 "Photo: Nancy Rosenthal")
Ah, summer. A time of high temperatures, short pants and low expectations. And reruns. Lots of reruns. Come August, you've seen every funny video on the Internet, but it's too hot and sticky to go outside.
Solution?
TV on DVD.
Two shows in particular offer more than the stereotypical "idiot box" fare: The fifth and final season of HBO's "The Wire" will be released on DVD on Tuesday, and the first three seasons of Showtime's "Weeds" are available now.
The two shows offer two sides of the same dirty coin. "Weeds" is ostensibly a comedy, but the plot centers on a drug-dealing suburban housewife, and story lines involve teenage abortion, slain DEA agents and breast cancer. Sure, there's a wacky, sex-crazed sitcom-esque uncle, but there's also a trunk full of heroin.
"The Wire," conceived by David Simon and Ed Burns, is a drama that makes a symphony out of the interplay between cops and drug dealers in inner-city Baltimore. The show is like a Dickens novel - every character on both sides is part of an elaborate web linking pushers to politicians, cops to crackheads, teachers to attorneys.
The fourth season of "The Wire" shifts the series' focus from teenage gangsters on street corners to the middle school that produces them. These 13 episodes are the finest use of the television medium since its inception. By the season's conclusion, the show has scoured away any notion of moral order and fired a nail gun through viewer expectations.
Unlike Dickens, Simon and Burns never give their audience a deus ex machina: No rich uncle appears to rescue the four eighth graders at the heart of the show's fourth season. The closest such character is a well-intentioned cop-turned-teacher. Through a progression of heartbreakingly realistic scenes set inside and outside of his classroom, he slowly comes to understand that he is a powerless cog in another broken system.
"The Wire" also muddies the distinction between good guys and bad. Gangsters deal drugs and death, but rather than chase them down, cops "juke the stats" so they can keep their jobs. Omar - a gay, scar-faced, shotgun-toting gangster - gives a detective his word that he won't drop more bodies, and he keeps it. A cop who swears to protect a confidential informant in exchange for information proves to be less honorable.
Nancy Botwin, the drug-dealing soccer mom in "Weeds," is another unsympathetic protagonist. She spends much of the first three seasons getting a hard-knock education in the drug trade and being alternatively pouty and indignant when things don't go her way.
She lies to her family about her new profession and is casual about using her sexuality to get others to fix something she screws up, but hey, she doesn't deal to kids, so it's all good, right?
This moral ambiguity is a big part of what makes both "The Wire" and "Weeds" such compelling television. For a generation of viewers who grew up with Danny Tanner sitting on DJ's bed delivering the requisite uplifting coda, the dearth of hope and absence of optimism that runs through each of these shows is what makes them both challenging and fascinating.
The fifth season of "The Wire" continues the show's modus operandi of delving into corrupt institutions, this time focusing on the media that chronicled all that went on in the show's first four seasons. It's sure to be as good as the first four seasons, so start catching up. Spending the rest of the summer challenged and fascinated is a far better alternative to being sticky and bored.
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