The Wire: Perfect Reception
Written by Andreas Babiolakis
This is an entry in our Perfect Reception series. Submit your favourite television series for review here!
Warning: This deep dive includes major spoilers involving The Wire. Reader discretion is advised.
I set out on a year-and-a-half long journey to seek out the greatest television series of all time, and it wasn’t easy playing catchup with all of the programs I had neglected for years. I am a cinephile, and I did grow up in a household that loves television, but my problem is that I am a completionist, and starting a TV show as one is such a daunting task. I still feel unfulfilled that I haven’t seen every episode of The Simpsons past the golden years of the series, even though I know there are literally hundreds of decent-to-subpar storylines I don’t need to waste months watching. I just avoided a lot of TV growing up, because I hated that void of knowing that something was amiss; incomplete; partial. Nonetheless, I did have a handful of series I watched in full and adored (Six Feet Under, Twin Peaks, Freaks and Geeks, Arrested Development, Seinfeld, The Sopranos, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, et cetera) before I started my experiment, but there were many classics I had to get to. I persevered nonetheless, frying my brain with an endless amount of television binge watching (with me completing a majority of the series, too) to try and find the greatest series of all time.
I had an idea of what I already felt like was the greatest show ever made before I conducted this research. I feel like I went from a novice to a well versed analyzer of television by the end of this year-and-a-half. Even with all of this exploration, research, and marathon watching, that number one show never wavered. If anything, I’ve never felt more confident in declaring that The Wire is the greatest television series of all time. It was the benchmark I had in mind when I started my work, and it only felt like that standard was deceptively higher than I initially thought as I watched more and more series; The Wire was on top, but I didn’t realize how undeniably so it really was. I was assured that there really wasn’t a television series like it, and now I’m certain of it. We’re still in the New Golden Age of Television, and yet I still can’t think of this spot being taken over (especially if Breaking Bad came close enough, and even that show is starting to feel like an anomaly of greatness amidst fantastic shows). Before I continue with this deep dive into David Simon and HBO’s magnum opus, I have to point out something I have felt for years. If The Sopranos was the Citizen Kane of television (an early adopter of new techniques and elements that has influenced nearly everything that has been released ever since), then The Wire is its Vertigo: a show that went from a work that was beloved with its own audience before being reassessed as the true golden standard in a new age, as if the true masterwork of a medium on a widespread level was right there in front of our eyes and we just didn’t notice its impact initially.
Not everything was roses for this crime drama, and that’s abundantly obvious given how under respected the series was at first. While The Sopranos made a splash and HBO had its next-big-things lined up (Six Feet Under, Deadwood), other networks and platforms were trying to play their next best hands. I love The Shield, and it was FX’s answer to what HBO was pumping out; it would ultimately be one of the key factors into why The Wire was under seen, given that they were similar shows, both raw and visceral in their own ways, and driven by antiheroes. The main difference is that FX could put everything they had into making The Shield the next best thing. The Wire was practically all but yanked from HBO for a number of its seasons. It didn’t have high ratings. It was under loved because of the show being unconcerned about cliffhanger endings, twists at every corner, and other already-tired television gimmicks. The Wire didn’t try to do what every other show was doing. It just existed as its own version, and that’s all that it needed to do. It resulted in the series being undervalued initially, but its day would come as it did everything right — even if we didn’t realize it.
“They were looking for another Sopranos, and they said, ‘Why don’t you take another shot at having a hit?’”, David Simon detailed to Patrick McGuire during an interview for the novel Tapping into The Wire: The Real Urban Crisis. This was amidst the preparation for the final season, when Simon had to fight tooth and nail to be able to actually resolve his series nicely (if the show had to end at all). “I kept saying, ‘I don’t do hit’”, he fought back (Beilenson and McGuire, xiii). It’s a shame a master of the craft like Simon had to fight his way to keeping a show that HBO was initially starving for up on the air, particularly because television owed it to him already. The Wire may have been Simon’s brainchild, but it was hardly the first time his work was being shown on the small screen. The triumphant episodic series Homicide: Life on the Street was based on his similarly titled novel Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets. See, Simon was a renown author before he became a television innovator, and his detailing of lives of crime, poverty, and systemic imbalance each made for perfect TV material. His second novel The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood was also adapted, as it became a miniseries for — you guessed it — HBO: the eventual home for The Wire. It seemed like Simon was two-for-two. Homicide was an ongoing series about a homicide unit navigating the underground of the streets of Baltimore, and The Corner was a similar project (but from the perspectives of an impoverished family and drug addicts).
The Wire came shortly after The Corner, and it already seemed to blend both stories together, as a corrupt team of law enforcement (the Baltimore Police Department) tries to crack down on the Barksdale family drug ring. The first season of the show felt like everything we may have expected from Simon by now dialled up to eleven, thanks to the initial faith in the project that HBO had (as well as the limitless nature of the platform, where you can show anything and everything). A gesture of acknowledgement that the series has in this first season is character Omar Little watching Oz: one of the first HBO series to embrace unfiltered television, including raw sex sequences, uncensored language, graphic violence, homosexuality (when the LGBTQ+ community was still being ostracized or mocked by pop culture), and — what initially seemed to be — an authentic approach to how lives of crime are shown on TV. The Wire knew what came before it, whether it was Simon’s own work (particularly because this, unlike Homicide, was an authentic creation by Simon, whereas Homicide was an adaptation [he would cowrite for The Corner, mind you]) or HBO’s previous programming. HBO wanted another The Sopranos. Simon knew The Wire was busy accomplishing something else: a completion of these other visions of what could be, not what already was.
That didn’t always seem apparent, as actor Andre Royo (Bubbles on The Wire) recalled for Jonathan Abrams’ book All the Pieces Matter: The Inside Story of The Wire: “We thought that show wasn’t getting picked up, because it’s too slow. TV doesn’t move like this. Everybody in TV world… they know Law & Order. You catch the bad guy at the end. It’s all wrapped up. This is some slow-talking shit… At the same time, we’re watching shit like The Shield. That shit is a hundred miles an hour.” (Abrams, 46-47) It was a project that Simon and company wanted to work on nonetheless, given just how different The Wire promised to be. Dominic West — the actor of series lead Detective Jimmy McNulty — has stated that “It was not like any show that had come before. I was aware of that and aware of also how special the writing was, but I was so, so scared of it and so sort of concerned to get it right…” (Abrams, 45). It was an in-depth experience that placed real circumstances and tones first, and this came from Simon’s previous years of “research” as a journalist for The Baltimore Sun (a key chapter of his life that will certainly be reflected on towards the end of The Wire’s run). He sunk his teeth into the local crime stories, only to depart from his team — following a strike that rendered the paper’s writing team toxic — and visit the Baltimore Police Department whilst on hiatus; this would lead to Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, and the rest is history.
Simon knew the ins-and-outs of Baltimore more than anybody (and I still believe that this is the case to this day), given that he was able to scrutinize so many different organizations (and more than just the overly general topic of “crime” as the world knew it). Again, I must stress that Simon was a journalist and an author first and foremost, because all of this comes into play when you watch The Wire. Simon wasn’t concerned with making television characters. He wanted to relay what he knew during his years as a studier of Baltimore’s numerous inner-mechanics. These characters were real, and what happened to them were even realer. The Wire begins with a shot of McNulty sitting on some steps and coming to the sudden realization that life just happens and then it ends, and we cannot control our fates or legacies like we hope on a daily basis. He stares at the corpse of Omar Isaiah Betts, whose nickname (and the moniker that will likely wind up in the newspaper the following morning) is “Snot Boogie”, and he then recognizes that this will forever be how he is known. It’s also a metaphor of how Betts will never be anything but a criminal in the eyes of the public, as this is the sole label he’s been granted: “Snot” is no better than calling him a gangster or druggie, when he has an entire lifetime — a series of uphill battles — that Betts wanted to get out of. The Wire sought to tell these full stories and dispel the notion that people love having lives of crime. You have to wonder why shows start where they do; what prompts this story to be told now, especially within an already existing family or work environment? The Wire stems from that night of McNulty’s realization (that he’s got to start changing how people instantly loathe him, as can be seen right away in the series), and our understanding that we’re about to see lives and not stereotypes and archetypes on television, finally.
After the first season was done (and this merging of Homicide and The Corner resolved), Simon was able to branch out in ways that we’d never expect. Each season functioned as its own “book” (similar to how Prime Suspect — another crime series — had starkly different motives for each season whilst utilizing the same lead character of Detective Chief Inspector Jane Tennison). Season two focused on the Baltimore port as the struggling working class dips into the contraband smuggling business to get by. Season three is all about politics, as a local councilman — Tommy Carcetti — is viciously campaigning to become the new face of Baltimore. Season four focuses not on the present but the future, as we dip into the schools of Baltimore to see what new organizations are brewing. Finally, and this is where Simon’s previous experiences definitely come into play, there is a scathing attack on journalism and its approach to documenting everything we’re now seen before. What’s truly special about The Wire is that it isn’t anthological with this approach despite the subject matters for each season. No story just ends. Case in point: we’re still looking at the Barksdale family and the aftermath of the first season while we are introduced to the new characters in season two, and this linearity continues throughout the series, all the way up to the open ended episode “-30-” with the insinuation that crime will just keep on going, no matter what happens to us.
Within these stories are a tome of brilliant characters; some that we love to hate; some that we hate to love; none that are disposable or unnecessary. There’s no “good side” or “bad side”, and the only vantage point we have is having the series predominantly through the eyes of Detective McNulty (who is not a saint by any means). No one is ever painted out to be a hero or a villain. They all just exist, and do what they feel like they need to do in order to survive. From the perspective of McNulty, we see what the police department is all about, with close friend “Bunk” Moreland as a fellow detective (both working homicide, with McNulty being a new member of this team) and Kima Greggs alongside him. He works under Cedric Daniels, who is strict and relentless. The team dives deeper than the obvious players, including the popular Bubbles: a former drug addict who functions as an informant for the police, whilst suffering from homelessness (like “Snot”, Bubbles was confined to his nickname until we finally learn that he is Reginald Cousins). This is not even a quarter of the characters (and I mean the law enforcement side of the story, and not just the couple of names I’ve cherrypicked). The drug ring itself is quite massive, and we hear about not through McNulty, but via the titular, literal, and figurative wire: planted listening devices so we can observe all that are going on around us. This ring is run by the Barksdale family, with Avon Barksdale’s right hand man Russell “Stringer” Bell running the show. Season two introduces us to the innercircles of the port, ranging from law (Beadie Russell) to those dabbling in crime (Vondas Vondopoulos and Frank Sobotka). I could keep going, but you’ll wind up with countless names that I cannot describe enough in a short deep dive; it can’t compare to how the series does every name justice.
There is one character I want to spotlight, though, and it’s a seemingly minor character that not only steals the entire show, but one that is arguably an untouchable name in all of television. That’s Omar Little, played impeccably by the late Michael K. Williams. A stick-up man that acted as a Robin Hood (of sorts) for the ghettos of Baltimore, Little was terrifying to those that crossed him, but a warm beacon of light to those that understood him. He was a highly progressive character because of his warm nature and homosexuality, which was virtually not represented by similar characters in any way on television (not even Oz: the show he is seen watching, as stated earlier). He is beyond loveable despite his flaws, but that was a major purpose as to why The Wire exists: to prove that no one, no system, and no life is perfect. We wonder what Little would have looked like had he been given a better life. Unfortunately, he was brought into a life of crime, where you die if you don’t keep up or kill others. He’s had to adopt a new philosophy, one that speaks of royalty and the game of chess: “You come at the king, you best not miss.”
On that note, chess is an important metaphor that is introduced early on in The Wire; in the third episode, “The Buys”, D’Angelo Barksdale teaches members of his crew how to play the game, and it makes all the more sense when he likens their own circumstances to the game. Life is about thinking two moves ahead, unless you’re entangled in crime: then you must think five paces ahead. To Little, he is the king of his board, whether he slays you in close proximity (as a king, of whom moves in single spaces at a time, would) via his shotgun, or if another piece would claim you first. This wouldn’t be the first time that the game of chess was used to detail the maneuverings of crime, as GZA’s album Liquid Swords acted like a long game of chess, wrapping up with the rapper confirming with producer, feature, and cousin RZA that these pawns have each other’s backs while they come for the king — having worked their way up from the bottom — to call a checkmate. That was an album. This was an entire show, and we had around sixty hours worth of a chess game to see which pieces (many of whom are beloved, including Stringer Bell and our favourite Omar Little) would eventually be taken out. While not as prolific with its surprise killings, The Wire felt like a precursor to Game of Thrones: we were getting to know these characters well enough, only to feel the weight of their deaths.
There’s a strong chess analogy here, but the major achievement is how The Wire is arguably the most literary show ever conceived. Unlike anything else (sans maybe Berlin Alexanderplatz) have I ever felt like I was viewing a novel (or a series) than The Wire. There are even quotes to preface each episode: a harbinger of what we would see for the next hour. This was the slowness that cast and crew feared would bury The Wire, and it initially did. Television was erroneously allowed to be the medium of loud noises, attention-grabbing hysteria, and shock. It didn’t have to be this way, and David Simon knew it. Those who were patient would discover it; not while it was on the air, but once it could be viewed on DVD (and now via streaming). Viewers could ingest it at their own pace — like a book — and dig deeper than any show had allowed them before. Despite all of the promises of television (escapism on a habitual basis), Simon reminded us that the greatest storytelling device was life itself: he just now had a preferred conveyance method for his stories. The Wire ended in a stalemate, with pieces still on the board and no clear winner; this mirrored Simon being able to wrap up the series after much begging (luckily The Wire didn’t get the same treatment as Deadwood, which was cancelled outright with zero notice). Simon got his way, but his show wasn’t the success that it should have been.
Well, he, too, was thinking many moves ahead. Of the HBO series that came out at the start of the Golden Age, and the other series that thwarted Simon’s show (the chaotically brilliant Shield to, well, Desperate Housewives [seriously?]), all can be looked at in hindsight. Have any of The Sopranos’ disciples surpassed it? Is Deadwood as strong as it was once perceived? How much more do the flaws in Six Feet Under hinder its overall legacy? There’s only one show, in my mind, that has actually gotten stronger overtime, as we trek through this Golden Age of Television together with no end in sight: The Wire. This is a show that is far more real than any so-called reality television, grittier than most other crime shows, and beyond the most multifaceted series of them all. If anything, its own followers are popping up now, with series that have tried to replicate the intricacies of Simon’s masterpiece (well over ten years after it ended). The internet has allowed discussions about the show to make us fall in love with it all over again. There are even memes about viewers wondering about Cheese being student Randy’s dad: the characters have been talked about again and again by now. There is life in The Wire. There is breath in The Wire. There is organic growth in The Wire. This is an experience unlike any we’ve seen before; despite its influence, I don’t think we’ll get something like The Wire ever again. It’s a miracle it exists, because it almost didn’t. There was no selling point for this to exist on paper, but David Simon (and his many characters) have reminded us how the series develops, tells its story, and impacts us: it’s all in the game.
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Andreas Babiolakis has a Masters degree in Film and Photography Preservation and Collections Management from X University (formerly known as Ryerson), as well as a Bachelors degree in Cinema Studies from York University. His favourite times of year are the Criterion Collection flash sales and the annual Toronto International Film Festival.