Back on the old wotmania site, I complained about the application of liberal philosophies in a particular TV show and other posters, completely missing my point, told me on more than one occasion, to just watch conservative TV shows instead. I finally got sick of that reply and posted a survey asking people to bloody well NAME some conservative TV shows. They were singularly unable to do so, though the nature of their replies was rather informative (despite the reflexive protests by liberals against conservative accusations of their hostility to traditional family values or national defense & security, the majority of suggestions in reply to my question by liberals were apolitical TV shows [Little House on the Prarie] centered around families, or apolitical TV shows about fighting bad guys even liberals supposedly agree are bad [24]. According to liberals themselves, patriotism, law enforcement and functional families are automatically conservative things). With the apparent failure of my survey, I took a little solace in the fact that the side point that there are no conservative TV shows had been successfully demonstrated, even if that was not what I was after. My original point had not been the existance of liberal values or positions on TV - if you are going to object to that, there's no point to watching TV - but about the particular way certain shows went about applying them, which should have been a discussion about creative quality, but which the simple-minded among the liberal community took as a criticism of the positions themselves.

But now, I have found a show where a conservative can see his own values playing out, and there is no question of quality to debate and confuse people. Of course, it is off the air, and you have to watch "Fringe" or "Game of Thrones", or horribly enough, "Rizzoli & Isles" to catch a glimpse of the actors, maybe six of whom I have EVER seen in ANYthing else. That show is, as I mentioned in the title, "The Wire" on HBO. I watched it in its entirely last year, and received the first two seasons on DVD for Christmas, and have been watching them again, now with the whole story in mind, and so am better equipped to identify themes and ideas in the show.

The show is largely concerned with a condemnation of systems and a society that are geared to serve the interests of those in power and which crush any attempts to fix them. The good guys on "The Wire" sometimes get the bad guy (and sometimes it's hard to tell who is who), but inevitably a new bad guy springs up and very little changes. Spoiler examples: Barksdale & Bell go down, and are replaced by the more ruthless, vicious and brutal Stanfield. Omar is shot, and Michael steps into his role. One Mayor Royce is defeated by Carcetti who then gets captured by the system.

Meanwhile, good characters or imaginative people who try to subvert the system to do the actual good the system is professed to be in place to achieve generally get punished for bucking the system, while those who play the game for their own advancement succeed. Spoiler examples: Colvin, McNulty, Daniels & Freamon are driven from the police department, while Valchek, Rawls and Burrell keep moving up.

What does this have to do with being a conservative show? After all, most of the explicitly stated politics would seem to be liberal. The point is, underlying the conservative point of view is the vision of humanity as flawed and prone to corruption or self-destruction. The reason for the opposition of conservatives and liberals on so many issues down the list is the difference of this underlying perspective. The show demonstrates the flaws of many different organizations or systems, all of which are generally targets of conservative ire - public schools, government, labor unions, criminal enterprises, journalists and even the police. While conservatives tend to support the police, that is in opposition to criminals. As a government bureaucracy, we tend to be suspicious of it, and the flaws this show highlights in the police department have to do with political directives, racial preferences, lack of funding or support from civil authorities and office-working bossess interfering with the cops on the street. The good cops tend to things like private entrepreneurship (Lester Freamon) or attempts to maintain their traditional families (McNulty) or opposition to gay marriage (Kima), and the wives who are displeased with their work are generally portrayed negatively for raining on their spouses' parades. The one teacher shown with any real depth was already familiar to viewers as a failure in his last profession, and the total inadequacy of the school system to address the issues of academic indifference and juvenile inadequacy is a highlight of the fourth season. One of the worst afflictions of the school system is a federal directive that distorts the educational priorities of the teachers and school. Another problem with the police department is the Democratic mayor diverting funding from the cops into the inefffective schools, and the city being short of funds because he would not cooperate with the Republican governor.

Furthermore, when dealing with the school system and juvenile delinquency, the clear success factor has nothing to do with social programs or funding, but rather parenting and personal supervision and example of the children. The lack of involved fathers in all of the troubled boys' lives (and the occasional mother pushing her son into the criminal life in order to protect her own interests) serve to reinforce the value of the traditional family model and the confirm the significance of most conservative TV critics' frequent complaints about the lack of positive portrayals of male role models and fathers. They also give the lie to the feminist slogans about "needing men like fish need bicycles" or "sisters doing it (raising kids) for themselves."

While the biggest contemporary political issue of the wars in the Middle East are not directly addressed, there are numerous snide references with street names of drugs being derived from the military news, and the diversion of the FBI's resources to concentrate on counter-terrorism leaving the police to fight the federal War on Drugs without help, causing one character to snark "What, we don't have enough love in our hearts for two wars?" While those issues are traditionally associated with neocons and the Republicans, astute liberal critics note the contradiction of the allegedly anti-government "conservatives" supporting such expansions of government power, which is why paleoconservatives and libertarians are generally indifferent to the alleged dangers of drugs and terrorists, or prefer them to be handled as locally as possible. As one character points out in regards to the violence of the drug trade "Everything else in this country gets sold without shooting people".

But what "The Wire" really comes down to is the idea that different people want different things, and trying to lump variant agendas together and expecting a simple solution is doomed to failure. The police who try to go after significant criminals and effect serious changes are undermined and stifled and punished by their bosses for violating the system, because the bosses are no longer interested in actual criminal justice - it no longer serves their agenda, which is protecting their own positions and jobs, in which they have invested most of their lives, and which are now tied to serving political objectives. Two of the main antagonists, who are successful criminals because their different perspectives worked well to get them to the top of their worlds, eventually pull them apart and cause them to turn against each other when those same differences in perspective necessitate different paths for each of them. This difference in individual wants, needs and agendas is at the heart of conservative philosophy. The conservative rejects sweeping reforms and mandates and broad changes attempted through legislation, because of the incompatability of such system solutions to their own values of individual choices. Where a policy might serve one police officer's agenda of making his job easier, it will thwart another's agenda of making his own job more secure. Where throwing money at a school system by a remote national government might seem to give it more resources to use in education, in reality, it causes the school to react in the most efficient way that will get the money with minimal effort. They don't reform the school system to give every student a good education and inculcate in each student a desire to attend and better himself, they simply coach the students to pass the test on which funding is based, and herd delinquents and truants into school on the two days a year that head counts are taken and allow them to roam the streets the rest of the time. Hence the conservative support for a free market or parent-directed education. The parents will be directly concerned with the welfare of the individual students, and will force the school to respond to their interests in exchange for their tuition payments. A parent who doesn't care won't send her student to school anyway, so the school will not benefit by forcibly removing the child from his criminal apprenticeship in order to meet their bureaucratic goal, while a parent who DOES care will not settle for the school merely enforcing the attendance policy two days a year.

Throughout the show, any good that is done, is done through individual efforts and one-on-one interaction. No program or policy saves any drug users - the one drug addict who might possibly be saved gets set on that road by his own choice and his own will, and it is shown to be a long, painstaking process, that could not possibly be enforced by a blanket regulatory scheme. When attention is briefly brought to the plight of the homeless, the government and other institutions are seen to be helpless to effect real change and the only homeless person to be helped by any extent is helped through the conscience of an individual who had previously exploited him. Spoiler example: When Cutty retires from gangbanging and attempts to help the kids, his initial hopes of doing so as a truant officer enforcing their attendance is derailed by institutional indifference to his charges - when he does finally achieve his dream, it is through his own efforts to personally engage, assist, protect and set a good example for the kids. And that effort is ultimately made possible not by government funding, but by a charitable donation by a private individual. Likewise, Colvin's attempts to help Namond in his capacity within the school system fail, and ultimately succeed when he takes personal charge of the boy and reaches out to him on a person-to-person level, and by traditional methods of strict discipline and being a part of his life. Prezbylewski's similar efforts as a part of his job as a teacher similarly fail Dookie, due to his inability to be there for him as directly and personally as Colvin is for Namond.

All in all, "The Wire" while never explicitly endorsing or promoting conservative positions and values, in its broad illustration of systemic and societal problems, serves to highlight the issues and illustrate the problems which conservatives have with the contemporary society and system. The really great thing about the show? I'd bet an alert or intelligent liberal could watch the exact same show and find his own vindications. How did this show so often and thoroughly escape attention when it was on, and why do I only hear about it via word of mouth and the occasional passing reference in discussions of TV shows in general on the internet?