If you’ve ever come across an opinionated The Wire enthusiast, there’s a good chance they might have ardently tried to persuade you into starting the acclaimed television show while lecturing you about its significance as a consciousness-raiser. Because if there’s one common denominator between every die-hard fan who’s completed the series, it’s the irresistible urge to spread its gospel and proselytize to friends and relatives at every turn. We just can’t help it. You’d think that one of the flagship dramas from HBO’s Golden Age, one that routinely tops online discussions about the best television shows ever and is taught by academics at Harvard, UC-Berkeley, and Duke, wouldn’t be much of a tough sell. And yet, despite the best efforts from its army of loyal crusaders, it can be hard to pin down what exactly sets this particular drama series apart from every other one out there in the cosmos. An essay in visual form, a great Victorian novel spliced into 60 episodes of prestige TV, an ancient Greek tragedy transposed onto our postmodern times…no matter how well you frame your pitch, it can be hard to actually give a rundown of the narrative behemoth you’re in for. Perhaps it all boils down to one simple, incontrovertible fact: that The Wire’s brilliance is far too great and nuanced to be properly untangled with a brief synopsis.
The critical adulation and reverence for the series has only grown exponentially since it premiered on HBO 20 years ago, with long-time acolytes and would-be converters like myself racking our brains to devise new ways of insisting the uninitiated to take the plunge once and for all. To call The Wire a cop show akin to your standard network procedural would grossly undersell it. If anything, showrunner and former Baltimore Sun reporter David Simon took a seemingly plain cop-versus-crooks set-up many steps further — using it as a mere conduit to peel back the curtain and reveal, gradually but with surgical precision, the institutional rot that corrodes modern North America. To do so, the series had to ditch what was considered back then a winning formula, boldly foregoing the episodic case-of-the-week format that is woven into the fabric of network TV to instead incorporate several crisscrossing narrative strands — daring us to keep track of them all without the luxury of having things neatly tied up after every week. One could argue that many of the distinct qualities that eventually earned The Wire a place among the pantheon of serialized drama can be blamed too as the reason why it didn’t get the traction it deserved at first, notoriously struggling to win any major awards or retain viewers during its original run — at least compared to concurrent cultural sensations that instantly took off.
“This is Baltimore, gentlemen. The gods will not save you.”
Often likened to Charles Dickens for its novelistic depth, gritty realism, and biting social commentary, the story tackles all key facets of American society, weaving together a sprawling portrait of a declining post-industrial city on the verge of collapsing on itself. With each season capitalizing and expanding on the prior, the series cast an unwavering eye on the failed leadership of institutions while deftly illustrating how such systemic neglect continues to devalue human life on a massive scale. It goes without saying that none of these rich thematic layers would have been enough to propel the series into the same tier as Twin Peaks, The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, et al., had they not been constructed alongside memorable characters and compelling drama, both of which the show delivered in spades. From cops, judges, politicians, drug dealers, junkies, pimps, dockworkers, teachers, students, journalists, and about every citizen in between — The Wire boasted a nauseatingly large ensemble cast and put it to use in intricate storylines that frequently converged and took entire seasons to pay off. “All the pieces matter” is one of the fundamental mantras of the show, one that rings true not only in terms of the gargantuan police work required in building every criminal case we see unfold on-screen, but also to the excruciating attention to detail behind the scenes in the writers’ room.
Admittedly, things don’t pick up immediately, and it usually takes even the savviest of viewers a handful of episodes to really get the hang of the show, pick up the jargon, and understand how the different structures of power defer to each other and come into conflict. That kind of patience and faith was a lot to ask of television audiences back on June 2, 2002, if perhaps nowadays too considering the focus-tested, dumbed-down brand of storytelling that has become endemic in our streaming age. One could never accuse Simon and Burns of such creative misdeeds, both of whom had spent too much time walking this beat to know better than to patronize their audience or indulge in the holier-than-thou kind of moralizing that naively suggests clear-cut answers to obviously complex societal issues.
“I have the shotgun; you have the briefcase. It’s all in the game, though, right?”
Facile terms like ‘good’ and ‘evil’ seldom apply when trying to assess the ulterior motives and moral depth of any given character in The Wire. Rather than acting out of sheer malice, they tend to do so out of self-interest, fear, or utter despondency, desperately trying to get by and make the most out of the poor hand they were dealt. Politicians break campaign promises as soon as they get elected, compromised by the huge mountain of debt they inherit from their predecessors. As such, elementary schools willfully turn a blind eye on struggling students for a better chance at securing the public funding they so badly need but can only aspire to receive through discriminatory methods. In turn, these downtrodden inner-city kids are left down on their luck with no easy way out, tragically driven to delinquency at a young age — thus perpetuating the cycle of violence, racial disparity, and misguided War on Drugs that encourages law enforcement to save face by ‘juking the stats’ and make crime rates appear to drop. With their hands full making easy street rips on low-level dealers and addicts, narcotics and homicide units have to go to extreme lengths to go after the higher-profile players without the resources or bodies required to build a criminal case against them that will hold up in court.
It’s all in the game, though, as stick-up man Omar Little (Michael K. Williams) likes to remind the audience from time to time, something that comes to suggest that in the big picture of things, it doesn’t really matter if your weapon of choice is a shotgun, a briefcase, labor union funds, or an op-ed — nobody really wins when the game is rigged altogether; one side just loses more slowly. A major throughline between the five seasons is that bureaucratic inertia ripples through every structure of power, regardless of which side of the law it may stand on. Whether you’re a low-level corner boy slinging a G-Pack at Franklin Terrace, a newly-minted white mayor trying to appease African-American voters, or a seasoned shift lieutenant gunning for that new C.I.D. colonel opening — everyone all across the city of Baltimore is a first-rate careerist.
What happens then, when every public servant is seemingly busy buttering up their higher-ups and selling out every last principle in order to fast-track their way up the career ladder? Essentially, any genuine effort that opens up the possibility of wider change and substantive progress gets viciously thwarted for the sake of preserving the status quo and pre-existing distribution of power at all costs. The Wire pursues this idea to radical extremes, bluntly illustrating how, time and time again, these rotted-out institutions insist on bureaucratic stasis to the point of becoming irrelevant; foolishly trying to cover long-lasting cracks in the system with temporary band-aids.
Lt. Greggs: “Fighting the war on drugs… one brutality case at a time.”
Lt. Carver: “Girl, you can’t even think of calling this shit a war. Wars end.”
At the end of the show, not much has fundamentally changed despite the heroic efforts from the steady cast of regulars. Even when one criminal organization is dismantled, this only creates a momentary power vacuum that will end with a new, younger one on top assuming its role and keeping the drug trade flowing at full throttle. Droves of young Black men will continue to get sucked into a bottomless pit of addiction, impoverishment, and mass incarceration. Corrupt state senators will keep taking bribes and laundering money with impunity. Globalization and offshore outsourcing will continue to take away blue-collar jobs, and real police work will keep being brushed aside in favor of by-the-numbers policies. This cyclical fatalism cuts to the very heart of the show, if also becoming its very raison d’être. Yes, The Wire does allow for some small happy endings along the way, whether it’s Namond (Julito McCullum) and Cutty (Chad L. Coleman) finding life outside the game, or former heroin addict and CI Reginald ‘Bubbles’ Cousins (Andre Royo) overcoming his inner demons once and for all. But at the end of the day, the game stays the same, only fiercer.
This can be a disheartening realization to assimilate as a viewer because for the most part, we’ve been led to believe that each of us has the power and autonomy to make meaningful choices over our future as long as we’re willing to work our asses off for it. The Wire suggests otherwise, arguing that our social order is broken beyond repair and will keep eating away at the little sense of agency we may still possess as long as it is actively disincentivized in every underlying infrastructure of power.
One might ask, then, if there’s anything to be done in order to fix the myriad societal ills The Wire masterfully brought to the fore two decades ago. A lot has changed since the show first aired on the heels of George W. Bush’s first presidential term and the 9/11 attacks. At the same time, some things remain exactly the same. In the case that the legacy of the show hinged on the magnitude of the wake-up call it spurred, the fact that its message still holds water and grows more pertinent with each passing day should be rock-solid evidence that it didn’t succeed as an agent of sociopolitical transformation. Paradoxically, this further cements The Wire as a timeless cultural artifact by confirming one its core underpinnings: the inability of the bureaucratic system to change for the better — quite a scary thought given the current gridlock of American politics. If these past 20 years are anything to go by, there’s no reason to expect things to improve anytime soon. In fact, the entire show seems to be built upon the conviction that in real life, bad shit happens, and sometimes, that’s all there is to it. As “Snoop” (Felicia Pearson) would say, deserve ain’t got nothing to do with it.
