BROOD

“The Wire” is over. “The Wire,” which salvaged so many depressing Sunday nights. “The Wire,” which was the only reason we subscribed to HBO. “The Wire,” one of the few television dramas where I’ve repeatedly found myself thinking of all the characters and their situations as real.

I’m sure I’m not the only one who feels the same way. Fictional or not, Omar got obituaries in publications across the country, including this touching one in Newsweek when his character died a few weeks ago. Whole NFL teams gather together to watch. And even Barack Obama has mentioned his love for the show on the road several times. What do we do now that it’s over?

I have at least a temporary solution. A few weeks ago, Ben bought Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets by David Simon, one of the two creators of the show and a former Baltimore Sun journalist. The non-fiction book follows 30 or so Baltimore detectives through a year of cases - starting on New Year’s day in 1988 and ending on New Year’s Eve 1988. When Ben started reading it, it did nothing less than take over his life, and when I started reading it the day he finished it, it took over mine. In the good way.

Reading Homicide is like reading the true story behind the myth of “The Wire.” You meet the real characters who where mixed up and re-pieced together to create Bunk, McNulty, Lester, and Keema. More than that, it offers a back-stage pass into the details of detective work that are only glimpsed during the show - whole chapters are devoted to what it’s like to work in the city morgue and what it’s like for a detective to testify in court. Vocabulary words from “The Wire” that you always wondered about like a “yo” and a “redball” are finally clearly defined.

In short, Homicide makes me better understand why we loved “The Wire” so much: it is truthful and (as much as a television drama can be) it is real. No wonder that the world has taken Omar’s death as if it he once actually lived. No wonder it was heartbreaking to know that Bubbles makes it but Dookie doesn’t.

There weren’t any fireworks at the end of Homicide - some of the biggest murder cases of the year are never solved and none of the hardworking detectives are recognized or even given enough overtime. There also weren’t any big fireworks at the end of “The Wire” - and Homicide helped me understand that that’s how it should be.

So if your schedule is still empty on Sunday nights, or if you start missing the late-night antics of detectives waiting for the phone to ring, don’t worry: there’s still Homicide, and it’s a solid 650 pages long.

I’ve been catching snippets of this new A&E television show Paranormal State. The show chronicles the investigations taken up by a number of paranormal enthusiasts and mediums. I’m not sure if I’ve seen enough of the show to actually know the thrust or structure of the show, but I have seen enough to get the idea that it mostly consists of adults holding flashlights up to their faces, sitting in a circle, and listening for weird noises and claiming to get chills.

“Do you smell that?” one of them will say. “I smell tobacco! There is a spirit here!”

It’s very similar to a fourth grade sleepover except that they have some sort of a thermal sensor, which seems to be a vague way to detect ghosts. I find it mildly interesting, although much less interesting than one of A&E’s other shows, Intervention, which I am ironically addicted to.

In any case, as I was lying in bed not sleeping last night, with the heavy footsteps of our upstairs neighbors above me and the sounds of boring, floral bedspread sex coming from our neighbors across the way, I realized that if a city apartment was actually ever haunted, no one would really notice.

Every time I hear weird sounds late at night, I immediately accredit them to any one of the weird families and couples that reside in our building or any one of the sketchy structural problems our apartment suffers from. If there were a ghost, who perhaps tried to freak me out by speaking in tongues through the wall, I’m just going to assume it’s the vaguely Eastern European family upstairs, talking in their sounds-like-Russian-but-definitely-isn’t-Russian language. If there were a ghost who tried to freak me out by making strange tapping and creaking noises, I wouldn’t be able to differentiate them from our crazy radiator noises. If there were a ghost who blew tobacco smoke into a room in order to alert me of his presence, I would probably just assume that our chain-smoking landlord was within a 50-yard radius of our building.

I love the image, though, of frustrated ignored ghosts trying so hard to haunt loud, rickety apartments to no avail. After a few years of fruitless attempts to scare the crap out of people, they would take up ghost checkers or ghost knitting. A few years after that, the murder they’re trying to avenge or the spooky message they are trying to relay would be forgotten. They would probably sit around and watch Paranormal State, too, and think about how easy those rural farmhouse ghosts have it.

Over the last year or so, Ben and I have watched the first four seasons of The Wire through Netflix. For a while, I thought that it was just something pretty okay to watch after we had exhausted every other HBO drama in existence. If anything, I found it a little hard to follow. But now, having finished Season Four last week and having just subscribed to HBO for the sole reason of watching Season Five in real time, I’m going to step out on a limb and say that it’s the best show on television.

To put it simply, I feel passionate about it. While watching a documentary on the show (on HBO On Demand, which comes with our new and more expensive cable package) one of the producers of the show pointed out that it had never won an Emmy. “Never won an Emmy?” the producer asks, “I think it should win the Nobel Prize in literature.”

I know that statement sounds completely ridiculous, but it sums up how I feel. Some other critic described it as “the best book I’ve ever watched.” And it’s true. The show has a very literary feel. More than that, I’ll go out on another limb - I guess this is maybe a smaller twig-like limb that juts off from the earlier limb- and say that the show seems Shakespearian to me. The language, the plots, the characters - they all reach for something higher and ring truer than anything else I’ve ever watched instead of read.

But let’s move on to some solid description and examples: at first glance, it’s a cop show that takes place in Baltimore. You’ve got your policemen, your drug dealers, and your lawyers. But this show goes so much deeper than shows like Law & Order (which I also enjoy watching on a different level) that the writers and actors succeed in creating a huge, complex universe in which every action follows to a necessary end. Each group and community has their own language and their own way of living and you can see how amorphous “the right thing” is - an individual’s moral code, a community’s moral code, and the code of the law can all be completely different entities.

In Season Four alone, Ben and I counted ten separate storylines that are followed in each episode - ranging from a mayoral election to a corner war to a stolen police camera to a group of four boys starting the eighth grade. And yet, slowly, the stories weave in and out of each other and bounce off of each other. Solid, deliberate connections aren’t made, but by the last episode you can begin to feel the huge inner workings of the city and the complexity of the problems that cities like Baltimore are facing.

What I’m trying to say is, The Wire doesn’t simplify anything. It might have an easier storyline to follow if it did, or it might even have a character who you could point to and say was all good or all bad if it did, but it doesn’t. Sure, it’s hard to understand the drug dealers’ street talk and the lawyers’ deposition talk and the policemen’s detective talk, but when it all starts clicking, it’s well worth it. And like Shakespeare’s tragedies, even though you see the tragedies of The Wire play out slowly and inevitably, you’re still riveted. I think it comes down to the complexity of the characters: each character’s strength is also their weakness.

Let’s take my favorite character in the series, Omar, for example. Omar is a black man who lives in an abandoned building and steals from drug dealers for a living. He is a living legend in the city. He carries a shotgun and wears a bullet proof vest. He’s a homosexual. He kills people in cold blood, although he never “works” on Sundays or swears. He never kills taxpayers. He never sells the drugs he steals to users. He’s in the game, but he doesn’t play by the rules of the game. You might say that he’s been alienated by others and treated as inhuman by his culture, and so he is inhumane - but that’s way too simple. It’s a lot of things. It takes about four seasons to halfway understand why Omar might do what he does.

I feel like I’m gushing a little, so I’m going to stop. I certainly can’t do the show justice in a blog post. Just do everyone a favor and rent the first season if you haven’t seen it.

A few weeks ago, I posted a review of the Lifetime Movie Network offering Secret Cutting. It starred a young Kimberlee Peterson, who I described as one of the more talented TV movie stars I had seen, despite her strange eyebrow that always seemed to float an inch above her other - making her look a little intrigued all of the time.

Days later, I received a letter from her manager/lawyer/agent person, asking me to take the picture of Kimberlee down, which was completely understandable. Hours after that, I got an email and blog post from Kimberlee herself.

Now, at this point I was feeling bad - when you write about people in the limelight, you don’t think about them quite as real people, and you certainly don’t stop to think about hurting their feelings. I mean, I have way more problems than a wayward eyebrow; it’s just that no one really cares enough about me to talk about them. I held my breath and opened the email.

Surprisingly, Kimberlee had written me a funny, awesome response about how she never quite understood why people were so interested in her eyebrow, that seven years after Secret Cutting it was a little thinner, but that it was still going strong. It’s who I am, she wrote, take it or leave it. I just wish people would review my acting instead of it… Often I tell people the Rock is my daddy. She also wrote endearingly about her acting career and her relationship with Lifetime movies. She signed it Kimberlee and The Brow.

The whole thing threw me off balance - she was so confident and responded to my silly criticism with humor, self-assuredness, and tact. It made me think about how personally I take criticism and how terribly I often respond to it - I mostly get defensive and sad. Perhaps, though, Kimberlee’s attitude is what it takes to make it as a successful working actress in a world where it seems like everyone wants to be a successful working actress (she has appeared in a ton of movies and a ton of television shows - Charmed, West Wing, and Boston Public to name a few recent ones). It’s a good lesson: to respond to uncool things with pure, utter coolness.

In any case, Kimberlee and I got to talking, and she answered a few questions for me about what it’s like to work on Lifetime movies and to be an actress in general.

Me: How did you get into acting, and what are you working on now?

Kim: When I was twelve I saw one of those oh-so-cheesy commercials for Barbizon, a school for acting and modeling. I called the agency, set up an appointment, and was very lucky that my parents went along with it. From there I auditioned for a competition called IMTA out in LA (you would be surprised how many stars got their start at this thing) and I got chosen to participate. I competed with thousands of other kids who also had stars in their eyes, placed in a few categories, and was lucky enough to meet my managers, who I am still with today.

At the moment I am auditioning and praying for that next gig. Last week I was on hold for a guest star on that new show K-Ville, but found out yesterday that I didn’t get it. Hollywood is an emotional roller coaster. The lows are really low, but man when you are blessed to be working, you are high as a kite. That little taste of success makes the hard times worth it.

Me: Do you have any TV appearances coming up that our readers should watch for?

Kim: I am lucky that a lot of the shows I’ve done re-air a lot. Check your Tivo’s!

Me: What is it like working on a movie set like Secret Cutting? Is it fun, serious, a little of both?

Kim: All of the above. That was such a magical time. Anytime you get to film on location it adds something special. For that time it’s like the whole cast and crew are in their own little world, a little break from reality. Obviously the topic of the movie was very serious. But for me those are the roles that allow me to release the fear, hurt, pain or any other emotion that I have going on at that point in my life. But as soon as the camera stops, the laughter begins. Being on set is wonderful. I have been blessed that I have had the chance to work with some amazing people. I have had such a good time doing it.
Me: What are you hobbies outside of your job? What things are most important to you?

Kim:  I am a pretty average person. I love to go to movies, experience good food, travel, read, meditate and learn. This world has so much to offer and I want it all! Family above all is the most important. Without that, for me, you have nothing. Life has no meaning unless you get the chance to share it with those you love.

Me: What’s the most challenging part about your career?

Kim: It’s that roller coaster I was talking about. This is a tough business, and you would think that 14 years later it would be easier for me, but it’s not. The rejection still hurts the same as it did my first year here. And that feeling of “oh this is it, I am so close…..” and then you get knocked on your ass. It’s a very humbling business. The criticism is hard too. The bashing my eyebrow takes is brutal. But it comes with the territory. There is always going to be someone out there who wants to tear you down, but that’s life in general. It’s finding a way to balance it all and keep your head up that’s important.

Me: What has been your favorite project to work on?

Kim: I did a film called Primal Force. We filmed it in Mexico and had the greatest cast and crew. It was a wonderfully cheesy UPN film about man-eating baboons…..and cue the laughter……but it was a thrilling experience. The director has been very good to me over the years and brought me in for other projects. We have worked together three times now and hopefully more to come. It was one of those “somebody pinch me I’m dreaming,” experiences. I thrived on that set. Simply put, I felt ALIVE.