yeah Cutty and Slim Charles would probably be my main picks if they didn't both start in season 3
This is probably true, cause Royce/Carcetti and Clay Davis don't really change at all
This is a good response too, even if the OP hadn't specifically said besides Baltimore itself
Herc and Carver both end up having surprisingly interesting arcs with how they start
Agreed about that Wee-Bey scene, damn.
single characters, it rotates per season. If you're talking in totality, then there's no other character than mcnulty. He is the protagonist of at least two seasons (1 and 5), a deuteragonist in two more (2 and 3), and around enough in season 4 to still be memorable. He's designed to be the straight man to stand in for the audience and react (in his own flawed, self serving, but generally well meaing way) to the bullshit that approaches him (and the audience, by proxy) at all sides.
Which all ties back into why season 4 is the best season of the show - it doesn't have a main character. The presumptive protagonist has his role substantially reduced, because it isn't about him. The Wire's overall theme of legacy and cycles of corruption, and how the road to hell is paved with good intentions, shine through best here because of the egalitarian use of perspectives. So many critical decisions, payoffs, and setups occur in a satisfying manner thus.
We don't agree. Disagreement does not mean that we didn't read the post.
We don't agree. Disagreement does not mean that we didn't read the post.
What the fuck did he do?
Look I'll say it again: looking for a protagonist in this show is an exercise in analytic limitation. I wholly understand that the show adopts a panopticon framework to get across its message and themes. Howeve, it's still a fictional narrative with characters and development. In the end, having just finished my sixth watch through of the series, I was drawn back to how the show breaks apart certain traditional narrative structures while also playing within the lines of convention. There's never going to be a simple answer to the question, which is why having the debate is fun and worthwhile.
This was the first thing I thought too.
Then you could have accepted my secondary premise that cocaine itself is the protagonist since it is the primary motivating force for every other characters growth or regression throughout the series. Even Baltimore itself.The purpose of this thread is not to dismiss the notion of Baltimore as a protagonist, but to put it aside. Overall, it's almost certainly true that Baltimore is the protagonist while characters are caught up in its tangled web. The key words in the OP were "If you had to choose." I want to recognize that, while the Wire is in many ways unconventional and egalitarian in its approach to narrative, it is also a fiction with characters that we can relate to other fictions, and that we can deconstruct according to common codes.
I don't disagree with the notion of Baltimore as protagonist, it's just not really the point of the thread.
How about Prez? Sure he isn't exactly a major player or even one with much agency (and when he does try to gain some agency, he blinds a child) but he is there throughout and could be seen as the audience surrogate.
Then you could have accepted my secondary premise that cocaine itself is the protagonist since it is the primary motivating force for every other characters growth or regression throughout the series. Even Baltimore itself.
OK I'll just say it: Cocaine and the city of Baltimore are not characters. They are important, more important than any characters, but they're not characters. I get that maybe some people object to this heuristic or find it inadequate for understanding the project of the show, but like, the whole reason I made the thread was to try and wrestle with a kind of silly and goopy question which will never really encapsulate the show's full themes. Nonetheless, I do think the notion of a "main character" is something that the show neither fully rejects nor fully embraces. You get fragments that the viewer has to piece together in their own way and seeing peoples' different answers in this thread is a testimony to how the show enacts its narratives differently, emphasizing different storylines to arrive at a grand design. If you find this type of reading objectionable I'm sorry, but it's clearly outlined at the start of the thread. It's supposed to be a fun way to revisit the show by thinking through character, something that we can often overlook when thinking about the bigger themes and ambitions of The Wire.
Skip season 5.
The end of season 4 is special and the series should have wrapped up right there.
Season 5 was very self-indulgent and the writers went way over the top with McNulty doing Dumb McNulty Things to the extreme.