Polar Opposites: Doctor Who and The Wire

            Albert Einstein and Kim Kardashian.  America and North Korea.  Men and women.  These comparisons can all be defined as “polar opposites,” two people, places, or things that share basic superficial qualities yet otherwise could not be more different.  Over the past week or so, I have been completely lazy and just sat around in my sweltering apartment watching two television shows that I have come to realize as polar opposites: The HBO program The Wire and the BBC programme Doctor Who.  Before I go into detail explaining why these two shows are so different from one another, I would like to start with their similarities.  Both are critically acclaimed television shows in the English language that have body counts too high to concern ourselves with.  Now comes the fun part.  I am going to list the five most important reasons (in no particular order) why Doctor Who and The Wire can be considered television’s polar opposites:

 Portrayal of Reality

This is the most obvious difference on the list, because while The Wire portrays a world as steeped in authenticity as any television show ever created, Doctor Who throws all concepts of reality into the loo.  I mean, for God’s sake, it’s about an immortal humanoid alien who uses a telephone booth to travel across all of space and time, encountering thousands of different planets and creatures along the way.  If The Wire had a character that was an alien, it would be the greatest “jump the shark” moment in television history.  The term “jump the shark” would have been renamed “cap the alien.”  Doctor Who takes the audience to all of these planets, but none of them, not even present-day Earth, can match the veracity of the world portrayed on The Wire.  The characters on Doctor Who do not have to concern themselves with the minutiae of everyday life with all of the aliens running around, yet one can argue that the characters on The Wire are in worse shape because their problems cannot be contributed to beings from another world.  They only have themselves to blame for the decay of their city.


Portrayal of Violence

Both shows contain a lot of violence, yet their portrayals of the violence could not be more different.  In Doctor Who, characters can die in all kinds of ways, but almost all of them leave very little mess.  Even when one race of aliens wears human skin as a disguise, when these creatures remove the skins, there is no blood.  Instead, it just looks like they are simply taking off their clothes.  By contrast, every death on The Wire is gruesome and brutal and, most strikingly, every death is shown to have a noticeable effect on another character.  Not every death in Doctor Who is important.  It seems like there are so many, that I can imagine that as a rite of passage, all wannabe actors in Britain must have a death scene in an episode of Doctor Who before they can move onto the next step of their careers.  Sure, some deaths resonate with the characters in Doctor Who, but on The Wire, every single death, even if it takes place off-screen, provokes a strong emotional response from at least one character, and eventually, every character in the show becomes hardened and cynical due to the rampant violence.  Doctor Who remains fun even in the face of a massive death toll.

Details

As I briefly mentioned before, one of the most striking qualities of The Wire is the show’s maniacal attention to detail.  In almost every episode, a character explains a process of some kind, whether it be legal procedure or how to operate a complex wire-tapping device or explaining the inner workings of how to run a mayoral campaign.  Everything has to be explained in detail to the point that it almost becomes a flaw of the show.  The audience has to retain so much information that it’s no wonder that this show had such a small audience.  Most people just want to sit back and escape into another world and not have their world thrown in their face, and that is where Doctor Who enters the picture.  The show cares so little about attention to detail that there is never a clear explanation of how the Doctor’s time machine actually works.  We see him pulling levers and pushing buttons, but it is never explained what any of those buttons and levers are for, they’re just there and they help him travel through space.  The writers of Doctor Who realize that if they try to explain the details of time travel and how the machine works, none of their viewers will understand or care, so they choose to ignore these big details and just expect the audience to play along.

  Pacing

Critics of The Wire have accused the show of being too languidly paced for mainstream audiences to enjoy, and while they are correct in stating that the show does move along at a modest pace, this actually helps the show instead of hindering it.  Creators David Simon and Ed Burns have said on many occasions that they consider each season like a novel, and novels are inherently more slowly paced than films or other television shows, but what novels and a show like The Wire may lack in pace, they gain in character development and world creation.  No show in the history of television has had as many incredible characters as The Wire.  In fact, it is hard to single out a poorly-drawn character from the dozens that populate the show’s universe.  In the vast Universe of Doctor Who, only the Doctor and his companions are given the same level of character development, but that is not necessarily a detriment to the show.  While The Wire is very deliberate in its pacing, Doctor Who is equally furious and lightning-fast in its pacing.  Every episode involves characters in high-pressure situations (usually the end of the world/universe) and a race against time to stop whatever malevolent force is threatening the existence of Earth.  In each season of Doctor Who, over the course of 13 or 14 episodes, there are roughly eight to ten different times where creatures are threatening to destroy the world or the universe and the Doctor always saves the day.  In the Wire, a problem might not even get solved over the course of a 12 or 13 episode season.

Tone

While the difference in each show’s portrayal of reality is most obvious, tone is the most striking and all-encompassing quality that indicates how these two shows truly are polar opposites.  First, Doctor Who is a family fantasy show (even though there is a lot of death), so there are little to no sexual references and the worst word uttered on the show is “hell.”  By contrast, The Wire is a gritty crime drama in which the characters use every bad word under the sun and take part in nearly every R-rated act one can think of such as drug use, homosexuality, graphic violence, adultery, and the list goes on.  Another tonal difference between the two shows that strikes me is how humor is used.  Both shows can be very funny but the tone of the humor in each show is completely oppositional to the other.  Doctor Who’s humor is very cheeky and whimsical while the humor in the Wire is very cynical and dark.  A third key difference in tone is the usage of music on each program.  Doctor Who makes great usage of score throughout each episode, manipulating the viewer’s levels of tension and excitement, while the Wire uses very minimal non-diegetic sound and the vast majority of scenes have no music at all, instead choosing to task the actors with conveying the appropriate tone of the scene.

I enjoy both of these shows greatly, and though I think when I measure them up against each other, The Wire is a better television show than Doctor Who, but both are equally enjoyable, even though they are polar opposites.  I could pompously attribute my enjoyment of both of these shows to my sophistication as a viewer of entertainment, but I think that it actually indicates that I, along with everyone who watches television, am truly blessed to have the choice to watch and enjoy such diverse programming instead of being one of those moronic vessels that watches “reality television” all the time.