My life is ruined and I’m blaming “The Wire”

For the longest time my mom kept telling me to watch the HBO series “The Wire”, and I would say, “sure.” I intended to get to it someday. “It blows ‘The Sopranos’ out of the water,” she would say, and I would say, “yeah, okay.” But “The Wire” seemed - from glimpses I’d caught of it in hotel rooms or wherever - impenetrable and a bit dreary. I’m quite sure it is obvious where this is going.

So now I’ve had my conversion, and I’m a slobbering, frothing, born-again “Wire” fan. And there is no pleasure to be had anywhere, any more, ever again. Because “The Wire” was so good it kept me up late at night thinking about public schools, drug policies, and foster kids. Because no book comes close. Because by some cosmic misfortune the next movie in our Netflix queue was the unspeakably bad “Forgetting Sarah Marshall,” it has made all other movies seem laughably inept and lightweight. It almost felt sacrilegious the day after the final episode, to smile or to express suburban joy at my Berkeley Volvo and the way I may drive it to excellent farmers’ markets. O, Wire, you have ruined my life!

In some ways, though, it is no joke when something grabs you so strongly and makes you story-sick with that peculiar malaise - the real world fades away, the characters feel more vivid than the people you see every day, the tragedy (well, in “The Wire” it was countless tragedies) of a character worms its way inside and coils like a parasite into your thoughts.

After it was over, I wondered also where all my worked-up emotion would go. Didn’t “The Wire” show again and again how one individual could make a difference? So what would I do after watching it? Sadly I haven’t yet figured that out.