The Wire vs. The Sopranos
HBO

"The Sopranos" is an HBO crime drama set in New Jersey. It features underworld politics, characters stripping their emotional engines down to the gears and kinetic, emotionally wrenching violence. It has become a national phenomenon.

"The Wire" is an HBO crime drama set in Baltimore, Md. It features underworld politics, characters stripping their emotional engines down to the gears and kinetic, emotionally wrenching violence. It only barely managed to snag a fourth-season renewal this spring.

Why? Ease of entry. "The Wire" is twice as smart and twice as heavy as "The Sopranos" at its incandescent best. That's some deep, swampy water for a casual channel-surfer.

For all its clever writing and interlaced parallel plotting, "The Sopranos" is instantly accessible. It has two hierarchies: the Soprano mob, immediately familiar thanks to The Godfather, Goodfellas and Casino, and the Soprano family, immediately familiar thanks to the fact that we've all lived through the same kind of shit.

"The Wire" is tougher and deeper, having been created by David Simon, a former police reporter for The Baltimore Sun. The first of its two hierarchies is the Baltimore Police Department: the politicized upper ranks, concerned about murder clearance rates and promotions; the mid-level officers, concerned about cracking cases; and the beat cops, concerned about cracking skulls.

Granted, almost every crime show pits the brass against the street cops. But "The Wire" stretches the pyramid. Detectives are worried about detective sergeants, who are worried about detective lieutenants, who are worried about the colonel, who is worried about the deputy of operations. Throughout the series, problems (bodies, personal grudges, lousy cops or political pressure) get bounced through the system like pinballs careening through a machine.

"The Wire's" second hierarchy is the street gang. But unlike the brutes you've seen in Colors or a dozen episodes of "Law & Order," the gang at the heart of "The Wire" is a tight business operation with a disciplined enforcement wing — it's utterly believable that it sells $20,000 worth of product a day. From the lookouts to the touts, dealers, pit bosses, the boss and his ruthless, bean-counting capo, the West Baltimore mob is portrayed with a head-spinning level of detail. What's more, they're portrayed both as human beings and brutal killers, as circumstances dictate. There are no cardboard cutouts; no characters who are pure, uncomplicated, dull-as-dirt evil. Even Stringer Bell (ably played by Idris Elba), the gang's chillingly business-conscious lieutenent, has multiple dimensions.

While "The Sopranos" flashes back most frequently through Tony's childhood, "The Wire" invokes Baltimore's underworld history. The series dives into the generational aspect of organized crime (Avon Barksdale, the gang's head, is himself the son of a former boss), and the persistent challenges that an economic niche such as narcotics poses to law enforcement.

It's also damned cool. The characters don't live in a vacuum. These thugs have roots, and the cops have roots, and the sense of history pervades the series and helps give it a stature that eclipses its peers.

The gang half of "The Wire," like the dockworkers' union section of the show's second season, is a trip to somewhere exotic. You don't know the players. You don't know the relationships. And, initially, you can't understand a goddamn thing anyone is saying. The street slang is thick and heavy in "The Wire"; a cracker like myself required two consecutive episodes of viewing before I grasped the standard nouns and verbs slung by the dealers and touts.

The series also does the "shades of gray" thing to a dizzying degree. Most shows have good guys, and bad guys, and good guys who go bad, and bad guys who are redeemed. That's about all you need to steer Magnum P.I. and Higgins to the stolen emeralds. But if the typical police drama has 4 shades of gray, and "The Sopranos" has 16, "The Wire" has 144. Personal foibles, codes of honor, extenuating family circumstances, personal conscience, ruthless practicality and emotional breaks with reality all feed into the moral choices made by the show's innumerable characters.

It takes time to get to know these people. They have a lot going on beneath their skins.

So you give it a little time. Two episodes; maybe three. Pretty soon, you've rented all 27 hour-long episodes of seasons 1 and 2, and watched them over a period of four days.

Like "The Sopranos," "The Wire" has a human face to keep you committed to the byzantine plots. But the main players of the two series occupy very different roles relative to their own universes.

In "The Sopranos," the world revolves around Tony Soprano, a suburban, underworld Zeus surrounded by a pantheon of mobbed-up Jerseyite demigods of sex, violence and murder. There is a pervasive sense of narcissistic fantasy about "The Sopranos"; every problem begins and ends with Tony Soprano, a man who can conjure women and violence with the wave of a hand, and whose biggest problem is figuring out what he wants, and why he wants it.

It's brilliant, funny, and visceral — and it's wish-fulfillment for male yuppies writhing their way through mid-life crises.

But in "The Wire," the world just runs roughshod over the reckless, alcoholic, emotionally stunted Detective Jimmy McNulty. McNulty cleaves, in many ways, to the American cop archetype. He has poor impulse control. He's personally fearless and outspoken, and he bangs babes like a hunchback rings bells.

But unlike the archetype, McNulty really is a jerk. He's cheated on his wife to the point of destroying their marriage. He drives drunk. He treats the extremely decent assistant D.A., whom he sleeps with whenever he can talk himself into her bed, like trash. The world wrecks his car, takes away custody of his children, and generally slaps him around, leaving him drunk and alone on a soiled mattress in his unfurnished apartment.

The flip side of McNulty's relentless self-destruction is D'Angelo Barksdale, a mid-level player in the West Baltimore mob. Barksdale, nephew to the gang's kingpin, is a cautious guy. What's more, he's a relatively decent dude, particularly considering his occupation as pit boss for a major drug-dealing operation.

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