Because my inner nerd betrayed me when I heard that A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms was being made, I got myself an HBO Max account. Because I decided I didn’t feel like shelling out until the next season comes out, I cancelled the subscription. Between then, and April when it expires, I’m rewatching The Wire.

Before Breaking Bad and Mad Men cemented AMC as the Channel of Prestige Television, there was a little show about the grand municipal dysfunction that is Baltimore, MD, that everyone watched and everyone liked and set the standard for how a weekly television drama could unfold. It was the cop show to beat all cop shows, that made everything before it seem like a gormless mass of played-out clichés. This show was the cruel, hard reality of crime, punishment, and power.

It’s five seasons, each one focused on a municipal institution that’s flailing in the process of achieving its mission:

• Season One: The Baltimore PD (they’re a running theme throughout the show)
• Season Two: The Stevedores Union
• Season Three: City Hall
• Season Four: The Public Schools
• Season Five: The Baltimore Sun

The latter two seasons are, admittedly, not as good. We end up with an entirely new cast of characters, and however much the streets infect the schools of Baltimore City, the amount of drama stirred up by 8th-graders confronting … state testing feels like a letdown after watching the Rise and Fall of Stringer Bell. And journalists? You want me to have sympathy for journalists?

But the common theme running through all these institutions is the tension between institutional needs and mission needs. It is a commonplace that those who serve the institution rise higher than those who serve the mission. But what The Wire makes clear to us is that institutional needs start actively conspiring against getting the mission done at all.

Take the police. The show kicks off with a homicide detective, Jimmy McNulty, getting summoned into a judge’s office after observing a witness recant testimony on the stand, throwing a murder case. The judge knows McNulty, and McNulty tells him plain that a gangster named Avon Barksdale is running drug production and distribution in the housing project hi-rises of West Baltimore. The murderer who just got off is his nephew. The witness got paid to recant, and Barksdale’s lieutenant and fixer, Stringer Bell, was in the courtroom to make sure it went down.

The judge, enraged, kicks up dust with the police brass, who start a special task force to investigate Barksdale. But the brass is pissed at the embarrassment, and they’re furious with McNulty for breaking the chain of command. They don’t want to expend resources on a long-shot RICO-style deep invasion of the projects. They want to make their numbers. Homicide investigations end with suspects arrested, not with convictions. Convictions are the State’s Attorney’s problem. The Institution is best served by meeting statistical targets, which can be given in reports to legislatures, guaranteeing funding. This is how you get promoted.

McNulty doesn’t care. He wants to take down the gangster, and he will kick at everything that impedes that, and the bosses can fuck off if they don’t like it. He doesn’t start this way; he’s actually apologetic to his CO when the judge makes his move. He didn’t do it on purpose, and he didn’t expect a result; he was just bitching. But the bosses marked him for punishment anyway, even after the investigation yields good fruit. By Season 3, he doesn’t care: he’ll go out of his way to screw his bosses and fellow cops just to get his way, just to hunt his whale. Only the Mission matters, and since no one else cares about it as much as he does, that means only his mission matters. He’s his own worst enemy.

City Hall has the same problem. The Mayor wants to be Mayor more than he wants to do the mayor’s job. He flips and flops and insinuates and lies to avoid making hard decisions. He undermines his own authority and makes allies into enemies, but A city councilman wants to do the mayor’s job, which he thinks entitles him to be Mayor. He wins the election, and the Party puts the notion of being Governor in his mind, at which point all the good he was going to do goes by the wayside. His desire to win impedes his desire to do the job. Institution defeates Mission.

A man with a sense of Mission can tame an Institution, but it requires gathering strength outside the Institution to do it. That’s what every politician learns. Power doesn’t come with the job, it comes with knowing how to work the job to your advantage. Problem is, that’s how the Institution gets its hooks into you and makes you an Institution man.

Hitting the bastards where they live is not for the weak. You have to put everything aside, all fear, all consideration of advancement. You must be a slave to the Mission. Behold, my yoke is easy, and my burden, light. Missionaries frighten others precisely because of this monomania, which can cause destruction precisely because it does not care.

Most of us don’t live like that. We are swamped in impedimenta. We are slaves to the system. We produce and consume. We collect on the back end. We bow to petty tyrants – cruel or cheerful – and we eat what we’re told to eat and swallow it with a smile if our performance review is coming up. The Institution is bigger than any one of us.

It’s an almost impossible balance, and it breeds dysfunction at scale. No one gets elected to Congress to become a tool of the Machine. They don’t get a choice. If you defy the Machine, it cuts off your money and runs someone who won’t. No one should express surprise at this. Power seeks its application, and institutions seek to continue themselves. Taming the Institution to the Mission requires a controlled burn every now and again.

Obviously, if you haven’t watched the show, you should. It is a raw unfiltered look at the urban life in 21st century America, and how it is managed. It is provocative in the best possible way.