The Wire: A Peak Experience

[Warning: This post contains some obscenities in quoted material. Not much beyond a PG-13 rating these days, but still... fair warning.]


I recently spent a month or so watching all five seasons of the HBO series The Wire, and I have to say that it's the best thing ever made for the television.

It's laden with violence and profanity, of course, but what else would you expect from a story that's about the social devolution of the American city -- drug dealing, the loss of blue collar jobs, political corruption, police actions (both good and bad), deteriorating schools, and the implosion of the daily newspaper. All this with compelling characters, great acting and novel-quality writing set against the landscape of Baltimore.

The Wire was created by David Simon, a police reporter at the Baltimore Sun for several decades, in collaboration with Ed Burns, a former Baltimore cop and teacher. You might think their resumes would lead to something dry and clinical, but that's not what happened. (Simon wrote the book that became the television show Homicide: Life in the Streets, based in part on Burns' experiences.)

In an interview with British novelist Nick Hornby, Simon explained why The Wire is so different from most television:

My standard for verisimilitude is simple and I came to it when I started to write prose narrative: fuck the average reader. I was always told to write for the average reader in my newspaper life. The average reader, as they meant it, was some suburban white subscriber with two-point-whatever kids and three-point-whatever cars and a dog and a cat and lawn furniture. He knows nothing and he needs everything explained to him right away, so that exposition becomes this incredible, story-killing burden. Fuck him. Fuck him to hell.

Later in the interview, Simon went on to talk about the way The Wire makes the viewer care about people (drug dealers, street kids, cops) and places (the 'hood) that normally would be ignored by a mainstream audience:

There are two ways of traveling. One is with a tour guide, who takes you to the crap everyone sees. You take a snapshot and move on, experiencing nothing beyond a crude visual and the retention of a few facts. The other way to travel requires more time -- hence the need for this kind of viewing to be a long-form series or miniseries, in this bad metaphor -- but if you stay in one place, say, if you put up your bag and go down to the local pub or shebeen and you play the fool a bit and make some friends and open yourself up to a new place and new time and new people, soon you have a sense of another world entirely. We’re after this: Making television into that kind of travel, intellectually. Bringing those pieces of America that are obscured or ignored or otherwise segregated from the ordinary and effectively arguing their relevance and existence to ordinary Americans. Saying, in effect, This is part of the country you have made. This too is who we are and what we have built.

Anyway. All I can say is, it made for a compelling 30 or so days of watching, and I actually think I'll want to watch the whole series again, sooner rather than later.

Sometime when you've got 60 hours to spend watching television, this is the one to watch. Think of it as a life-changing, three-day vacation spread over a month or two.