‘The Wire’ takes mythic approach

“In middle school, I used to love the myths,” says Omar (Michael K. Williams), the maverick stickup artist who may be the only really free man in HBO’s majestic series “The Wire.” “That stuff is deep, truly.” Though technically a cop show, “The Wire” is really an anti-cop show. It refuses to subscribe to the myths that the classic cop shows lifted from the western, archetypes transplanted from the frontier to asphalt streets. Archetypes are most definitely at work here too, but they’re deeper even than the ones that rose up out of cities named Dodge and Kansas; Thebes and Athens are more like it.

“The Wire” is different from any other TV series for the same reasons it’s one of the greatest dramatic series of all time. It’s the closest the form has ever come to Greek tragedy, which becomes abundantly clear now that the second season is available on DVD. (The third season concluded in December.) This is one series whose epic unfolding is best suited to watching in several long sessions instead of one hour a week.

While trying to explain how “The Wire” isn’t like “Law & Order” or “NYPD Blue,” its creators got into the habit of saying that it’s like a novel, which makes some sense. The two main groups of characters -- assorted detectives and officials from the Baltimore Police Department and the members of a West Baltimore drug ring -- are never wholly admirable or detestable. Synthetic notes of redemption, obligatory in network television, don’t get sounded at the end of every episode. The stories are intricate and unconventionally told, and like a good novel, the show makes you work for the grown-up pleasures it offers.

Few modern novels, however, are so concerned with people whose lives, like those of Oedipus and Antigone, are determined by forces beyond their control and whose best qualities usually wind up destroying them. The first season of “The Wire” was taken up with introducing us to a dozen significant recurring players and with groping toward the format that emerged in its full glory with season two. Although certain central figures -- most notably the feckless detective Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West), drug kingpin Avon Barksdale (Wood Harris) and the legendary Omar -- appear each time around, each season also follows the trajectory of one or two doomed individuals, usually those who dare to buck what everyone around them refers to as “the game.”

Some harsh realities

In season one, we learned that anyone hoping to play the game with less violence (on the drug trade side) or more integrity (on the law enforcement side) will wind up profoundly sorry for his idealism. In season two, a different sort of soul hangs in the balance. Frank Sobotka (Chris Bauer), secretary-treasurer of the local longshoremen’s union, wants desperately to keep the dwindling local together and preserve a vanishing way of life. He’s probably the most unselfish person ever to appear in the universe of “The Wire” -- and that means when he goes down, as he surely will, he’ll take some friends with him.

Sobotka, it turns out, has been letting a gang of smugglers slip certain shipping containers past the port authorities. He uses the smugglers’ payoffs to help his own men over thin times, but most of the cash goes to a fancy lobbyist and the campaign funds of local politicians. This, he figures, will help revitalize Baltimore’s port and bring back the shipping trade. Sobotka has an angry, reckless fool of a son and a clever but broke nephew, each with his own reasons for taking an interest in Sobotka’s new friends.

It’s a situation that can only end badly, largely because the intentions behind it are so generous. “I was wrong for the right reasons,” Sobotka pleads as his scheme begins to fall apart. By the penultimate episode, as we see him marching purposefully toward a waterfront meeting, it’s clear that this walk is simultaneously the right thing to do, the biggest mistake he’ll ever make and absolutely inevitable.

“The Wire” is at heart a tragedy of vocation, the story of men (and a few women) prevented from doing the work they were made to do. Omar is the only one among them perfectly suited to his job, the only one unencumbered by compromises. The natural-born detectives are hampered by protective spouses or ambitious superiors. Stringer Bell (Idris Elba), Avon Barksdale’s suave right-hand man, yearns to run the drug trade like a real business, a far-fetched proposition when your colleagues are hoodlums.

Frank Sobotka, the humblest but also the noblest of the bunch, just wants to make a decent living taking boxes off ships with his buddies. You could label what crushes these guys capitalism, bureaucracy or simply “the game” -- it’s all the modern-day equivalent of what the ancient Greeks called the gods. And like Omar says, that stuff is deep, truly.