Title Who Loves Ya, David Simon? Notes towards placing The Wire’s depiction of African-Americans in the context of American TV crime drama Type Article URL http://ualresearchonline.arts.ac.uk/2363/ Date 2009 Citation Sabin, Roger and Gibb, Jane (2009) Who Loves Ya, David Simon? Notes towards placing The Wire’s depiction of African-Americans in the context of American TV crime drama. Darkmatter. pp. 1-14. ISSN 2041-3254 Creators Sabin, Roger and Gibb, Jane Usage Guidelines Please refer to usage guidelines at http://ualresearchonline.arts.ac.uk/policies.html or alternatively contact [email protected]. License: Creative Commons Attribution Non-commercial No Derivatives Unless otherwise stated, copyright owned by the author Who Loves Ya, David Simon? Jane Gibb and Roger Sabin | 29 May 2009 | 4-The Wire Files [May 09] Notes towards placing The Wire’s depiction of African-Americans in the context of American TV crime drama Critics have justifiably praised The Wire for its rounded African-American characters, and the risks it took in foregrounding ‘black Baltimore’ - risks that have harmed its ratings, according to its makers.1 They have concluded that the crime genre has been taken somewhere new. But how new is ‘new’? What the critics couldn’t do - weren’t tasked to do - was to contextualise the show in terms of the history of crime drama on TV. This article will therefore seek to survey a number of key shows from the past that purported to convey a liberal viewpoint, and which have made race a focus. This is in order to suggest ways in which The Wire might be part of a genre tradition - and equally how it might be seen as expanding the parameters of that tradition and saying something genuinely original. In terms of our overall framework, it is taken as axiomatic that changes in any genre - in this case, the quality of the depiction of African-Americans - are driven by changes in society, and by broadcasters’ attempts to gauge what viewers are willing to buy into. (It’s a curious irony that crime drama often exploits the irrational fears expressed by communities in the face of increasing crime, in a dual effort to provoke anxiety as well as to reassure.) Thus, within any given historical period there will be political agendas linked to crime which get picked up by television and re-interpreted through genre- based storytelling that relies on innovation as well as repetition in an effort to maintain audience interest. The term ‘competing narratives’ helps explain this process, specifically how crime TV stories function within different historical and institutional contexts by capturing a broad and often contradictory dialogue about the origins of, and solutions to, the ‘crime problem’. David Simon has said that so far as Americans are concerned the ‘crime story [like the western] is elemental to our understanding of ourselves’.2 That being so, and because of the status the crime story maintains within the national culture, American crime TV is one of the most relevant contemporary forums through which competing narratives and ideas about race, class and gender are contested rather than guaranteed. Underpinning this relationship is a host of factors that might include: The circumstances of TV production which influence programming strategies - for example, whether tied to advertising, the level of government regulation, etc. This depends on whether a show is produced in the ‘network era’, ‘neo- network era’ or ‘HBO-era’.3 Linked with this, there’s the question of how the media (TV included) is inclined to report crime: it is not irrelevant that crime drama tends to gets scheduled near the news and historically has used plots ‘ripped from the headlines’ in order to manufacture an illusion of unmediated authenticity. 1 Then there’s the notion of what audiences have come to expect in terms of representation from films, novels, comics, etc. (other aspects of culture), and more specifically what they might anticipate from TV and in particular TV drama (what is the status of portrayals of women, homosexuals, ethnic minorities, etc. in war series, period dramas, westerns, etc.?). The same applies to what they might have come to expect from TV crime drama specifically, including how one show argues with, responds to, is inspired by, another. Similarly, we shouldn’t forget factors that might prompt audiences into receiving the message in a particular way - via trailers, advance information in the press, the internet, and so on (sometimes termed ‘ancillary’ material’ in Reception Studies). And, of course, how any viewer’s reading of a particular show is always negotiated according to personal circumstances. The list could continue. It amounts to a complex matrix, and one that is constantly changing. With regard to the depiction of African-Americans, it explains, for example, why they have been more ‘acceptable’ in some kinds of TV show than others (e.g. comedy - a phenomenon dating back to before vaudeville); how the criminalisation of ‘the black man’ on the TV news might have an effect; why cop shows have taken a certain viewpoint during the Civil Rights era or after Rodney King, etc.; and how such shows have fed off ‘Blaxploitation’ and ‘Hood’ movies (for example). Above all, it underscores the importance of reading TV as being orientated primarily towards the kind of white, middle class demographic that advertisers want to reach, and why, therefore, any claim to ‘realism’ in TV crime drama has to be problematised. In other words, there is a need constantly to ask what a ‘positive’ representation might be, and how far ‘blackness’ is the otherness against which white viewers define themselves. We don’t have the space in this essay to explore these ideas in any detail, but we can hope to use some of them to offer an analysis of The Wire that situates it in the context of its TV genre - a genre that has been woefully under-explored at an academic level.4 To this end, we would now like to turn our attention to the past, in order to remind ourselves very briefly of five key crime shows from the post-Civil Rights era which purported to be liberal, and which made it their mission to make race a feature. In surveying these shows, the ‘police procedural’ has been privileged over other kinds of crime show (prison, legal, private eye, etc.) because this is the tradition into which The Wire most comfortably fits - though this is not a categorisation without controversy, as we shall see. However, our main aim is to highlight the varying degrees of dramatic agency invested in African- American characters and to identify any potential transformative power these character representations might possess in terms of challenging racism and/or enhancing our understanding of the diversity of African-American experience. (We’re also interested in tracing the relative importance these programmes attribute to ‘race’ in relation to other factors such as class and gender orientations which also contribute to the construction of African- American identity/identities.) 2 Kojak (1973-78, CBS) A phenomenally popular show, based around discrete storylines in a pulp tradition, and created by a writer who was a friend of Martin Luther King (Abby Mann), and who set out to use the crime genre to shine a light on injustices.5 As such, for Kojak ‘the police force is the community’, and his duty is to a New York that is shown in all its gritty multi-ethnic glory (and frequently from the perspective of very run-down districts). Kojak himself was of ethnic origin (Greek), a foreshadowing of his re-casting in 2005 as an African-American, and it was his smart-talking charisma that floated the show (’Who loves ya, baby?’, etc). However, lest we forget how hard-hitting the series could be, and that it was not just about catchphrases and lollipops, the pilot episode (based on a real case) featured an unjustly imprisoned black youth, racist cops, and a lawyer who tells the court that ‘Law and Order is being used as a catchphrase for Stop the Nigger’. Later episodes toned down the social rhetoric, much to the disappointment of Mann, though individual examples still made points (e.g. about ethnic gang warfare, the police shooting of a Puerto Rican and the reaction of the community, etc.). There were plenty of African-Americans in supporting parts, and not simply as criminals (jewellers, cabbies, students and cops) though beefier roles were rare (e.g. Salathiel Harms, the private eye who intrudes on Kojak’s patch). Similarly, the Kojak character continued to differ from other TV cops through the ways in which his ‘ethnicity’ facilitated his equivocatory positioning as both ‘white’ and ‘non white’. Like many hardboiled detectives he was defined by his intimate knowledge of the ’streets’ and through his own ‘eccentric’ urban city vernacular. However, both these traits were presented as intrinsically linked to Kojak’s New York ‘immigrant’ status and not simply used to reproduce the sort of ‘white’ male-encoded cynical and superior detachment that would conventionally be associated with a Marlowe clone. Thus, from a 2008 perspective, Kojak is self-contradictory for the way that it includes African-American characters who lack dramatic agency, in terms of both the contributions they can make to the episodic action of the show and as fully integrated members of an ‘ideal community’ in the form of the police force. It is really only in one-off episodes that focus directly on racism that African-American characters are foregrounded through scenarios which feature shootings of black characters by whites or other miscarriages of justice. Although these individual shows still retain their power as anti-racist indictments, the series taken in its entirety remains tied to more familiar Hollywood modes of representation through which African-American characters are either marginalised and shown in relation to whites, or depicted in terms of a ‘black identity function’ as the privileged indicators of an ongoing racial problematic.