Subtle Movements; the Chess Scene in the First Season of the Wire

               For The Wire, it’s easy to understand why it’s considered by many to be the greatest show of all time. It’s an intricate dance of corruption, race and gender relations wrapped in a cop show, showing depth that hasn’t been seen by any drama before or since, for the most part. It’s easy to say that the first few episodes of the first season are weak. They were the exposition of a very ambitious series and they needed to introduce a multitude of characters. The first two episodes especially are, mostly, unwatchable if you don’t like cop shows. Once the season picks up, it starts to get too interesting and unique to not watch, except for one part, the pivotal Chess Scene in the Third episode, “The Buys”.

                The scene can be seen here for those who haven’t seen it before, (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whwawZ1YoOc). In the scene, D’Angelo, the focal character on the drug side of the show, finds Wallace and Bodie, two guys that work for him in the pit, playing checkers with chess pieces instead of just playing chess. Amused, he teaches them how to play chess, with; you guessed it, a large metaphor using the drug world to explain how the game works. For a show that deals mostly in subtlety, this scene decides to completely toss this out and just spoon feed the explanation to the audience. He starts talking about pieces, and when mentioning the queen, Bodie mentions that that pieces “sounds like Stringer”. It really devolves the whole idea of subtlety that the series was based on.

                To be fair, the series is trying to establish that D’Angelo isn’t the average drug dealer. The idea of chess sets him aside as a more intellectual character, as chess is a thinker’s game. That’s fair, but the whole presentation is cliché for one, and completely straightforward. In the first episode, when Wallace finds the guy who was scamming them with fake money, Tommy, they ask him what he wanted to do with him, D’angelo takes the small amount of money he has, and waits. The acting is in his eyes here as he hesitates. He knows that not beating this guy is the wrong choice, but he also knows it’s wrong to beat this junkie down, considering that they caused the problem with their smack. He ends up walking away, leaving the beat down to his cronies, all the while, his eyes tell the story of a tortured man, unable to reconcile his morality with his work. That’s subtle, that’s good character development, this isn’t. It’s so painfully clear that D’angelo is the thinking thug that it may as well be written on his shirt. And to top it all off, the idea of explaining how the world works through chess is so incredibly cliché that everyone has a chess scene. Anime’s like Naruto and Bleach, children’s shows, have chess scene to explain why the pawns are dying. It’s a cop out in a show that’s better than that.

                The real problem is that this scene assumes that the audience is stupid. It’s easy to see that D’angleo and McNulty are both trying to reconcile that they work for corrupt systems by their interactions with their superiors by looking at their eye movements alone. The show stopped trusting that the audience could pick up on that fact and they spoon fed an old, tired cliché to get the point across. I’m not angry at you, The Wire, I’m just disappointed. I thought we had come to an agreement. You would continue to be smart and compelling and I would keep up with all the characters, details and relations. The trust is broken!