He is often described by critics as a kind of “Robin Hood” figure. Orphaned at a young age, raised by his religious grandmother, he became a stick-up man, whose speciality was robbing, and often killing, drug dealers.
But from within that ensemble, Omar came in many ways to express the heart of the show.
THE WIRE OMAR SERIES
The Wire was an ensemble show, myriad characters woven in and out of stories as the series progressed. And never more so than in the figure of Omar Little.
The Wire eschewed that whole approach to morality. That distinction is their raison d’etre, even in those that blur the lines. He is much more demanding of the viewerĬop shows are about good and evil. Almost two decades on, there is still little, fictional or factual, that tells that story like The Wire. The story, too, of how black rage and white rage was forged and how they interlaced. This was the backstory to Trumpism and to Black Lives Matter told more than a decade before either happened – the first episode of The Wire was broadcast in June 2002. “World going one way,” as Poot, a low-level dealer in one of the drug gangs, puts it, “people going another.” And all this wrapped up in the form of a policier. People crushed by a police force more interested in order than in the law, a city hall that sipped corruption with the morning coffee, unions more decayed than the industries they once dominated, an education system that taught despair, a media that missed the real stories. It was, rather, a set of intricately connected stories about the people we now call the “left behind”, and whom Simon then called the “excess Americans”: steelworkers and longshoremen, street dealers and heroin addicts, the unemployed and the barely employed, all chewed up by a system that cared only to preserve itself. “ Swear to God, it was never a cop show,” insisted David Simon, who, with his co-writer Ed Burns, was the driving force behind the programme.
THE WIRE OMAR SKIN
There are few works in any medium that have more successfully burrowed beneath the skin of our age, exposing that spot where race, class, power and despair coalesce to entrap the human spirit and curdle the American dream. The Wire was one of those TV shows that broke the rules of what TV should be, in terms of tone, narrative and pacing, “a television show that thinks it’s a novel”, as the New York Times suggested.
0 kommentar(er)
