TV The Wire, 10 years on: ‘We tore the cover off a city and showed the American dream was dead’

Mikey · Mar 6, 2018

Mar 6, 2018

David Simon’s ‘anti-cop show’ struggled to find an audience before being lauded as a classic and making stars of Idris Elba, Michael B Jordan and others. Here, some of its writers and stars look back at a series that changed TV for ever

Dorian Lynskey

Tue 6 Mar 2018 15.10 GMTLast modified on Tue 6 Mar 2018 16.40 GMT

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‘Greek tragedy for the new millennium’ … Michael B Jordan, Tray Chaney, Larry Gilliard Jr and JD Williams in season one of The Wire. Photograph: HBO
When, in 2001, the actor Frankie Faison accepted the role of deputy commissioner Ervin Burrell in a new HBO drama called The Wire, he thought he was signing up for a cop show. “I was expecting it to be more about wiretapping,” he remembers with amusement. “It evolved into something much more fascinating.”

HBO laboured under a similar misapprehension because The Wire’s creator, David Simon, had pitched the show to them as an unusually thoughtful police procedural, not an anatomy lesson in US dysfunction that he really had in mind. “I sold it as a cop show, but they don’t know it’s not really a cop show,” he told the novelist George Pelecanos when he invited him to join the writing team. In fact, he said, it was something audaciously new: “A novel for television.”

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Wendell Pierce, Dominic West, Sonja Sohn and Clarke Peters. Photograph: Everett Collection/Rex Features
Exactly 10 years after its final episode aired, The Wire is established as one of the greatest shows in the history of US television – some would say the greatest. But, while shows such as The Sopranos and Mad Men launched with loud fanfares and walked paths strewn with accolades, strong ratings and Emmy awards, The Wire’s route to the pantheon was a long slog. “David Simon had to fight for every season,” says Clarke Peters (Det Lester Freamon). “Nothing was ever guaranteed.”

The story began in 1984, when Simon, then a journalist on the Baltimore Sun, was covering the wiretap-related arrest of a local drug lord, Melvin Williams. Ed Burns, 14 years his senior, was the detective leading the case. As both of them were blunt, abrasive, fiercely intelligent and morally enraged by the status quo, they became friends. After Simon’s 1991 nonfiction masterpiece Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets became a hit NBC show, Homicide: Life on the Street, which ran for seven seasons between 1993 and 1999, both men quit their jobs. Burns became a teacher, and the two collaborated on the 1997 book The Corner: A Year in the Life of An Inner-City Neighbourhood, which examined the futile cruelty of the war on drugs from the other end of the telescope. The Corner became an HBO miniseries, which enabled the 40-year-old Simon to pitch The Wire to HBO’s CEO, Chris Albrecht, and entertainment division president, Carolyn Strauss, as “the anti-cop show, a rebellion of sorts against all the horseshit police procedurals afflicting American television”.

John Doman … played William Rawls Photograph: Dave Kotinsky/Getty Images for Coalition Again
“They were such a unique pair to be writing this show,” says John Doman (deputy commissioner William Rawls). “Their view was from the inside out, not from the outside in. They knew the stories and the characters first-hand. I think The Wire really tore the cover off an American city and showed that, for so many people, the American dream was dead.”

Simon was an authenticity hound who described his writing as “stealing life”. If the people he was writing about didn’t think his work rang true, then he had failed, regardless of what viewers thought. So he drew on individuals, anecdotes and snatches of dialogue that he had picked up as a reporter. Believing that most television writers didn’t have an ear for the streets, nor much interest in the lives of people living in poverty in urban areas, Simon put together a team of crime novelists (Pelecanos, Dennis Lehane and Richard Price) and former colleagues from the Baltimore Sun.

“The final decision was always David’s, but he encouraged debate and wanted to be persuaded that there was a better way to go, if you could argue it successfully,” says Rafael Alvarez, a former reporter who became a staff writer on season two. “In one meeting, David and Ed went at it, over something I don’t recall, for more than an hour-and-a-half, with the rest of us watching like it was Ali v Frazier.”

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Idris Elba as Stringer Bell. Photograph: David Lee/HBO/Blown Deadline/Kobal/Rex/Shutterstock
The show’s casting director, Alexa Fogel, also broke with industry norms, assembling a richly textured cast of stage actors, Britons, musicians, underused veterans, promising newcomers, complete novices and even some of the real cops, gangsters and politicians who inspired certain characters. “The number of African Americans cast on the show was groundbreaking for its time,” says Sonja Sohn, whose Det “Kima” Greggs was the strongest of the handful of female leads in The Wire’s very male universe. “I think I played the first black lesbian on television. The Wire ushered in a new interest in African American stories.”

Simon encouraged his writers and actors to conduct field research. “Wendell Pierce [Det Bunk Moreland], Dominic West [Det Jimmy McNulty] and myself went out on some ride-alongs with Baltimore cops,” remembers Doman. “The cops were so blase. We went to the hospital, and one guy had been shot 13 times. The cops were standing around drinking coffee. It was another day at the office for these guys, but our eyes were popping out of our heads.”

Simon’s attention to detail could be exhausting, but it was all in the service of telling the truth. “David was always there, making sure everything was done right,” says Faison. “People in Baltimore were very passionate about this show. It put them on a stage where they could be seen. Everyone who came up to me said: ‘Good for you guys. Ain’t that the truth.’”

As for the viewers, Simon wrote in his foreword to Alvarez’s 2010 book about the show The Wire: Truth Be Told: “The first thing we had to do was teach folks to watch television in a different way.” The Wire’s novelistic ambition messed with standard rhythms of television, interleaving drama with the “anti-drama” of everyday life. It dared to slow down and stretch out, demanding unusual patience and attention from viewers. “It went way beyond mere entertainment,” says Aidan Gillen (local politician, Tommy Carcetti). “It dealt with issues that no other shows would be interested in dealing with. It didn’t compromise in any areas. To get it, you had to watch and listen, and there was a risk that people might not have bothered, but they did.”

attracting a mostly black fanbase of people who saw their lives reflected in the show: Doman remembers being approached by cops who would say: “I work for an a------ just like you!”

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Sonja Sohn as ‘Kima’ Greggs. Photograph: Allstar/HBO
It was with season two, which looked at “the death of labour”, that Simon made clear his intention to “build a city”. Otherwise, he told Burns, “we truly are doing just a cop show”. He wanted to show the connecting thread – the wire – that ran between seemingly different organisations and the people who worked in them. Alvarez believes that if Simon hadn’t succeeded in pitching The Wire, the themes driving the five seasons might instead have inspired five books. Whether he was exploring police departments, drug cartels, labour unions, the school system, newspapers or city hall, Simon was interested in how the machine worked, or failed to work. If he could explain Baltimore, then he could explain the US.

“One of the problems here in the US is that we try to deal with the solution without understanding the why,” says Whitlock. “I always felt that The Wire explained to you the why. It said we’re gonna take it real slow, go deep and show you the whole landscape.”

Isiah Whitlock Jr … AKA Clay Davis Photograph: Maarten de Boer/Getty Images Portrait
For viewers who embraced the first season as a gritty crime drama with a predominantly black cast, however, the pivot in season two to the travails of white dockworkers was a jolt, even as it pulled in new viewers. “I thought: ‘What the f--- is this? What happened to our drugs?’” says Peters. “For me, it was a way of saying: this isn’t about you. This is about the city of Baltimore. It was necessary.”

Season three’s plot strand about Carcetti’s bid to become mayor of Baltimore even confounded some of the writers. Pelecanos, who lived in Washington DC, found politics “f---ing boring”, but came around when he saw the results. Sooner or later, everyone learned to trust Simon’s vision.

Over time, the cast and the crew of The Wire became a tight-knit family. “I had a rough time during the first season,” says Sohn. “The guys who supported me through that remain my brothers today.”

The younger actors developed a reputation for h----raising. Gillen remembers Simon warning him to “make sure and tape bail money to your person” before hitting the town with certain cast members. Older actors migrated towards the calmer climate at Peters’ house, a bohemian salon that became known as “the academy”. Meanwhile, HBO established outreach programmes to give something back to the city. “Because of our celebrity, some hard-heads who might want to sling crack or sling a bullet in your direction all of a sudden become little kids, and you have a window to touch their humanity,” says Peters. “We became actors on a mission because we had met the characters in the machine of Baltimore.”

Aidan Gillen … breakout role. Photograph: Vittorio Zunino Celotto/Getty Images
A decade later, The Wire’s legacy is unimpeachable. It established Simon as one of TV’s great auteurs: he is currently working with Pelecanos on season two of his latest HBO show, The Deuce. It transformed the careers of several actors, notably West, Gillen, Idris Elba and Michael B Jordan. “I thought, at the time, that nobody was paying much attention,” says Whitlock. “More people recognise me from the show than they ever did. I run into people who have just seen it and they want to talk to me about it. I have to tell them it was 10 years ago. You move on. But I’m very proud to have been a part of it.”

It left its mark on the city, too. Sohn stayed in Baltimore to build on The Wire’s outreach work and directed Baltimore Rising, an HBO documentary about tensions between police and activists after the killing of Freddie Gray in 2015. “I believe that, although hope dies every day on the streets of Baltimore, Chicago, Afghanistan or wherever, hope lives in these very same places,” she says.

What’s more, The Wire rewrote the rules of television drama with regard to tone, subject matter and narrative scope. The show that was once a tough sell is now both a benchmark of quality and a social document that is taught in universities. “When I saw the conversation that was initiated by The Wire, in all walks of life, it made me feel that people don’t want to be dumbed down,” says Peters. “They want something that’s going to challenge their intellect, make them feel alive, give them issues to debate. I didn’t see the whole series until about five years ago. I sat down and binged and said: ‘Oh my God, is that what I was a part of? Thank you, Lord.’”

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Wendell Pierce and Michael Kenneth Williams in season four, seen by many as the show’s high point. Photograph: Allstar/HBO
“The Wire deals with every element of society, from the lowest of the low to the highest of the high,” says Faison. “Sometimes the ‘good’ people are not so good and sometimes the ‘bad’ people are striving to be good. It was something a great deal of people could identify with. We never pulled back. We met everything head on and dealt with the truth.”

That fundamental truth, which explains why The Wire illuminates the era of Trump and Black Lives Matter just as it spoke to Hurricane Katrina and the financial crisis, was best summed up by Simon in a 2007 interview with Nick Hornby. “This is part of the country you have made,” he said. “This, too, is who we are and what we have built. Think again, MFers.”
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https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-...merican-dream-was-dead?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

icecube · Mar 10, 2018

Mar 10, 2018
New season??

Vahn · Mar 10, 2018

Mar 10, 2018

icecube said

New season??
Click to expand...

man what lol

where did u get that from?

DKC · Mar 10, 2018

Mar 10, 2018
Currently rewatching, almost done with season 3. It's my third time all the way through and man there's still so much to pick up on even the third time. It was the fourth time I'd seen season 1/2 and even in those seasons there was still subtext I missed.

It's also probably cuz I'm older and understand the society/politics/the world/etc. a bit more (all the other times I watched it I was 17-22) but man, this show has unlimited replay value.

1999 · Mar 10, 2018

Mar 10, 2018

Big Cuntry said

Currently rewatching, almost done with season 3. It's my third time all the way through and man there's still so much to pick up on even the third time. It was the fourth time I'd seen season 1/2 and even in those seasons there was still subtext I missed.

It's also probably cuz I'm older and understand the society/politics/the world/etc. a bit more (all the other times I watched it I was 17-22) but man, this show has unlimited replay value.
Click to expand...

I need to watch it, still aint seen an episode just use the gifs all the time

DKC · Mar 10, 2018

Mar 10, 2018

Tyler said

I need to watch it, still aint seen an episode just use the gifs all the time

Click to expand...

Drop any other trash show you're watching right now for it.

RG9 · Mar 10, 2018

Mar 10, 2018
I’ve heard little about the show but seen nothing but good things

Might be the next show on my list

Mikey · Mar 10, 2018

Mar 10, 2018

Big Cuntry said

Drop any other trash show you're watching right now for it.
Click to expand...

Finishing the final 2 episodes of The Wire tomorow.

My favourite show of all time easily. Love the show lol

The amazing thing about the show is how they kept replacing great characters after each series especially after season 3.

1999 · Mar 10, 2018

Mar 10, 2018

Big Cuntry said

Drop any other trash show you're watching right now for it.
Click to expand...

Mikey said

Finishing the final 2 episodes of The Wire tomorow.

My favourite show of all time easily. Love the show lol

The amazing thing about the show is how they kept replacing great characters after each series especially after season 3.
Click to expand...

I don't watch many tv shows the last tv show I watched was like Breaking Bad in 2016. I have a problem where I have to keep watching it and my life falls apart lol

icecube · Mar 11, 2018

Mar 11, 2018

Vahn said

man what lol

where did u get that from?
Click to expand...

I didn't read s---

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