thirty days of sharing: day three

03. your favourite television program

A syntagmatic analysis, in which what Berger calls, an examining of “a sequence of events that forms some kind of narrative,” can be applied to the televisual universe of The Wire. By looking at each season, which revolves around a certain theme (drug trade, port, city government and bureaucracy, education, and the print media), we can also examine how each event/scene in each episode builds up not only one relative problem, but also parallel such problems. In season four, the drug trade prevails as a dominating force in the inner-city kids’ lives, which is one of the reasons (on top of lack of city funding) why some of the schools undergo so many disciplinary problems. Each character, no matter how separate they are in which institution they belong to, are somehow interconnected to each other, whether they are aware of it or not, due to events within the frame of the story. In season two, nephew to Frank Sobotka, Nick, and his girlfriend visit the house, Jimmy McNulty’s divorced wife, a realtor, is selling. Neither of them knows each other but Nick Sobotka, his uncle, and his fellow port workers are currently under high scrutiny of the crime force McNulty works on.

All the events in each season purposefully build up to reveal how the urban poor deal with the conditions in their neighborhood, how the police, in turn, deal with matters that complicate on different psychological and sociological levels, and how Baltimore’s problems do not stem from one cause but a messy web of many inner-city issues. Each season’s story becomes a complex commentary because of the many themes the show tackles. The finale to each season usually ties up the major case but often times, there are many loose strands still left behind, which adds to the complexities that comprises the multi-layered story of The Wire.