Why The Wire is One of the Most Brilliant TV Shows Ever

There were a lot of moments dur­ing my first view of The Wire when I real­ized I wasn’t watch­ing the usu­al cop pro­ce­dur­al. But the one that sticks in my head was when an obvi­ous­ly blitzed and blast­ed McNul­ty, the Irish-Amer­i­can detec­tive that you *might* think is the hero of the show, leaves a bar, gets into his car and prompt­ly totals it. In any oth­er show this would have been the turn­ing point for the char­ac­ter, either as a wake-up call, a rea­son for his boss to throw him off the case, or to gin up some sus­pense. But no. McNul­ty walks away from the acci­dent and…it’s nev­er real­ly spo­ken about. The cops took care of their own.

Life does not fol­low the con­tours of a tele­vi­sion dra­ma, and nei­ther did David Simon’s ground­break­ing HBO series. Beloved char­ac­ters get killed, or not, or they just trans­fer out of the show as in life. Nobody real­ly gets what they want. Nei­ther good nor evil wins.

As Simon told an audi­ence at Loy­ola Uni­ver­si­ty, Bal­ti­more in 2007: ““What we were try­ing to do was take the notion of Greek tragedy, of fat­ed and doomed peo­ple, and instead of these Olympian gods, indif­fer­ent, venal, self­ish, hurl­ing light­ning bolts and hit­ting peo­ple in the ass for no reason—instead of those guys whip­ping it on Oedi­pus or Achilles, it’s the post­mod­ern insti­tu­tions … those are the indif­fer­ent gods.”

The Wire still feels recent despite pre­mier­ing in 2002 and in 4:3 ratio, no widescreen HD here. It feels recent because the prob­lems depict­ed in the show still exist: cor­rup­tion at all lev­els of city gov­ern­ment and gov­er­nance, insti­tu­tion­al­ized racism, failed schools, a col­laps­ing fourth estate, a gut­ted econ­o­my, weak­ened unions, and a gen­er­al nihilism and despon­den­cy. Simon may not have seen the Black Lives Mat­ter move­ment com­ing, but the recipe for it, the warn­ing of it, is there in the show.

So there’s def­i­nite­ly a rea­son to give it a re-watch to see how we’ve changed. The above essay from 2019 makes the case for The Wire as a sub­ver­sion of the usu­al cop show, with Thomas Flight not­ing it “doesn’t try to grab and keep your atten­tion. It requires it. And if you give it your atten­tion it will reward you.”

It also reminds us of the lit­er­ary giants in the writ­ers’ room: crime nov­el­ists Den­nis Lehane, George Pele­canos, and Richard Price were on the team, as was jour­nal­ist Rafael Alvarez, and William F. Zorzi. That com­bined with David Simon’s years in jour­nal­ism cov­er­ing Bal­ti­more and Ed Burns’ expe­ri­ence on the police force meant the show feels right, and the writ­ers did research and actu­al Bal­ti­more extras were encour­aged to speak up if some­thing didn’t.

If that video essay intrigues you, there’s more in the series, though with many more spoil­ers, such as this one on Char­ac­ter and Theme.

Not long after The Wire fin­ished its fifth and final sea­son, there were plen­ty of books pub­lished on the show. And now we’re near­ly two decades in from its pre­miere, The Atlantic’s Jemele Hill and The Ringer’s Van Lath­an decid­ed to spend quar­an­tine kick­ing off a pod­cast where the two black cul­tur­al crit­ics give the show a spir­it­ed re-watch. Does the show fea­ture too much “copa­gan­da” as my left­ist crit­ics now con­tend? Does it hold up like white lib­er­als (its biggest fans, let’s be hon­est, despite Pres­i­dent Obama’s shout out) think it does? The hosts just wrapped up Sea­son Three, but if you’re ready to start the show again with com­men­tary, here’s their first episode:

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Pres­i­dent Oba­ma Chats with David Simon About Drugs, The Wire & Omar

Revis­it­ing The Wire Dur­ing 2020’s Black Lives Mat­ter Move­ment
“The Wire” @ Har­vard

Ted Mills is a free­lance writer on the arts who cur­rent­ly hosts the Notes from the Shed pod­cast and is the pro­duc­er of KCR­W’s Curi­ous Coast. You can also fol­low him on Twit­ter at @tedmills, and/or watch his films here.