The Target (S01E01)
Airdate: June 2nd 2002
Written by: David Simon
Directed by: Clark Johnson
Running Time: 62 minutes
Before the fragmented landscape of the streaming era, where prestige drama feels almost ubiquitous, HBO held an almost exclusive monopoly on American high-quality television drama. The cable network, liberated from the suffocating constraints of broadcast censorship and the relentless pressure for mass-market appeal, masterfully exploited the peculiarities of its medium. It carved out a crucial sweet spot: marrying the cinematic production values and narrative ambition of feature films with the expansive, character-driven potential of the episodic television format. The result was a string of series that transcended mere entertainment to become deeply embedded institutions within popular culture, shaping discourse and redefining what television could achieve. Among these, The Wire stands as perhaps the most rigorously constructed and intellectually formidable achievement of early 21st-century American television, a reputation that finds its startlingly potent, albeit nascent, justification in its very first episode, The Target. This opening salvo doesn't merely introduce a story; it meticulously lays the groundwork for a decade-spanning, multi-layered autopsy of an American city, revealing systemic rot with a journalist's precision and a poet's despair.
The architect of this monumental work, David Simon, brought a unique pedigree to the HBO table. A Baltimore-based journalist whose 1991 non-fiction masterpiece, Homicide: A Year on the Killing Street, offered an unvarnished, often brutal look at the city's homicide unit, Simon had already successfully translated his gritty realism to the small screen with Homicide: Life on the Street. That NBC police procedural, despite suffering significant creative dilution in its final seasons as network executives sought broader ratings, remained one of the most critically lauded and influential dramas of the 1990s, celebrated for its unconventional rhythms, moral ambiguity, and refusal to sanitise the grim realities of urban policing. The Wire, set in the same decaying Baltimore crucible and tackling a broader, yet intrinsically linked, set of societal pathologies – the drug trade, the port system, city government, the education system, the media – functions, in many profound ways, as the spiritual successor and intellectual evolution of Homicide. Where Homicide focused intensely on the microcosm of the murder investigation, The Wire promised a macrocosmic dissection of the entire ecosystem that produced those murders.
This lineage is palpable from The Target's opening frames. We are thrust not into a procedural puzzle, but into the immediate, visceral aftermath of senseless street violence in West Baltimore – a scene echoing the very anecdotes that populated Simon’s 1991 book. The camera lingers on the mundane horror: the body on the pavement, the indifferent passersby, the procedural scramble. It is within this grim tableau that we meet the series' nominal protagonist, Baltimore Police Homicide Division detective Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West), already radiating a potent mix of intelligence, arrogance, and simmering frustration. McNulty is no heroic archetype; he is a flawed, deeply human instrument through whom Simon will channel the audience into the city's labyrinthine dysfunction.
Crucially, it is McNulty, propelled less by noble intent and more by a volatile cocktail of professional pride, personal grievance, and accidental circumstance, who inadvertently ignites the central narrative engine of the entire series. The catalyst is a courtroom verdict that exposes the terrifying efficiency of the emerging Barksdale organisation. A Baltimore jury, to the palpable fury of Judge Daniel Phelan (Peter Gerety), acquits the young drug dealer D'Angelo Barksdale (Larry Gillard, Jr.) after a crucial witness recants. Phelan, politically connected and deeply disturbed by this miscarriage, demands answers from McNulty, a detective he respects. McNulty, seizing the moment, outlines the chilling reality: D'Angelo is part of a ruthless, ascendant drug empire run by his cousin Avon Barksdale (Wood Harris) and his cerebral lieutenant, Russell "Stringer" Bell (Idris Elba). This organisation, McNulty explains, has seized vast territory in West Baltimore's African American communities through a campaign of extreme violence – at least ten murders in a year – and a sophisticated strategy of witness intimidation that has already sabotaged three murder convictions, mirroring D'Angelo's escape.
McNulty’s revelation triggers a chain reaction within the Baltimore Police Department that lays bare its own internal fractures. Judge Phelan, incensed, leverages his political clout to demand action from city authorities. This demand lands like a grenade in the BPD’s command structure. McNulty’s immediate superior, Homicide Division commander William Rawls (John Doman), embodies institutional inertia; he prefers the quiet life, avoiding the "ruffle feathers" of a complex, high-risk investigation against a powerful gang, and delivers a thinly veiled threat to McNulty about career consequences. In stark contrast stands Narcotics Division Major Cedric Daniels (Lance Reddick), who approaches the Barksdale threat with professional seriousness and strategic acumen. As the Homicide and Narcotics units tentatively discuss forming a joint task force, the narrative delivers its first brutal punctuation: William Gant (Larry Hull), the one witness who didn’t recant D'Angelo’s trial testimony, is gunned down on the street. The message from the Barksdale organisation is unequivocal: defiance means death. The stakes are lethally clear.
Visually and tonally, The Target bears a strong familial resemblance to the earlier seasons of Homicide: Life on the Street, a connection underscored by the presence of familiar faces. Peter Gerety, who played the middle-aged Detective Stuart Gharty in Homicide, now embodies the frustrated Judge Phelan. Even more significantly, the episode is directed by Clark Johnson, who portrayed the sharp Detective Meldrick Lewis on Homicide and had already directed several of its episodes. This continuity provides a comforting anchor for fans of Simon’s previous work. Yet, The Target simultaneously announces a decisive evolution. The camera deliberately shifts focus beyond the police precinct walls, venturing onto the streets and into the very heart of the criminal enterprise it seeks to depict. This is most evident in the subplot following D'Angelo Barksdale’s return to the drug trade after his acquittal. Far from being rewarded, he faces demotion – punished by Avon and Stringer for a murder that brought unwanted heat and costly legal complications. Instead of overseeing the lucrative high-rises of Franklin Terrace, D'Angelo is exiled to the squalid, low-rise housing projects known as "The Pit," working under the volatile corner boy Preston "Bodie" Broadus (J.D. Williams). This scene is pivotal; it instantly establishes the Barksdale organisation not as chaotic thugs, but as a ruthlessly efficient, bureaucratically structured business with its own internal rules, hierarchies, and consequences.
This dual perspective – police and criminal – is further deepened by the introduction of characters occupying the absolute bottom rung of Baltimore’s socio-economic ladder: the addicts. Reginald "Bubbles" Cousins (Andre Royo), in a performance of heartbreaking vulnerability, and his desperate friend Johnny Weeks (Leo Fitzpatrick) attempt a pathetic scam using counterfeit bills on the Pit crew. The brutal beating Johnny suffers – a savage, unflinching depiction of street justice – is not merely shocking violence; it’s a stark illustration of the human cost ignored by both the police bureaucracy and the drug lords. Weeks’ subsequent hospitalisation, clinging to life, becomes the catalyst for Bubbles’ pivotal decision: volunteering to become an informant for Daniels’ sharp narcotics detective, Shakima "Kima" Greggs (Sonja Sohn). Bubbles’ introduction is arguably The Target’s most significant contribution to the series’ enduring power; he embodies the collateral damage, the human wreckage upon which the entire edifice of the drug trade and the city’s neglect is built.
The episode also efficiently sketches the supporting ensemble within Homicide. Sergeant Jay Landsman (Delaney Williams), a careerist cynic whose very name was lifted from a real detective in Simon’s 1991 book, provides dark humour and institutional perspective. McNulty’s closest confidant, Detective William "Bunk" Moreland (Wendell Pierce), exudes weary wisdom and loyalty. While their roles in The Target are primarily atmospheric, establishing McNulty’s world and the precinct’s culture, their significance will blossom magnificently in the episodes to come.
Perhaps the most startlingly prescient element woven into The Target, given its production mere days after the September 11th attacks, is Simon’s exploration of shifting national priorities and the redirection of state power. McNulty visits his friend, FBI Agent Terrance "Fitz" Fitzhugh (Doug Olear), who casually demonstrates the staggering surveillance capabilities the federal government employs against the drug trade – monitoring the most intimate details of criminal operations with chilling ease. Fitzhugh wryly notes, however, that such resources will now be overwhelmingly redirected towards the nascent "War on Terror," leaving the domestic drug war, and organisations like Barksdale’s, dangerously under-scrutinised. McNulty, observing this technological might, grasps a dangerous idea: could Baltimore’s meagre resources be leveraged in a similar, targeted surveillance operation against the Barksdales? Simon’s thesis – that the post-9/11 security apparatus would siphon focus and resources away from entrenched urban crises like the drug epidemic – has proven tragically, undeniably accurate, lending The Target an uncomfortable weight of foresight that many critics only fully appreciated years later.
Inevitable comparisons to Homicide will persist, but The Target leverages its HBO platform to achieve a level of verisimilitude impossible for broadcast television. The violence is more explicit, the language authentically profane and rhythmic, and fleeting nudity appears without exploitation. Crucially, none of this feels gratuitous. The colourful vernacular is the language of the street and the precinct; the violence is the brutal reality of the drug trade and policing it. This isn't sensationalism; it’s the necessary texture of Simon’s uncompromising vision. The Target presents a raw, unfiltered slice of Baltimore life, refusing to look away from the ugliness or offer false redemption. It establishes the city itself as the true protagonist – a complex, decaying organism where institutions perpetuate their own dysfunction, individuals struggle against impossible systems, and the "war" on drugs is revealed as a self-perpetuating cycle of failure.
While The Target operates with the structural familiarity of a police procedural – the murder, the investigation launch – it simultaneously transcends the genre. It is less concerned with who pulled the trigger in the opening scene (a detail almost immediately overshadowed) and far more invested in why such violence is endemic, ho the systems meant to address it are compromised, and who ultimately bears the cost. It sets the thematic table for everything to come: the clash between individual ambition and institutional inertia, the parallels between the criminal organisation and the police department, the crushing weight of the streets on the most vulnerable. It is not merely the first chapter of The Wire; it is the laying of bedrock. The episode’s power lies in its refusal to offer easy answers or heroic resolutions. It presents a city broken not by evil masterminds, but by the slow, grinding corrosion of systems designed to serve, yet failing those they purport to protect. In this stark, uncompromising realism, devoid of broadcast television’s comforting illusions, The Target* announces the arrival of a television drama that wouldn’t just reflect America, but dissect it with the cold, clear eye of a pathologist. The autopsy had begun, and television would never be the same.
RATING: 8/10 (+++)
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