Hard lessons for life

THE lunchtime hubbub at Edward Tilghman Middle School had reached full din. Students clad in maroon polo shirts chattered and whooped, as the smell of boiled green beans and chicken cutlets wafted through the cafeteria.

A school may seem an incongruous setting for the latest installment of “The Wire.” After all, the gritty HBO drama spent its previous three seasons dwelling on the brutal realities of the street drug trade, dockworker corruption and political malfeasance. Its dozens of characters -- cops, addicts, dealers -- showed life in the city through the lens of criminality.

But for the show’s creator David Simon, it was obvious that the next institution to come under the program’s unflinching gaze had to be the educational system.

“Every year we’ve been trying to slice off another piece of our mythical Baltimore,” he said. “In the end, we hope that when we finish our run we’ll have addressed the idea of the American city and where we, urban people, are at this point in time.

“The next logical thing for us was to examine the notion of equality of opportunity. These human beings who are feeding [off of] and serving and being devoured by the only viable industry in these parts of Baltimore -- where were these people coming from?”

The answer offered up in “The Wire’s” fourth season, which debuts on Sunday at 10 p.m., is one that is likely to only further exasperate Baltimore officials, who are far from thrilled about having their city portrayed as an emblem of decaying urban America.

This year, the series follows four adolescent boys -- Michael (Tristan Wilds), Namond (Julito McCullum), DuQuan (Jermaine Crawford) and Randy (Maestro Harrell) -- as they try to navigate the druglord-owned streets of West Baltimore and contend with a largely dysfunctional school system often incapable of protecting its charges.

Much of the action takes place inside the middle school, filmed in a shuttered elementary school on the edge of downtown Baltimore. Early in the season, it quickly becomes apparent that the classroom provides no sanctuary from the battles outside.

On this cold spring day, the four young actors were filming a scene in the school hallway, a bustling corridor papered with hand-painted signs that urged “Integrity” and “Courage.” As the friends ambled down the hall, ominous glances were thrown their way. A passing student shoved Randy menacingly -- a warning that he had run afoul of the rules of the street.

The chaos inside the school comes as a shock to former detective Roland “Prez” Pryzbylewski (Jim True-Frost). This season, he will begin a new career as a middle-school math teacher after leaving the police department after an accidental shooting of a fellow officer in Season 3.

His story line was drawn in part from the experiences of writer and producer Edward Burns, Simon’s longtime collaborator, a former Baltimore homicide detective who taught social studies in a middle school for seven years after leaving the police department.

Out of the 200 students Burns instructed in his first year, 13 had been shot -- two of them twice.

“I was in the infantry in Vietnam,” he recounted. “I chased escapees and murderers and rapists. I was in homicide. There’s nothing like walking into a middle school in a setting like Baltimore.”

“The way I think about it is, the kids are going to learn,” Burns added. “The question is, where?”

“The Wire” illustrates the inexorable pull of the corner, where the drug dealers whose presence is a way of life are ready with their own form of education.

Simon, a former Baltimore Sun reporter and author of two nonfiction books about policing and the inner city, called the program a “very angry show,” one that delves into the somber truth of poverty rarely portrayed on TV.

“Cop shows in particular have no interest in it because it screws with the basic motif of catching the bad guy,” he said. “In police procedurals, the people being pursued ... they’re really there to validate the morality and the superiority and the intellect and the heroism of the authorities.

“And I think it’s basically that culture of storytelling and that simplistic mythology that has given us this incredibly destructive, incredibly wasteful, incredibly tragic drug war. I look at most television and I think, ‘This is just propaganda. It’s not honest.’ ”

“The Wire” has its share of police and criminals in its sprawling cast, but deciphering who the heroes are is not easy. James McNulty (Dominic West) is a lifelong cop with a self-destructive streak; Omar (Michael K. Williams) is a ruthless stick-up man with a strict code of ethics. The complex stories that slowly unfold through the series -- inspired in large part by cases Burns worked on as a detective -- demonstrate the parallels of their experiences.

“Our uber-theme has remained the same since Season 1, and it’s this: that in post-modern America, institutions that are ostensibly there to serve people and are ostensibly there for people to serve, end up betraying people on a fundamental level,” Simon said.

He paused for a breath.

“If you put it in there just like I said, it’s going to be like, well, there goes L.A., nobody is going to watch this,” he added with a baleful chuckle. “It probably seems, ‘Oh my God, that’s oppressive.’ The only thing I can say is none of the characters talk the way I’m talking, and we try very hard to embrace the humanity of all the characters and to capture moments of genuine light and humor. Because without the humor, it would be a horror show.”

Indeed, for HBO, the show’s political message is secondary.

“The characters and the stories are so compelling that you’re actually entertained,” said Carolyn Strauss, president of HBO Entertainment. “It’s the mark of great art.”

In fact, HBO executives were so taken with the story Simon laid out for the fourth season that they decided to bring the show back despite its low ratings last season, which drew an average of just 3.9 million viewers an episode.

Simon said he’s not surprised that “The Wire” has not caught on more broadly, despite its near-universal plaudits from critics around the country.

“How many people want to regard their television set as a tool of provocation rather than as a tool of relaxation?” he said.

And then there’s “the big elephant in the room.”

“There are a lot of viewers -- and not they’re not venal or racist in any grand sense -- but they look at this many black faces staring back at them and they say, ‘Oh, this is not my story,’ and they change the channel,” Simon said. “By the way, they’re dead wrong -- it is their story. It’s all of our stories.”

Simon originally pitched the series as a look at the ramifications of the drug war, but in reality, he envisioned a much broader tale. After the first season, which focused largely on a wiretapping investigation of a drug gang operating out of the projects in West Baltimore, the program shifted to the docks, where a beleaguered union boss tried in vain to pump life back into the waterfront. Season 3 focused on city politics and the futility of reform efforts.

The changing settings meant that some of the actors who had played major roles were subsequently relegated smaller parts -- a situation that caused some angst initially, Simon admitted.

This season, regulars like West’s incorrigible McNulty play a smaller role than in the past, but Simon said the actors now take the loss of screen time in stride.

“I think our cast has come to the conclusion that, as a unit, we’re building something special and all the pieces matter,” he said. “If you’re not big now, you might be big in the next moment.”

In fact, Simon has a major role in mind for McNulty in Season 5 -- provided HBO greenlights another year. He believes “The Wire” needs at least one more season to complete its story, with an installment that looks at the media’s role of media in society.

“The last thing I wanted to examine was the disconnect between the perception and reality,” he said. “At the end of five, I feel like we will have touched on exactly what we want to say about the city, its institutions and why -- with all of our power, all of our wealth, all of our technology -- we can’t seem to solve our fundamental problems.”

Simon is cautiously hopeful that he’ll have a chance to tell that last chapter, noting that the Season 3 DVD box set catapulted to the top of the bestselling list on Amazon when it was released last month.

“Something happened and the show is a little bit more resonant in the culture,” he said, before quickly adding: “I’m not suggesting we have a hit on our hands. We’re nothing if not realists here in Baltimore.”

matea.gold@latimes.com

*

‘The Wire’

Where: HBO

When: 10 to 11 p.m. Sunday.

Rating: TV-MA (may be unsuitable for children under the age of 17)