I have a very easy home life as a nerd.
My wife also is a nerd, and we like a lot of the same things or at least we’re amenable to a lot of each other’s likes. Our first date was 28 Days Later, and I laugh to myself when I hear men bemoaning whatever chick-flick they’re dragged to see.
My wife and I have a never-ending list of things to watch. That bastard Netflix taunts us, as does our personal video collections. Each nerd friend tells us about 15 things we haven’t seen. So we have short-term and long-term viewing projects.
Among them is The Wire, which my wife never saw in its original 2002-08 run. As we delve deeper into the world surrounding the Baltimore drug trade, she is stepping into something I call fanboy convergence.
As Hollywood continues to mine nerd genres for box office and TV gold, nerds keep benefiting and we get more nerd convergence.
Familiar faces from other genre followings keep turning up in other genre projects.
This is nothing new; Hollywood always likes to cast a known name or two to help ensure success, and small-time genre pictures always have traded on this. But as fanboy/fangirl genres keep making more big-time money, the convergences step closer to the center of the pop-culture universe.
In this new mainstreaming of genre pictures, Hollywood and the public grow more and more lax about typecasting. Look at J.J. Abrams’ retcon of Star Trek in 2009. The crew manning the U.S.S. Enterprise included Sylar from Heroes, Eomer from Lord of the Rings, Shaun of Shaun of the Dead and Harold from the Harold and Kumar movies.
Olivia Deitz from Beetlejuice is Spock’s mom, and Malagant from First Knight (cue Sean Connery-as-King Arthur’s “Whyyyyy?!?!”) is his dad? Madea is the head of Starfleet Academy? Really? And, if you wanted to cheat chronologically, Kirk’s dad is Thor.
The Wire works on a reverse polarity to Star Trek in terms of fanboy/fangirl convergence.
Without knowing The Wire, she kept missing out on the inside joke contained within the casting of any person who worked on the show.
She never thought that was Stringer Bell (Idris Elba) putting away serial killers on Luther and strolling into The Office. (Which also would have added an extra layer of disappointment over how the Charles Miner character was written.)
She already knew that McNulty was actually British because she’d already remembered Dominic West from 300 and John Carter.
HBO, arguably by design, recast Wire players to play off their former roles.
She totally missed out on how it made sense to have Michael K. Williams go from Omar, West Baltimore’s Robin Hood, to Atlantic City gangster Chalky White on Boardwalk Empire.
Or the snicker of joy when political shark Tommy Carcetti (Aidan Gillen) slimeballed his way into Westeros on Game of Thrones.
Or that getting the always-serious Lance Reddick on an episode of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia was a real get.
And that he played pretty much the same role as Daniels when he moved on to Fringe. (A project from J.J. Abrams that cast Pacey from Dawson’s Creek and turned crazy-ass Denethor from LOTR into his crazy-ass father.)
Cedar Rapids trades of Ed Helms’ wound-too-tight WASP comic persona made famous on The Office. But I cracked up any time I saw Clay Davis on screen as a nerdy insurance salesman; it was the first time I saw Isiah Whitlock Jr. saying something other than “sheeeeiiiit.” They even wrote in a gag with him quoting Omar, which sadly I had to explain.
And every time Andre Royo shows up in something, you automatically know what you’re getting: the down-on-his-luck frailty and can’t-help-rooting-for-him charm of Bubbles.
Whether he’s opening black holes on Heroes or helping Olivia on the other side in Fringe, he’s still Bubbles.
Or that when Shakima Greggs steps into Philadelphia police’s homicide unit on Body of Proof, you were hoping for the day she lays a beatdown on some hoppers.
But things are looking up for this Wire-centric corner of fanboy/fangirl convergence. Watching this past season of The Walking Dead, she was able to make a joke about how Tyreese (Chad Coleman) was leaving Rick’s prison in order to open a boxing gym to get inner-city youths off the drug corners.
And that Sansa on Game of Thrones should ask Littlefinger if she can get Omar to help knock off King Joffrey.
Now that’s progress.
