Requiem for Stringer Bell

You probably don't watch HBO's "The Wire" because, apparently, no one does. But on last night's episode Stringer Bell, one of the great characters in the history of television, died in an ambush while meeting with a contractor in one of the buildings he is erecting with laundered drug money.

Stringer was the No. 2 man in Avon Barksdale's drug organization. But he was a far deeper character than your average slinger. In fact, he was virtually unrecognizable if all you've been exposed to is the crop of American gangsta movies. In Bell you had a drug dealer who fancied himself a businessman. Not Mafioso/samurai sort of guy, who savored the violent side of the lifestyle, but a man who saw drugs as a means to an end. Bell died in a building that the legitimate side of his enterprise was trying to build. This was a man who took economics classes at the local community college and tried to apply those principles to the Baltimore drug trade. All that said, Stringer Bell was also a scumbag drug dealer who employed high school dropouts and pushed product to the people of West Baltimore.

It is a hard character to pull off. But there was a great actor, Idris Elba, behind the character. He found the center of Stringer Bell, the fact that this man straddled the streets and high-rolling world of business. He looked at home in a neatly tailored suit, yet a bad temper and violence still welled within him. Early in Sunday's episode, Bell wants to order the murder of a consultant he's been working with. That consultant has taken a quarter of a million dollars of drug money and not delivered any building projects. In this moment the contradiction in Stringer is laid bare. The rules of street violence are too ingrained in Bell to allow him to truly enter the executive suite. Elba understates this in his portrayal of Bell, and it's a mixture of embarrassment and rage works perfectly.

As a show, "The Wire" does the same thing. The mayor of Baltimore is a regular character but so is Bodie, a mid-level dealer in the Barksdale organization who has no power of his own. The show depicts the cops, politicians and criminals with equal depth and detail. Written by a former Baltimore Sun cops writer, "The Wire" presents a full picture of the implications of America's obsession with the drug war and how it effects all sides.

Hopefully HBO wises up and renews the show for a fourth season.