How to Make it in America Credits

YouTube politely informs visitors that embedding the pilot episode of How to Make it in America is disabled by request. Presumably that request was made by HBO, which, to its credit, has agreed to screen the entire first episode of this particular TV program on YouTube. I would have liked to embed at least part of that video here, but I can't, so feel free to visit the YouTube page directly if you're interested in checking out this episode.

I bring this up not because I think this show is any good--I wouldn't know; I haven't watched past the first 67 seconds--but because the opening credits are extremely good. No less an opening-credits arbiter than Alan Sepinwall calls it "one of the best HBO's given us in a while." And it's especially cool for the New York-centric audience which I imagine the readers of this blog comprise.

I think these credits are interesting because New York resentment seems pretty popular these days. There is, of course, the (false) dichotomy drawn between Wall Street and Main Street. And the sentiment expressed by some politicians over the past two years that New York isn't the "real" America. But these opening credits, combined with that song about an empire state of mind, demonstrate a sort of celebration of New York by some artistic types. Now, granted, the target demographics those politicians were trying to hit differ pretty dramatically from Jay-Z and HBO fans. It would be easy to conclude this post with some half-developed idea about the fracturing of American society. But I'm not sure that there's a larger point here, and, if there is, I'm fairly certain the fracturing of American society wouldn't be it. As a New Yorker, though, I appreciate the cultural attention being paid to the city. I think a couple songs and a montage or two is the least we deserve for cramming ourselves into subways and enduring a cost-of-living index more than double the national average.

What Makes The Wire Different

Middlebury College is offering a Spring 2009 course titled "Watching The Wire." The syllabus is posted online, and it includes a pitch letter written by series creator David Simon to two HBO executives. Here is my favorite section of the note, which acts as a type of thesis statement for the show:

But The Wire is, I would argue, the next challenge to the network logic and the next challenge for HBO. It is grounded in the most basic network universe--the cop show--and yet, very shortly, it becomes clear to any viewer that something subversive is being done with that universal. Suddenly, the police bureaucracy is amoral, dysfunctional, and criminality, in the form of the drug culture, is just as suddenly a bureaucracy. Scene by scene, viewers find their carefully formed presumptions about cops and robbers undercut by alternative realities. Real police work endangers people who attempt it. Things that work in network cop shows fall flat in this alternative world. Police work is at times marginal or incompetent. Criminals are neither stupid nor cartoonish, and neither are they all sociopathic. And the idea--as yet unspoken on American TV--that no one in authority has any reason to care what happens in an American ghetto as long as it stays within the ghetto is brought into the open. Moreover, within a few hours of viewing, the national drug policy--and by extension our basic law enforcement model--is revealed as calcified, cynical, and unworkable.

And, while we're here, David Foster Wallace loved The Wire:

He was, in fact, extremely fond of The Wire -- he stopped me in the hall one day last year and said, look, I really want to sit down and pick your brain about this, because I'm really developing the conviction that the best writing being done in America today is being done for The Wire. Am I crazy to think that?