-gatherer, you’re wading in a very strong, unpredictable, and treacherous current.

The best addition this season is Clark Johnson, the Homicide: Life on the Street veteran actor who directed the original pilot of The Wire (and is slated to direct this year’s 10th and final episode). Here he plays city editor Gus Haynes, a solid worker who’s frustrated on all sides — by corporate cutbacks from Chicago, layoffs and buyouts that decimate his newsroom, young reporters so hungry for bylines that they stretch the truth, and new management more interested in bottom-line profits than nuanced stories.

“I don’t want some amorphous series detailing society’s ills,” one senior editor scolds Haynes, swatting down an ambitious idea at a staff meeting. “If you leave everything in, soon you’ve got nothing.”

The joke, of course, is that The Wire is itself, clearly and proudly, an amorphous series detailing society’s ills — one that leaves everything in. And when this year’s setbacks send even longtime detectives Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West) and Lester Freamon (Clarke Peters) to commit acts of desperation in the pursuit of evildoers, the series builds to a tangled web in which all the story lines — the murders, the mayor, the newsroom, and the wiretaps that give the show its title — come together, brilliantly.

Comedy Rambo

DAVID BIANCULLI — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 14:54:12 GMT

A gladiator of mockery, Stephen Colbert is dismantling American society from the inside
Misunderestimate Stephen Colbert at your peril.

The Phoenix's Colbert Report video collection

Puppet government: Four-score-or-so years ago, Will Rogers began a comedic political tradition. By David Bianculli

I ruined Stephen Colbert's coffee: Behind the scenes at Comedy Central. By Sean Bartlett

Misunderestimate Stephen Colbert at your peril. Just because he is an unassuming, bespectacled physical specimen whose business cards may read “TV comedian” is no reason to dismiss him as a lightweight funnyman. Since the very night he launched his own series on Comedy Central in 2005, Colbert has thrown some vicious elbows, and demonstrated a bravura that dares his enemies to, in paraphrasing his ironic hero George W. Bush, bring it on.

As both a humorist and a political and media commentator, Colbert is a stealth bomber. A gladiator of mockery. A comedy Rambo. He’s the most dangerous satirist out there right now, and neither the writers’ strike nor his failure to get on the presidential-primary ballot in his native state of South Carolina will stall his advance for long.

In fact, Colbert has reached such revered status at this juncture that even in a period of relative inactivity — not doing a show, not running for president — people are talking about him, wondering about him, and waiting for his next move. He’s the Al Gore of Comedy Central: even if he can’t or won’t run for office, he is nevertheless building anticipation. (Can a Nobel Prize be far off?)

And, like Gore, he knows it. The question is, now that he knows he has the public’s attention and the media transfixed, where will he strike next? Or is not striking, and laying back, the smarter play? Colbert is nothing if not smart, and that’s why you have to watch him — even if, at least right now on TV, you can’t.

He’s dangerous not only because his wit is so sharp, but because, in a clearly defined Red State–Blue State landscape, he unpredictably cuts both ways. When he broke his wrist in July before a show taping, Colbert turned it into a satiric opportunity by starting a campaign against “wrist violence.” He started wearing and distributing what he called a “WristStrong bracelet,” a red plastic oval similar to — and gently poking fun at — Lance Armstrong’s cancer-fighting yellow LiveStrong bracelets and the breast-cancer-awareness pink bracelets. He got Katie Couric of CBS and Brian Williams of NBC to wear one, then generated a comic mini-scandal when ABC’s Charles Gibson wouldn’t.