rip ‘n’ run
Both Davids – Simon and Chase – should take heart in the amount of critical attention given to the final acts of their respective creations. While The Wire may have ended a bit too neatly and The Sopranos a bit too obscurely for some, it was only because they both left the audience wanting more. There was some talk that HBO would have to develop a strong replacement series for their Jersey mob epic, but they already had it in The Wire. That the public at large never caught on was just an unfortunate side note. If anything, The Wire was more ambitious than the Sopranos. It was also a bit less comical and substantially less white. This isn’t a knock on Chase and company – I actually preferred his show. But at its peak The Wire was strong stuff.
As screwed as HBO would now appear to be, I have a solution for them: coax David Chase out of retirement and talk him in to expanding the upcoming John Adams mini series starring Paul Giamatti into a full blown series. While Giamatti may seem the most unlikely of leading men, Chase has a reputation for turning less than dashing Italian actors into national icons. He could delve into the psyche of one of America’s forefathers and mix fiction with reality by foreshadowing the actor’s real life father becoming commissioner of our national pastime. If anyone could pull this off it would be Chase, and at the very least it would have to be better than the colossal piece of crap that was John From Cincinatti.
I have to give props again to my buddy and George Lucas’ most valuable sound designer, Tom Myers, for getting me hooked on The Wire. I didn’t have the same personal connection with the show that I did with The Sopranos, and were it not for Tom I likely would not have persisted. But it was worth it if for only seeing the way that Cheese was taken out by Slim in the final episode. It might have been the most concise and punctuated example of poetic justice in television history. And unlike Tony Soprano’s fade to black, it left nobody wondering what happened. (3/10/08)
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