Jimmy McNulty and Me

Remember "Trekkies?"  Those people who were so taken with the TV series "Star Trek" they would hold conventions in Las Vegas and dress up as characters from the show.  
Much the same thing happened with "Harry Potter" but those fans were mostly kids who got over it.

Apparently, there are "Wireheads" --people who have seen "The Wire" all five episodes, over and over,  and can't stop talking about it.

Yes, I am, I have to admit it, one of those. 

But, really, how different is this fandom from those academics who love Shakespeare?  

This all came up again when I saw the writer/director of "Spotlight" walk up to get his Academy Award and I shouted, "That's the guy from the Wire. That horrible reporter!" 

Tom McCarthy, had in fact, played a really hideous character in the Fifth Season, a newspaper reporter who faked his stories to advance his own career. Now he had written a movie about the Boston Globe's coverage of the pedophile priests.

When fiction or music or even non fiction captures an audience, it changes the way they perceive the world, it may affect their fantasy life and it enriches a subculture.

My family did something of an intervention with me about "The Wire" by pointing out how often I referred to some episode or character, "Oh, that's just like in 'The Wire' when Bunk says..." It gets tiresome when your only point of reference is limited to one source, whether it's Shakespeare or "The Wire."  Of course, when it's Shakespeare, your references are in blank verse and sound really cool. With "The Wire" you cannot often repeat the relevant phrase in polite company.

Walking home one day after high school a friend of mine, who escaped Bethesda, Maryland and went off to college at Berkeley said, "I wish they just eliminated English courses from high school. They just ruin every thing they touch."  

This shocked and disturbed me because I generally liked English courses, although, given the particular English course which prompted her remark--our "Advanced Placement" English course with Mr. Schneider, who perched on his desk at the front of the classroom and made eyes at Kristie Hansen, after whom he so visibly lusted--was enough, I had to admit, to put you off English courses.

Now, reading internet postings from the legion of "professors" of rhetoric or gender studies or race studies, or sociology or anthropology at various universities, I have the same feeling. These people!  They deconstruct and analyze and talk about how various effects are achieved. What rot. As if we need to be told what we can see for ourselves.

But then, I suppose I'm just as insufferable. 

It's okay to sprinkle a few lines of reference about, as you go through daily life, but relating extended scenes does wear down your friends and family.

To all of them: I repent. Forgive me.