For the un-initiated, the Wire, is a fantastic HBO show about...well, cops and robbers in Baltimore. But the depth of writing, the multi-dimensional characters and the thematic overlays really bump this show to a higher plane. Take the scene in the fourth season, where we see 'Cutty' Wise, a reformed black-ex-boxer-turned-drug-user and current mentor to the neighborhood kids, in his hospital bed.
Cutty, having reformed himself from his earlier gansta days had been been shot by friends of an up-and-coming gangtsa he tried to rescue. While lying in the hospital, a black nurse scolds him for continuing to use the resources of the public health system for his 'gangsta' activities - citing his multiple previous trauma surgeries - without realizing the supreme irony that this time, he actually got admitted because he tried to stop a kid from entering his previous malevolent path.
And the lessons of life go on - from disgruntled health care workers to systemic inequities. From institutional racism to the debilitating effects of poverty. From personal salvation and inescapable stigma.
(How as a health care worker can you really parcel out different treatment only after knowing the ability of the patient to pay? It's madness...and maddening!)
And for those of us who live it daily, it's just nice for a fictional tv show to get it. Even throw-away scenes amazingly encompass so much of life on the fringe of the medical care - and the show's not even about medicine!
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