I’ll mostly co-sign @dogsarecool’s statement, although it’s been over a decade since I watched the show. I suppose the one issue I had with the show is that it starts by centering a white character when it doesn’t quite fit with the show’s themes. McNulty should have been a side character for season one, with Kima or Bunk being the lead. Also, the minimizing of Prezbo’s killing of a black officer never sat right with me, even though it leads to a very strong season 4.
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I would have loved having Bunk as the lead for Season One, but overall I quite like the arc of McNulty through the show as a whole and I don’t know if it would have worked as well as it did if he hadn’t gotten plenty of setup in S1.
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I feel like Prezbo’s killing of an officer, and all the other shit that he gets into, goes into the ‘protect your own’ mentality of Police. It’s presented as just a fact of the people who work there, instead of critique.
You see that in episode 3 with the commander protecting his people for going in the projects and causing trouble.
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That’s true, but it felt like it didn’t affect Prezbo much outside of fucking up at his job. Also, there wasn’t any portrayal of the trauma it caused the dead officer’s family. It felt out of step with how the show portrays the rippling effects of trauma in the community.
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Yeah. It felt very different about how the cast rallied around Kima’s shooting in season 1. We saw how her loved ones reacted, how the police reacted, and of course… One of the GREATEST gifs of all time:
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By the way, if ya’ll didn’t know, The Wire did a bunch of origin shorts that weren’t featured in the show:
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Especially when you’re the son-in-law of a very high-ranking cop! Prezbo should have never been a cop and his story to me is pretty much the story of a well-meaning chronic fuckup in the wrong job who keeps getting protected even when he doesn’t deserve it. Being a teacher was way more in his lane.
edit: y’all wanna hear the hottest “woke hot take” i’ve ever heard, re: the wire, which I heard in real life once?
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Yes plz…
Is it that Season 2 is the best season? Because that’s true, actually.
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The Wire is bad/problematic because it depicts black people as criminals, and anyway David Simon is white and characters say the n word a lot
(I would like to make it clear that this is NOT my hot take, just one that I once heard IRL)
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Austinwalkertakesobad dot jpeg
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The show isn’t without its faults, but I feel as though its great use of themes (along with everything else that’s stellar about it) really helps to keep The Wire relevant. Like, I’m from Detroit, and every major theme in the show can be directly paralleled to what’s going on in my city (and pretty much any major US city, I imagine).
S1: Folks turn to crime because the job market and the lack of any decent safety net has failed them.
S2: The auto industry is a husk of what it once was, and despite the unions’ best efforts, companies like GM will still lay off 2,500 workers in a single day (local economies be damned)
S3: The backroom deals you see Clay and String make are the foundation of Detroit’s recent revival, with developers chomping at the bit to buy up Downtown/Midtown real estate for Condos residents can’t afford.
S4: Look up anything about Detroit Public Schools and the board who runs it, and you’ll see why The Wire is especially relevant here.
S5: Our local press is frequently desperate to take back its former glory, chasing vapid poverty/perseverance porn stories while, at the same time, offering little to no critical analysis of the fact that almost all of downtown – including its workforce – is more or less owned by a single person.
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I’ve always thought about how they could do a sixth season of The Wire set in modern times, exploring past characters and new characters in the years after the events of the first 5 seasons.
Simon apparently had this idea for the sixth season:
Considering the ratings hole The Wire fell into during season five, David Simon surely knew that, like fighting the drug war, holding out hope for a sixth season would have been an exercise in futility. But had The Wire been given a sixth season, Simon thought the exploding Latino population in Southeast Baltimore would have been the subject. According to Simon, the topic would have been directly in The Wire ’s wheelhouse, since “immigration is this incredibly potent source of friction and ideology, and maybe always has been in American life.” But the time it would have taken for Simon’s team to research immigration, combined with the low ratings, more or less buried the idea.
Seems like with our current events, that’d be an interesting topic to explore now.
Plus I wanna see what a Slim Charles run crime organization looks like, lol Lowkey one of my favorite characters.
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According to All the Pieces Matter: The Inside Story of The Wire (which is a very good book that I recommended) it is spelled Sheeeeeeeee-it. Always with 9 e’s.
The Wire half made me afraid to visit Baltimore, which was a total mistake. Baltimore is a wonderful city, with great food, great places to just hang, a super accepting music scene and great stories.
I tried re-watching it with my SO too, and they could not get into it. I still think it rewards the patient, and my response to the theme song is almost pavlovian, but the initial focus on McNulty and the police is a hard place to start. My SO didn’t like anything special was going on there, and felt a fundamental discomfort with the colonial/fascist power dynamic from the start. Which I think is good because that’s really a place Simon wants you to go, but maybe not so soon? Part of me wants to start again with S4 or S5, because I think those showcase the show’s power better, but I’m not sure they work without knowing the history.
So, I still love it, but I think that it’s fallen behind a little bit, in how newer shows have developed ways to hook the viewer on the procedural grind that the Wire S1 depends on better.
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The Wire’s pacing would not fly in this era, which is not a condemnation of the show, just a fact. It IS hard to get into. Each season, it’s hard to get a feel for what it’s going to do, and at least for me, each season I had a knee-jerk reaction to it’s upending of its own status quo, with which I had grown so comfortable. And yet, by the end of each season, I was terribly sad to see those arcs end, those units close up, those corners shut down, and those characters leave. It has an uncanny sense of place that most shows never even attempt to capture.
I watched it a year after it ended, and loved it deeply then. I watched it again with my partner two years ago, my politics more radical and more finely-developed, and only felt more passionately for it. Best of all? I came around on season 2, seeing it now as one of the series’ best seasons. A true sign of maturation (on my part) and timelessness (on the show’s), IMO
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I’ve been re-watching it in fits and starts over the past few months, and I’m currently a few episodes into Season 3. It’s still largely a masterpiece. The themes that it works with, and the amazing character work is just not something you see in TV at all. It’s messy, uncomfortable, and unflinching in its depiction of the failings of the American drug war, and the lives around it. As someone previously said in this thread, so much of it is based off real life occurrences in Baltimore, and it shows. The characters and situations feel real, because they are reality.
It’s also a really slow burn. I think it’s necessary for it to take its time, and part of what makes it so great is that it lets each storyline and character breathe. But it’s been the big barrier to my partner getting into it. And after so many shows nowadays really just go for being violent, crass, and grim, just for the sake of being so, it’s been a hard sell to her that The Wire isn’t saying and showing what it does for just pure shock value, but because the the story and themes that it explores really can’t be explored without it (the no lines except ‘Fuck’ and ‘Motherfuck’ with McNulty and Bunk scene notwithstanding).
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I love The Wire and think that it still does hold up today, though I say that as someone who didn’t watch the series for the first time until about 5 years ago. It did such a good job at humanizing so many characters. Bubbles in particular stands out to me, because he was a good person and seemed to want to get clean at points, but couldn’t get the addiction demon off his back and you see the continual loss and pain he goes through because of it. That really struck a chord with me.
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In my own mind, The Wire does hold up exceptionally well and I still think about it on a daily basis and I don’t think many other shows have risen to touch how it deals with such complicated but relevant themes in such an anti-televisual style. The Wire isn’t sentimental, and characters that are overly idealistic ultimately get grinded up by the system, it’s this idea that one person can’t hope to make a difference next to the deep seated systems government and order that have been in place for decades. I guess shows like Game of Thrones have done the same thing (at least in it’s earlier seasons) to popular acclaim, but as it winds up it’s getting a bit more formulaic and safer.
The only thing that comes close to The Wire is probably Treme, in which David Simon applied the same format to New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.
I guess at the time, I always felt Season 5 was a little bit of a let down, but now… with the way that journalism is under attack and the ways in which gross lies are being flung about by the highest offices of the land.
Maybe it’s time for another rewatch…
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Yes, it does hold up! Its critical acclaim is well deserved.
