The Wire is one of the great shows of our time: exciting yet sticking close to reality. I generally disdain TV shows and movies, and have hardly even heard of most of them. But The Wire has the reputation of being highly realistic, which is what got me to watch it in the first place, and it didn’t disappoint. It doesn’t get absolutely everything right, though.

One of the big things it gets wrong is the conduct of top-level gunfighters, of which it has two: Omar Little and Brother Mouzone. There’s no mystery as to why: as they say explicitly on the DVD commentaries, David Simon and company were imitating Westerns; and Westerns are profoundly unrealistic.

The first scene at which I really winced was when Omar stands with his back to a door behind which there are drug dealers and demands that they surrender their stash – which they then do, dropping it from a window above. I don’t care how good a gunfighter you are; that’s just not a viable tactic. Yes, good gunfighters do often get their way without having to shoot, but that’s usually because they put themselves in a position of total advantage where it’s obvious to their opponents that they have been outmaneuvered and that resistance is useless. Indeed, that happens in other scenes: somebody suddenly finds himself looking down the twin barrels of Omar’s shotgun. But here Omar is at every disadvantage. Entering a house and clearing it is an almost impossible task: there are too many places someone can wait in ambush. There are tactics for house-clearing, and militaries do practice and use them, but they do so for occasions where there’s only something like a one-in-a-thousand chance that an enemy is waiting in ambush. When they expect resistance, their tactics are very different and involve a lot more use of high explosives. “Doors are walls and walls are doors” is a saying from that setting, meaning never to go through a door because someone will be waiting to shoot you: instead set an explosive charge and make yourself a new door in a wall. Or you might call for air support and level the whole building with a bomb, or at the very least throw a lot of hand grenades around corners.

But Omar doesn’t have an air force or an army or anyone at all backing him; he’s alone against a whole gang. And then on top of that he turns his back. Well, given the risk of being attacked from behind, maybe that actually would be the best use for his eyes, while his ears attended to the house. But he isn’t even using his eyes to scan for threats: they’re downcast most of the time. He’s not even doing the relaxed awareness thing (where you let your eyes relax and rely on peripheral vision to pick up any movement).

Even if he were using his eyes to good effect, it would just show how bad his overall situation was, with threats that might come at him from anywhere in 360 degrees – plus above, where they could have sent down a bullet rather than the bag of drugs. They threaten him by saying they have a MAC-10, which he disbelieves – reasonably so, since a MAC-10 is a big chunky machine pistol that is hard to conceal. Still, to believe that they’re certain to be completely unarmed is unwarranted: the show often has the gang members flashing pistols in that vicinity.

Now, an author does have the privilege of making his characters do things that are stupid but still work. It happens! But there should be some consciousness of this – at least there should if this is an expert who normally would not make such mistakes. Omar might, say, have displayed nervousness, rather than casually smoking a cigarette and being witty with his victims, as if he were just an actor and already had read to the end of the scene and didn’t have to worry since he knew he’d prevail. But that’s Hollywood; and in this department that’s what they were imitating.

Also, a thing about top gunfighters is that they can actually hit their targets, even from a serious distance. There’s a scene where Omar has a clean shot at Avon Barksdale, but instead of just shooting him, he walks close and takes so much time in doing so that he gets interrupted. Okay, a fifty-yard shot (that being something like the original distance) isn’t entirely trivial with a pistol, but a good pistol shooter can hit a stationary man-sized target at that distance. Or Omar could have brought a rifle, with which such a shot is trivial, or even just loaded rifled slugs into his usual shotgun. (The entire concept of rifles is foreign to The Wire – mostly for good reason since pistols are the usual weapon of inner-city violence, being preferred for their concealability. But guns are much easier to hold on target when you can put them to your shoulder, which is why rifles are the thing for long shots. A top-level gunfighter going after a heavily-guarded drug kingpin wouldn’t do it any other way.)

The question of accuracy also comes up in the first confrontation between Mouzone and Omar, where Mouzone is talking about hitting Omar in the elbow from what looks to be about 15 yards. Now hitting a fast-moving elbow from that distance really is somewhere between very difficult and impossible, especially if shooting from the hip (his stance at the time). It’s a lot more difficult than hitting a near-stationary torso at 50 yards. Of course it’s Mouzone saying that, not Omar, and it’s just boasting rather than demonstrated skill; but the scene doesn’t seem intended to show the two as stupid boasters, even though what they are saying is absurd. (Omar says in return that with his .45 “Even if I miss I can’t miss”.)

As regards having an army to back him, in his first action Mouzone does have one – he’s being called in to help the Barksdale “muscle” – but unaccountably doesn’t use it. Instead of coordinating with them, he just marches up to a housing tower and runs off a competing gang, all on his lonesome. (Well, with a sidekick, but one who is a personal servant, and a mediocre one at that, rather than someone skilled at arms.) Then he sits outside reading, supposedly making sure they stay away – when really they could have just shot him from a window, or for that matter had someone walk up behind him and blast him. There is a reason gangs are gangs and armies are armies: teamwork is important in fighting, as Patton most memorably put it.

Anyway, this unreality is confined to those two supposedly top-level shooters; when it comes to the everyday gunplay of the drug trade the show hits the nail straight on the head. The shooting with the guns held sideways; the spray-and-pray that often leaves bystanders injured or killed – all that they do a great job on, as can be expected from their deep experience in the Baltimore homicide scene. But they’re not gun people, so turned to Hollywood when it came to the two top-level shooters. Of course even with those two characters, in many instances they just used their common sense, which yielded much better results. Indeed, in the third season they introduced Marlo’s shooters, who are not modeled on Hollywood and are much more realistic. They actually shoot at practice targets, for instance, rather than just relying on their macho studliness to keep their motor skills sharp.

My other criticism is not in the same league, since I don’t think the show’s creators could have done any differently. But there’s a problem with their street characters: to use Marc MacYoung’s language, “they don’t have the stink”. As he explains:

There is a certain psychic odor that comes from growing up and living in the streets. It’s a rot that comes from constant exposure to violence, death, alcoholism, drug addiction, sociopathic behavior, poverty, sadism and viciousness. It’s reflected in a person’s attitudes, speech patterns, personal interactions and how he looks at the world. It’s a certain hardening of the spirit that comes from living years with the attitude of “do unto others before they do unto you”; Add to that the chronic paranoia of having spent years looking over your shoulder, lest vengeance-minded people you have wronged, slither out of that shadow you just passed.

Ordinary actors don’t have “the stink”, however stinky the language you put in their mouths; and the show used mostly ordinary actors from ordinary middle-class backgrounds. Being from such a background myself, I might not have noticed, except that they actually did use some street people as actors, and the contrast is stark.

One of them is “Snoop”. With the other female characters, it’s instantly apparent that they’re female, but Snoop had me uncertain for quite a while. This isn’t a transgender thing; the show was filmed before the transgender craze, or at least before it went mainstream. It’s a street thing: a hardness of spirit. It’s someone who has lived her life where to be female is to be a weak victim, and who hides her femininity in all sorts of little ways. Her manner is chilling: when she talks of violence and death, it’s with a flat matter-of-factness rather than with the ordinary displays of emotion. It renders her character scary in a way that many of the other characters are supposed to be but don’t quite pull off.

Another real street person plays Mouzone’s sidekick, and with an equally flat affect – though since he doesn’t engage in violence or even talk much, the result isn’t scary so much as wooden.

If all the characters that should be like that were like that, it would render the show somewhat repulsive. Their mannerisms alone would make ordinary viewers leery of them; viewers might even end up sympathizing with the cops who beat them up at every opportunity. That’s not the effect David Simon was trying for: he wants us to look past superficial mannerisms and really see how the street characters are victims of their circumstances… and what easier way than normalizing those mannerisms, especially when normal actors do that by default?

That intention is somewhat debatable. It is good that viewers see that there are hard constraints driving the street, not just people doing bad things because they’re bad people and like to do bad things. And in an immediate sense it’s often true that they’re victims of their circumstances: when you’re a drug dealer you sometimes just have to shoot someone. But it’s not like people are unaware what a violent world they’re getting into when they become drug dealers.

Also, the street mindset is more than just superficial. Indeed, it would be hard to put on a show with lots of actors from the street: they aren’t reliable enough. Filming a movie or a TV show like this is a high-pressure event, where if an actor doesn’t show up he’ll be wasting tens of thousands of dollars of other people’s time; likewise if he shows up drunk or stoned. (Even in scenes where someone is supposed to be drunk, they normally have him just mimic being drunk.) Obviously it worked to pick out a couple of the best of them to put on the show, but having half the cast be flaky would be unworkable.

And a show has to be a show: there’s no point in making one that nobody wants to watch. Something truly repulsively realistic likely wouldn’t repay the money that went into making it – though it would be mighty curious to see what such a transformation would do to the aristocracy of the drug business, like Stringer Bell: how far do they need to display the emotional scars of street life? I’m really not sure, but the way they casually order people killed would be more plausible when those people totally looked and acted like they were from “a zip code that does not fucking matter”, as opposed to that just being a line delivered by a cynical cop.

So this second criticism is really not so much a criticism as an observation: they did a lot of good work to make the show realistic, but there were still limits.