In 'The Wire,' the streets are mean, high school is meaner

On HBO's 'The Wire,' an ex-cop learns hard lessons as a new teacher

BY DIANE WERTS | Newsday Staff Writer

September 7, 2006

Season 4 of "The Wire" features Julito McCullum (center) in Project classroom . (HBO Photo)

Cop shows always seem to be one of TV's hottest commodities. They rivet viewers with crime intrigue, adult tension and real-world relevance. The stakes are extreme - life-and-death for individuals, moral demarcations for American culture. The cop's life couldn't be more dramatic.

Unless he were a public school teacher.

Classroom surprise

So says Ed Burns, who knows both sides of this balance scale. Burns was a Baltimore police officer for two decades before shifting gears to teach in that troubled city's school system. "When you step into that classroom after being 20 years in the street," Burns says, "you think you are pretty tough. And you find out real quickly that you are not. It's a very stunning change of who you are. And it tests things that nothing else in my life tested."

That trial by fire provides meaty fuel for fresh episodes of one of TV's most spellbindingly personal dramas. "The Wire" returns for its fourth HBO season Sunday at 10 p.m., with Burns producing alongside series creator David Simon, a former Baltimore Sun reporter who cut his TV teeth on NBC's urban cop classic "Homicide," based on Simon's nonfiction book.

Both men are fascinated by today's crumbling big cities, where many neighborhoods seem to have devolved into a sort of civil war zone. But rather than portraying abstract urban problems, Burns and Simon zoom in on individuals - ordinary people scrambling to find new roles to play in the changing metropolis, on whichever side of the law, in whatever way they can carve out a place for themselves.

Simon likens the landscape of "The Wire" to Sim City, the computer game where players are challenged to create an entire functioning culture.

"We really wanted to depict an American city at the millennium, with all of its attendant problems and all of its promise," Simon said at the television critics' recent press tour, "and really examine not just what it is but why it is that we've built what we've built - and why it is that the richest, most powerful country in the world can't solve its fundamental problems when it comes to places like Baltimore."

His show burst out of the gate in 2002 with characters embroiled in the drug war from all sides - the street cops going after dealers, the corner dealers eking out a living, the city leadership and the crime kingpins playing their underlings like chess pieces.

Real reality TV

A "Wire" cult sprung up to devour every slice of life Simon delivered in a novelistic page-turner of a tale that incrementally sketched a nuanced portrait of vibrant humans trapped in an inexorable machine not of their own making.

The sense of reality was amplified by filming - like "Homicide" - on location in burned-out Baltimore. The result wormed its way under viewers' skin by peeling back the layers of what Simon calls "a different piece of the city" each season, boring with laser precision into one particular "element of the urban institution. And they all connect and explain why we are the way we are, and why we can't get out of our own boxes.

"The first year was law enforcement and the drug war. The second year was the working class and the idea of the death of work," when first-season drug cop McNulty (Dominic West) was essentially exiled to the marine unit at Baltimore's fading port.

"The third season was the political element," says Simon, a story thread that carries over into the fourth season's mayoral campaign between corrupt incumbent Clarence Royce (Glynn Turman) and challenger Tommy Carcetti (Aiden Gillen), who's caught up in his own machinations of money, race and power. "And now," Simon says, "it's just quite natural to do schools."

This new season introduces four boys coming of age on the street and, occasionally, in school. One minute, they're eating treats from an ice cream truck. The next, they're being recruited by gangstas to pass deadly messages, or starting their climb up the ladder of a family business that just happens to be drug dealing. The cops already know who these kids are.

Jaded teachers

And from a different angle, so does former detective "Prez" Pryzbylewski (Jim True-Frost), who arrives at his new teaching job in a classroom where veteran teachers offer jaded advice about just maintaining daily order. Never mind educating anybody.

"I really leaned hard on Ed for this," says Simon, "because it was his classroom and his sensibility of the story we were trying to convey. He taught at Hamilton Middle in Baltimore for three years and then City College for four." It was Burns' job "to recognize certain souls that were important for the story." He found them in four actors still in high school, including two from New York. Brooklyn's Julito McCullum - seen in Spike Lee's miniseries "Miracle Boys" on The N and in the movie"Akeelah and the Bee" - plays Namond, son of an inmate still giving his kid crime pointers from the inside.

Staten Island's Tristan Wilds, also seen in "Miracle's Boys," is the more book-oriented Michael, who proves unexpectedly proficient in his friend's family business.

"What you see on the screen is what's really going down," McCullum said at press tour, impressed by the experience of filming in Baltimore's decaying neighborhoods. "But the people that live in those houses and that go through those things, they also have good hearts.

"Even though some of the kids want to be a bad guy."

HBO builds up the hype

Despite overwhelming critical acclaim and a near-rabid cult following, "The Wire" has never reached the public awareness of "The Sopranos" or even "Deadwood." But HBO is pulling out all the stops. It has already made Sunday's season premiere available via digital cable's HBO On Demand service, and plans to preview each new episode there starting the Monday before its regular airing. Also available on-demand until Sunday's season premiere are 2004's Season 3 episodes and three eight-minute digests of those previous seasons.