Welcome to The Wire Rewatch Project. This is a blog whose primary purpose will be the review and discussion of every last episode of all five seasons of HBO's acclaimed and immortal drama The Wire.
With a five-season run stretching from 2002-2008, The Wire existed for the majority of its run as something of a stepchild to HBO's more visible flagship dramas, particularly the Emmy-obliterating The Sopranos, which was in its third season and in the middle of its stride when The Wire premiered, and the delicately ambitious Six Feet Under, which still had that new-drama smell. Those shows, along with many of the others that HBO produced and aired in timeframes that overlapped with The Wire, including Sex and the City, Deadwood, and Rome, were all good television shows. They deserved their ratings, their attention, and their awards.
The Wire always seemed to inhabit a different plane of existence. It didn't engage its viewers with the immediacy of The Sopranos, it didn't bring heart-wrenching moments of drama and interpersonal conflict in the manner of Six Feet Under, it didn't bring the soliloquies of Deadwood, nor the sumptuousness of Rome. When the words used to describe it were "Gritty" and "Realistic" - well, those words were also used to describe FX's The Shield (though I question the judgment anyone that would call that particular show "Realistic" with a straight face), which was more visceral, more in line with familiar cop show tropes, and which used its own urban wasteland more as a vehicle with which to expose its characters (though, to be fair, The Shield was a good show, and as an artistic exploration of the Anti-Hero, it's surprisingly successful). The Wire had its own urban wasteland to explore, but as the show progressed, it became more and more apparent that the wasteland itself was the point. Though its characters were memorable, their purposes were fluid, almost interchangeable. The subject went far beyond what they encountered on a day-to-day basis.
America was the subject. Baltimore was the canvas. The drug trade, and society's war on it, were two prominent colors of the paint.
When it came to the show's ratings, such lofty ambition didn't seem to help. Neither did the show's relentlessly serial nature (miss a couple of episodes, and you'd pretty much be helplessly lost for the season, even though the "Previously On..." segments were well-done), the timeslot that saw it in competition with Desperate Housewives (whose inevitable victory says more about us as a culture than we'd probably like to admit), its predominantly black characters, or its extensive use of slang (many a viewer reportedly needed to turn the subtitles on in order to understand what was being said when the drug dealers spoke to one another). For the duration of its run, The Wire struggled mightily to find an audience. It was faced with the prospect of cancellation after its third season, and only survived because it was relatively inexpensive to produce, it over-performed against its ratings in DVD sales, and to one degree or another, because the higher-ups at HBO recognized that something very interesting was happening with the show. The audience that it did find was passionate and hooked. Though it went almost completely unrecognized at awards season, TV critics were already calling it "The best show ever made."
The best art is, of course, vindicated over time. I've yet to mention a show that I felt was in any way poor, and the general consensus probably agrees, but show me a show that I've brought up that hasn't faded considerably since the end of its run, and I'll show you one set in Baltimore. No doubt The Sopranos is worthy of study in film and drama classes, but The Wire is being taught at Harvard, Duke, and elsewhere. In Sociology classes. Discussions on the show don't seem to resemble discussion of a television show at all.
In many ways, The Wire feels more like classic literature than a TV show.
Is that taking things too far? Perhaps. Calling it literature sets the bar very high. It's one thing to say that something is better than Bones (a show I do enjoy, for what it's worth), another thing entirely to start comparing it to Shakespeare. Or Dante. Or Faulkner.
Or. You know. Dickens.
On that level of discussion, I'll be the first to admit that my own qualifications are slim to none. It's not that I'm utterly ignorant of that plane, just that as something of an Entertainment Omnivore, I'm more likely to have a book by George R. R. Martin or Nick Hornby in hand than to be examining the deeper and more challenging stuff day in and day out. Like Hornby's character Rob from High Fidelity, I've read books, and I think I've understood them, but my tastes tend toward entertainment. As such, you'll see little mention of literature, however it may apply, in this discussion. It's not that I'd say they're better, just that I'm more likely to engage on the level of Scott Lynch than on that of Aristotle, more likely to have Sara Bareilles on in the background than Beethoven, more intrigued by Felicia Day than by Helen of Troy. That's my way of saying that I like to think that I do have taste, to the degree to which one can in an era that consists largely of the entertainment equivalent to fast food, and that my appreciation of The Wire comes from that taste being stimulated in a way that I didn't know was possible on television, and that I haven't seen anything before or since that engaged me, from the television screen, in that way.
A DVD set of the complete series, I think would be at home on any bookshelf of classic literature, the contents of which can almost always be looked upon with as much critique as appreciation. The Wire will live on, I think, long after all of us are gone, both in the literal sense of us as individual people and in the more figurative context of our civilization. Future civilizations will study ours, I daresay, and if they have any sense, I suspect that The Wire will feature somewhere in that syllabus.
Why do this? Because I feel the desire to have my say on the show, and to ensure that the details of its existence, to me as a random viewer, aren't lost.
Greg Shaffer
July 8, 2010
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