It looks obvious

I have an habit of watching TV series in a very long delay. I don’t like the waiting period between episode and I don’t have patient to see if the TV show worth my time. I started watching the Sopranos when it was already in its fourth season - I picked the DVD’s from netflix and enjoy an uninterrupted watching. I did the same thing with Battlestar Galactica, Buffy the Vampire slayer, and recently with the best TV I ever saw - The Wire.

I assume that most people know already what the show is about, so I’ll not get into the details. I’ll just say that the series using the police investigation story as a tool to portray the decay of American urban structure and social fabric. The story is being told with rare qualities which provide real intellectual stimulation and emotional reactions. One of the main themes of the story is the inherent inefficiency of organizations to solve real problems - set with the wrong incentives, driven with agenda that has very little positive effect on real problems institutions are busy with self preservation, satisfying foreign interests and focusing on meaningless measurable goals. And although the series isn’t advocating for Libertarianism, it has - as the New Yorker Magazine identified, a Libertarian obvious streak:

Simon makes it clear that the show’s ambitions were grand. “ ‘The Wire’ is dissent,” he says. “It is perhaps the only storytelling on television that overtly suggests that our political and economic and social constructs are no longer viable, that our leadership has failed us relentlessly, and that no, we are not going to be all right.” He also likes to say that “The Wire” is a story about the “decline of the American empire.” Simon’s belief in the show is a formidable thing, and it leads him into some ostentatious comparisons that he sometimes laughs at himself for and sometimes does not. Recently, he spoke at Loyola College, in Baltimore; he described the show in lofty terms that left many of the students in the audience puzzled—at least, those who had come hoping to hear how they might get a job in Hollywood. In creating “The Wire,” Simon said, he and his colleagues had “ripped off the Greeks: Sophocles, Aeschylus, Euripides. Not funny boy—not Aristophanes. We’ve basically taken the idea of Greek tragedy and applied it to the modern city-state.” He went on, “What we were trying to do was take the notion of Greek tragedy, of fated and doomed people, and instead of these Olympian gods, indifferent, venal, selfish, hurling lightning bolts and hitting people in the ass for no reason—instead of those guys whipping it on Oedipus or Achilles, it’s the postmodern institutions . . . those are the indifferent gods.”

[...]

Over the next several days, the writers poked holes in each other’s ideas and, like Greek gods, mapped out the fates of the characters. Most of the trajectories were grim, but one troubled character, they decided, would pull himself together and enjoy what George Pelecanos calls one of the show’s “inglorious redemptions—not Rocky knocking the Russian out in the ninth round but somebody getting through to the other side.” Simon often says that “The Wire” refuses to indulge in the “life-affirming” messages that are woven into the fabric of network TV. Still, he seemed glad to incorporate this small victory into an otherwise rigorously unsentimental picture. “We don’t have a lot of victories,” Simon told his colleagues. “As cynically as the rest of this stuff is ending, it will validate the one place we put any of our sincerity, which is individual action.” It’s hard to classify Simon politically, but anytime you start thinking of him as some sort of bleeding-heart socialist you’re brought up short by his unremitting skepticism about institutions.

If, for some reason, you didn’t watch The Wire yet - I highly recommend doing so it is really worth the time.