Week 42: The Wire Season 1, Disc 1

Confession time. I am addicted to the blog Stuff White People Like. The posts are hilarious and so achingly true that it hurts. Hurts me in particular because it's like they're inside my white mind, right down to my Kitchenaid Mixer, my love of Arrested Development and the fact that I constantly carry a water bottle around with me. I'm Whitey McWhiterson. So imagine my surprise when they added the HBO series, The Wire, to the White People adoration list, and I'd never seen it. Does that make me kind of brown? Hmmm? A little black, perhaps? Maybe a touch Asian?

As you can imagine, I burned up my formerly white fingers adding The Wire to my Netflix queue. We watched all three episdoes on the first disc and loved it, naturally, BECAUSE WE ARE LILY WHITE. The Wire is a cop drama set and filmed in Baltimore. What sets it apart from other similar dramas like The Shield, for me, is how ultra-realistic it feels. The Shield is great drama and fun to watch, but it's way, way over the top. I wouldn't describe The Wire as necessarily edge-of-your-seat drama, but I didn't mind because the meat is so good.

The plot revolves around a detective, Jimmy McNulty, who is determined to take down Baltimore drug lord, Avon Barksdale. The cool thing is, Barksdale is completely under the radar. No record, no photo, no history. No one has ever seen him. The Wire flips between watching McNulty's team begin to assemble their strategy against the mysterious Barksdale and watching Barksdale's crew traffic heroine and evade the police from their side. I would almost describe this as watching the Sopranos in reverse from the police's side.

I feel great for having finally tapped into this great series. My whiteness has been restored. Now I'm off in my Toyota Prius to get an expensive sandwich. Just kidding. Even I'm not that white.