Third in David Simon's brutal and gritty Baltimore version of the Law-and-Order franchise, after Homicide (all seasons out on DVD, though perhaps not with the NYC crossover episodes) and the drop-dead searing mini-series The Corner (available on DVD and HBO sometimes repeats it On Demand). Simon explains, in Q & As on the HBO Web site posted after Season #2, such quotes hereafter referred to as "Simon Says", that I'll re-post excerpts here as who knows how long HBO will retain the comments: "Ed Burns and I wrote The Corner together. That book is a subtle argument against the drug war. But we both felt that since the book was for the most part a microcosm of that war in the tale of a single open-air drug market, there was more to be said about the nature of the disconnect between law enforcement and the drug culture. And we felt that this could be accomplished through a narrative like The Wire. The show also owes a debt to Richard Price's magnificent Dempsey books, and Clockers in particular, which first demonstrated the narrative power of a split-POV between police and their targets."
This is the Best Novel on Television Simon Says: "The show is crafted as a visual novel; most of episodic television, even when its very good, is crafted as a series of short stories. It was initially hard convincing HBO that we could do a "cop show" that would be distinctly different from network fare, cop shows being the storytelling backyard of the other networks. They needed to see several scripts and then they needed to get a sense that the show would build as the episodes progressed, which is kind of what happens when people pick up a book and read it, chapter by chapter. . . You have to consider that the nature of a novelistic television show is that each chapter builds on the previous, so that the pace accelerates. That means that the first episodes of any season are much like the early chapters of a long narrative. They set the stage, introduce characters and begin the plotting that will result, hopefully, in the payoff. Tellingly, the first episodes of first season were a revelation not only for viewers, but for HBO as well. [Simon added a year later: It took Ed Burns and myself more than a year to come up with the first three scripts and then rework them to the satisfaction of Carolyn Strauss and Chris Albrecht at HBO.] Trained to watch episodic television, many people were stunned to find that the show was deliberately pacing itself much more slowly and intricately. Some people were bored, but others were drawn in. The moment when I knew we'd be alright was when Chris Albrecht, then the head of programming for HBO, said he was glad that each episode was getting better. That was a good sign, he said. To me, they were all good episodes in that they were progressing the single story exactly in the manner intended, but Chris's impression was important. Many people pick up a book and read it to conclusion with the same sense that each successive chapter leaves the reader more involved and more committed to finishing."
Simon Says on who he is writing for:
The key to following the story is conceptualizing corrupt, warring bureaucracies, The Law and The Out-Laws, with the focus on the pressures on middle management on all sides; for the second season add the waterfront and the drug wholesalers, for the fifth add the newspapers. It is particularly trenchant about the blind eye of the FBI post 9/11. Simon Says: "But I can only add that we are not selling hope, or audience gratification, or cheap victories with this show. The Wire is making an argument about what institutions - bureaucracies, criminal enterprises, the cultures of addiction, raw capitalism even - do to individuals. It is not designed purely as an entertainment. It is, I'm afraid, a somewhat angry show." He reiterated a year later: "Since day one, this show has been about what institutions do to the individuals who serve them or are supposed to be served by them."
Each episode does take two+ screenings to understand, let alone trying to start watching not from the beginning of the series, such that Slate provided a weekly critical guide to help get you to watch, with commentary by TV writer David Mills, journalist/author Alex Kotlowitz and a filmmaker of Hoop Dreams, among other resources. The opening quotes, provided in the HBO online episode summaries so I haven't been always repeating them here, are pithily important guides to each episode's theme.
For The Wire Rap That’s Pure Baltimore By Jon Caramanica in The New York Times, September 10, 2006 (this may be more than a fair use):
I initially categorized it as a hunkfest (and funny connection between the resident hunks of The Wire and Deadwood) but that turned out to be just an added bonus. And there's a bunch of hunky formerly dead cons from Oz resurrected as complicated cops. But you have to try not to fall too much in love with any one character, as Simon Says: "On this show, the characters -- how they are presented, what they do, what becomes of them -- are there to serve the story we are trying to tell. The story does not serve the characters; if we are anything more than hacks making a TV show, it has to be the other way around." He continues: "But nothing lasts forever, and if it does, it usually lasts to diminishing results."
By Chapter 2 - The Detail already got his shirt off. As Simon Said two years later: "As to love/sex scenes, they come when the story dictates and are not gratuitous, or at least we hope they aren't. And one thing that viewers never consider: Some actors/actresses are reluctant to work undressed. Won't say who, but it is something to consider above and beyond the intentions of the writers." Davis corrects that when "Prez", "Herc" and "Carver" are drinking beer and arguing about the case, "American Woman" is playing by the Guess Who (from their 1970 album of the same name). Jeremiah let me know that while "McNulty" is drinking in his car, "Love is Strange" by Mickey & Sylvia plays.
Chapter 3 - The Buys "McNulty" was in bed with a woman -- yet another hard-driving, ambitious Jewish woman lawyer on TV "Rhonda Pearlman" (played by Deirdre Lovejoy) who I discuss elsewhere in the context of Critical Guide to Jewish Women on TV but, unusually, she's earthy and vulnerable below the rumpled toughness -- foreshadowed by her listening to Lucinda Williams sing "2-Kool 2 Be 4-Gotten" (from Car Wheels on a Gravel Road which was on my Best of '98).
In Chapter 4 - Old Cases by Simon and Burns his supervisor agrees: It's not Jimmy's fault. Jimmy is addicted to himself. It's a fuckin' tragedy. He's come to believe he's always the smartest fuck in the room. It makes him an asshole but it's also what makes him good po-lice, while the lover of his lesbian partner's response to his attempts at off-hours camaraderie for doing genuine police work together amidst the corruption and apathy is That's one confused white man out there! (Terrific choice of Nina Simone's "Sugar in My Bowl" leading into the scene.)
In Chapter 5 - The Pager, by Burns and Simon, his police skills are paying off and being resentfully recognized, while his negotiations with his ex-wife for child custody are a total failure. (And there was even relevance to my job at the time: the Judge gives the Deputy Commissioner helpful and accurate fundraising advice: Did you ever think of bringing in private resources to help you? I have a connection at the Abell Foundation.)
In Chapter 6 - The Wire by Simon and Burns, he finally gets his kids for a night --and brings them to the morgue with a drug-dealing CI, because as the Major's spy protests, He's got this fuckin' case in his gut like a cancer. "Wha?" retorts the revenge-seeking higher-up, He doesn't drink any more? A poster on the HBO BB says the jazz piece at the end is "Fleurette Africaine" off of Duke Ellington's Money Jungle. Another poster reports that "Wax Music Box" by Cytoplastik, a local experimental electronic composer, is playing when "Avon," "Stringer" and "Stinkum" walk into the projects.
Chapter 7 - One Arrest, story by Simon & Burns, teleplay by Alvarez, not only do we see him drunk with his partner (with a memorably metaphorically vulgar conversation about their relationship), but when he sobers up, he returns for sympathy to the arms of the attorney: I love this fuckin' job but they're gonna do me. On the HBO forums "MichaelLittle" says the song playing when Stinkum is in the car and the cops are on his trail is "Analyze" by Sharpshooters.
In Chapter 8 - Lessons written by Simon from a story by Simon and Burns, he uses his kids in a game of "I Spy" on the #2 drug dealer (to the tune playing in the market of The Tokens' popularized version of "The Lion Sleeps Tonight" according to the Alvarez book) then pushes his partner into a drunken accusation of You're no good for people, Jimmy. Damn, everyone around you, Christ. . . A line from “Omar” in this episode entered the popular culture lexicon: You come at the king, you best not miss. In 2012, my husband heard this quoted during a sports broadcast.
In Chapter 9 - Game Day by Simon and Burns, he's hectored his fellow cops into following the constitutional rules for the wire tap and caring about bringing down the elusive kingpin (Stupid criminals make stupid cops. I'm proud to follow this guy.) -- then resists running after an opportunity to see him at his sponsored basketball game - We get him by the voice alone or else we don't get him -- and cheats on the wire tap log. Thanks to fan Jeremiah who identified "Rock the Nation" by Michael Franti and Spearhead from Stay Human on "Avon"s car radio when the cops are tailing him after the game on a merry innocent chase.
In Chapter 10 - The Cost by Simon and Burns, his wife hauls him into court to keep him from endangering the kids, and he convinces her he still loves her-- and is only, No. Yes. A little continuing the affair with the attorney that she had a detective follow him to discover. HBO BB poster methvschef thinks that "Hater Players-Blackstar" by Talib Kwelli & Mos Def is playing when "Kima" approaches her doom.
In Chapter 11 - The Hunt, it's his bureaucratic enemy who gets him through a guilt-ridden Post-Traumatic Stress-- You are a gaping asshole, but believe it or not, not everything is about you. --and he lashes out at ambitious lawyers: Everybody's got a fuckin' future. -- except him.
In the penultimate of the season Chapter 12 - Cleaning Up, story by Simon & Burns, teleplay by George Pelecanos, he regrets pushing the case: It was just a way for me to show how smart I was. The Lt. that he sparked says into his face: You can stand there dripping with liquor smell and self-pity if you got a mind to, but this case, it means something. Now.
HBO slyly promoted the second season as: "A new case begins. . ." with an image of a body floating in the harbor. (USA pretty much stole most of the plot from for its Traffic mini-series, more than from the BBC series or Soderbergh movie, though with less cynicism.) Simon Says: "The waterfront is, to us, cinematically beautiful. Those cranes are gothic. And we were looking for a world that would represent for the working-class in Baltimore. We could have done the steel mills, but they are bankrupt, or the GM plant, or some other union-wage industry, but the port felt right." A year later he reflected on the second season: "When we did the port story, we used the actual CSX grain pier as a location and indeed, that facility has been idle since it was damaged several years ago. Traditionally, idle piers around the outer and inner harbors of Baltimore have been targeted for residential/commercial development for the last two decades. When we began filming the second season, the CSX pier was not so targeted, and our writing that the longshoremen were concerned that if it wasn't repaired, the developers would get to it -- that was fiction. Except that by the time we finished filming, a group of developers had proposed condos for the grain pier. Last time I went by there it was fenced off for the redevelopment and, alas, 'you'll never see another grain ship in Bawlmer, my friend.' Life imitating art, I suppose." (See how the shipping business has gone to China in the documentary Manufactured Landscapes). The Alvarez book identifies that in an episode where "Frank Sobotka" is worried about a lost container of contraband that's 1972's "Brandy (You're A Fine Girl) by Looking Glass "playing on a beat-up radio."
The mix of corruption, good intentions, class and ethnic and racial tensions are again intimately intertwined in Chapter 14 - Ebb Tide by Simon and Burns; "McNulty" takes a bribe, but is then irresistibly drawn into being a good cop on a homicide even when his bureaucrat-oozing cohort snorts that Fuckin' McNulty is the 'Prince of Tides' marooned out in waterfront patrol - It's all about self-preservation, Jimmy -- something you haven't learned, -- as he works meticulously for hours to plot jurisdictional "murder po-lice" revenge on the Colonel who demoted him. Director Ed Bianchi beautifully used sounds as sonic metaphors for how people living in the same city occupy different perceived spaces -- from the bluesy bar band (The Nighthawks doing the ironically significant "Sixteen Tons" in a longshoremen's hang-out to the Polish kid listening to the old punk of The Stooges' "Search and Destroy" (from Raw Power, according to folks on the HBO BB) to when a young punk Baltimore drug dealer is sent out-of-town for the first time and freaks because he can't understand why he can't get his usual radio stations and is completely alienated by listening to A Prairie Home Companion on Philly public radio.
"McNulty" creates "Collateral Damage" even among his friends in Chapter 15 by Simon and Burns, as he sets different agencies at war with each other, all unaware of how the criminals (new ones and the ones from last season) are brutally dealing with the homicides themselves. The Deputy fumes: I happen to know my man in the marine unit intimately and I know he is the most swollen asshole in American law enforcement. Even his ex-partner says, You're not the run-of-the-mill asshole, Jimmy, you're a special asshole and fumes He's dead to us as his machinations saddle them with seemingly unsolvable homicides. As Lyle Lovett's "Goodbye to Carolina" (from I Love Everybody) plays in the background, his lawyer lover complains: Last night you were too drunk to fuck. Today you're too hung-over. What's the most useless thing on a woman? A drunken Irishman.; so he blithely notes we're good together then shrugs that he'd rather get back with his ex-wife. But the opening quote is his philosophy: They can chew you up, but they gotta spit you out. As to the stereotype of the drunken Irishman, Simon Says in reference to all the various ethnicities on the series: "If you watch this show, you know that every single ethnicity and religion that comprises a modern American city has been in some way insulted and abused by the behavior of one or more characters. The traffickers in the high-rises are black; the drug suppliers this year are Greek and Israeli and Russian/Ukrainian. "McNulty" drinks too much? An Irish-American stereotype perhaps. The malevolent major who misuses his power is Polish-American, and his worst excesses come because of a moment of ridiculous Roman Catholic pride. And "Morris Levy"? Uh oh, someone inform the Anti-Defamation League that the corrupt drug lawyer is decidedly Jewish." An HBO forum poster notes that's Aretha Franklin's "The House That Jack Built" playing in the longshoreman's truck when he's pulled over for a breath test. I wasn't able to catch the jazz that's playing in Avon's room, er, jail cell.
In Chapter 16 - Hot Shots by Simon and Burns, director Elodie Keene leisurely created elegiac images (with so much character-appropriate ambient radio-listening music that I couldn't ID it fast enough, including a lovely cover of "So Fine") as the seed is planted for the old investigative team to be gradually re-round up to facilitate a major's personal, implacable revenge. "McNulty" has been butting in some more - It's got me thinking is all. I worked some things out in my head -- while his ex-partners skewer him that it was that altar boy guilt talking, he mocks, But what do I have to be guilty about? HBO BB posters ID'd "Cisco Kid" by War playing as "Uncle Avon" proves he is in charge, even in jail.
In Chapter 17 - Hard Cases by Simon and Joy Lusco Kecken, Keene focused on the meanings in silent exchanges of looks, between spouses, between bosses and underlings. Most significantly, between the Colonel and "McNulty", such that as the old team is being reunited for internal political purposes - Except McNulty. No McNulty. Nothing that even resembles the son of a bitch. He quits or he drowns. That's the only thing that gets him off the fuckin' boat so help me God." "Gilligan" himself is being uncharacteristically introspective, as he hands over the divorce papers to his wife: Signed and notarized. I don't want to argue about the money. I want to get back together. Ambient music continues its thematic importance. "McNulty" is listening to classic soul music, with songs by the Velvelettes ("He Was Really Saying Something"), Frankie Lymon ("I Promise To Remember"), and Irma Thomas ("Ruler Of My Heart"), as he pursues his old and new case on his own time. His former partner invades the longshoremen's bar by controlling the jukebox, eschewing country music (identified in the Alvarez book as Gram Parsons's "Streets of Baltimore") for a Ray Charles oldie. The cops and the longshoremen are all listening back for the future. Also heard in this chapter: "Magic Carpet Ride" by Steppenwolf and "Your Good Girl's Gonna Go Bad" by Tammy Wynette.
In Chapter 18 - Undertow, by Simon and Burns, the criss-crossed relationships are being revealed -- from the docks to the drug dealers, the port to the prison, with many ironic chuckles on race and bureaucracies. But "McNulty"--My detecting days are over-- is out on his own, even up to NJ, trying to trace his floater-- I kinda feel it's on me to find her people. . . You seen what happens down at the morgue when they can't ID a body? I have. That's Maria Muldaur's "Midnight at the Oasis" on at the pizza parlor where the port policewoman plays her CI. Folks on the HBO BB report that the song playing during rooftop surveillance is "The Hand that Rocks the Cradle" by Akrobatik from the album Balance.
The Chapter 19 - The Prologue, by Simon and Burns, is in effect the end of Season #1 as loose ends from the first case are literally tied up. "McNulty" delivers his star witness to court, gives up on finding his floater's family for a funeral (Fuck it. Let her go. Just a way to pretend I was still a murder po-lice.), reconciles himself to "retirement" out on the boat (On a good day I catch crabs and count seagulls.), and moderates his drinking to have a reconciliation date with his wife (And fucking the waitress? she cynically suggests. I don't do much of that anymore either, he claims). So, that's everything that pissed you off -- the drinking, the women, the work. I want another chance. -- earning him just a fuck for the road before she kicks him out of the house again. Is that it for him on the case now that his colleagues are just beginning to figure out how to untangle the criminal connections around the docks? This chapter has cameos that Simon Says: "Also Richard Price, who wrote Clockers, Samaritan, The Wanderers, and other notable novels and screenplays, was in the prison library when Gatsby was discussed. That was homage. For those of you who have read Clockers, it is clear that this show owes a debt to that remarkable book."
In Chapter 20 - Backwash, by Simon and Alvarez, director Thomas J. Wright (new to this series, but not to network dramas), plays on a continuing visual theme of characters sitting outside on the stoops of their different Baltimore houses, enjoying their very different views and neighborhood lives. There's "McNulty" still trying with his ex-wife and kids (he's just a stubborn kind of fella, after all), but she says definitively that she just wants to be friends: "I can care, but how the hell am I supposed to trust you?" We got country music-turned-gospel at his counterpart's funeral, and "Love Child" by the Supremes on the bar juke-box used as a very funny joke on "Ziggy," about whom Simon Says: "Accents are touch and go. It isn't possible to use an actor pool of Baltimore performers only, so the actors often have only a passing sense of the Bawlmer accent. When we can do it, we do. James Ransone who plays "Ziggy" is a Bawlmer boy and we encouraged him to use the accent. He has, delightfully. I've known twenty characters like him, and indeed his character is based very loosely on a legendary longshoreman named Pinkie Bannion, who used to take his duck to the bar and repeatedly expose 'pretty boy' and all else. As they said in Bawlmer about Pinkie: 'That boy ain't right.'"
In the pun-filled Chapter 21 - Duck and Cover, by Simon and Pelecanos, "McNulty" has returned to his roots, doing all the things his suspicious wife thought he wouldn't give up. Drunk, he crashes his car as he sings along to the Pogues' "Transmetropolitan" (as Andrew L. insisted correctly -- from their album Red Roses for Me): "This town has done us dirty/This town has bled us dry/We've been here for a long time/And we'll be here 'til we die/So we'll finish off the leavings/Of blood and glue and beer/And burn this bloody city down/In the summer of the year/Going transmetropolitan." He still manages to bed a waitress. His voice cracks as he confesses, Who am I? Captain Chesapeake? [a reference to a local "Captain Kangaroo" type TV show host] I need to get off that boat. I need a case. If I'm not good for . . . to his ex-partner, who pleads to his boss to get "McNulty" on the multi-tentacled detail. He's a picture postcard of a drunken fuck-up but when he's on a case. . . That's as close to the man comes to being right. You know that "McNulty"s back when he walks in, just as the team agrees that they need a whore to catch a whore, protesting What the fuck did I do? And he easily picks out the john who'll get him his "ticket to the dance": Lying to your wife is easy. It's looking your kid in the eyes that's the hard part. The grin is back! This episode was written by noted D.C. crime novelist George Pelecanos. See the Salon interview with him about his and Simon's novelistic approach to The Wire . And at a CNN interview with Simon that says the he is preparing the plots for a renewed third season.
Chapter 22 - Stray Rounds by Simon weaves all the story lines together in a complex corrupt pattern and "McNulty" is the comic relief. There's an inside joke that he has to trick the Madam that he's from way out of town to get into the brothel, so Dominic West gets to use an imitation of his native English accent and silly Brit slang "Spot on" as the code word for the bust (which he forgets). So Jimmy gets all spiffed up in a suit to pick a prostitute, "Decisions, decisions -- I'll take two," and when they strip him and quickly and efficiently get him off, he protests about his violations of regulations, "There were two of them. I was outnumbered." Mary Wells's classic Motown "You Beat Me To the Punch" was playing in the longshoremen's bar as a comment on "Ziggy's" argument with "Nick".
Chapter 23 - Storm Warnings, by Simon and Burns, opened fittingly with Johnny Cash's "I Walk the Line." McNulty, sober, is in his element in police work, bringing in FBI computer software gimmicks, using his experience out on the contraband-captured police boat to do surveillance, and figure out, innovatively, how to triangulate a text message source for tracing. Will he put other links together that some of his blundering cohorts are missing? That was Joan Jett's cover of Jonathan Richman's "Roadrunner" wryly commenting from "Ziggy's" car radio.
Chapter 24 - Bad Dreams, the penultimate episode of the season (written by Pelecanos and the first one to be directed by noted Spike Lee cinematographer Ernest Dickerson-- with Simon doing a Hitchcockian cameo as a Member of the 4th Estate), had McNulty and his detail, thanks to a FBI mole and what, as the Lt. throws down, "even for a supremely fucked-up police department this takes the prize," just miss tagging the big guys, The Greeks -- though McNulty atypically puts in a PC protest, "Hey, lay-off those Greeks. They invented civilization." (And his partner retorts: "Yeah, and ass-fucking too.") "njmandal" on the HBO BB ID'd: "The two songs at the end of the episode were sung by the late Stelios Kazantzidis. At the restaurant, the song playing was 'To Psomi tis Xenethias (Bread in a Foreign Land).' The song played very loudly at the end is a less well known song from the same album, 'Ena sidero anameno;' it's actually a steamy love song. The artist was a favorite of lower class Greeks and immigrants most of his life although he became more trendy in the 90's. He died last year, unfortunately. A gritty singer who was not glamorous, he sang about workers, immigrants, and failed love. The music would almost certainly be played in a Greek restaurant in the U.S." "Suspire" adds: "Also there appears to be at least two different versions. . .one where the tone isn't quite so dark and he is singing the chorus duet with some chick. It's from his album Palia Laika." The Alvarez book says that one of the Greek songs is "She's Gone, She's Gone" by composer Vassilis Vassiliadis. Simon Says in reference to the Greek cultural references: "George Pelecanos is to be credited with the Greek phrasing. And if you are into it, you should check out some of his earlier D.C. novels which feature a Greek-American protagonist who has some McNulty-like characteristics as well. His later novels aren't as heavy on Greek culture, but they are excellent in their own right. Try The Big Blowdown to start." Considered by AV Club as one of the "essential episodes".
Chapter 25 - Port in a Storm, the Season #2 finale, finds the union reeling -- but all the criminals and the corruption just swirl and eddy on, from the opening and closing that are dialogue-less, finishing to the tune of Steve Earle's "I Feel Alright." (Earle was in Season One as ex-junkie "Waylon"; this is the title song of his album.) The East Side cats are laying down with the West Side dogs, "The Greek" isn't even Greek, and McNulty goes back to flirting with the prosecutor. Simon Says: "I will say that it might help if viewers thought of "The Greek" as more than a specific character. In the second season story, and in the world of The Wire, he represents an elemental force. He is pure capitalism, amoral, utterly rational, and unencumbered by ties to community, nation-state or humanity in general. Regardless of whether we see "The Greek" again or whether the detail catches up to him, can you ever really catch or contain such an elemental force?" Gregg provides that's Baltimore native Joan Jett and the Blackhearts covering Credence Clearwater Revival's "Have You Ever Seen the Rain" (from the album The Hit List) playing at the longshoremen's bar.
Third Season - The rules change. The game stays the same.
From an interview with The Man at HBO:
For season three, Simon will write three episodes, Pelecanos, Price and Ed Burns will write two episodes each, and [Dennis] Lehane, Joy Lusco Kecken and Rafael Alvarez will write one each. "The trick is finding a story that everyone wants to tell a piece of, and still feel connected to the whole," says Simon. "It's like we're building a building, You don't want anyone to feel like, 'Well, I can't control the other floors, but the third floor of this building is really beautiful." He continued later in the year: "We work out the storylines in detail before we begin filming every season. This happens by Ed Burns, George Pelecanos, myself, Bill Zorzi and at times,
Dennis Lehane [podcast interview includes Wire insights] and Richard Price, getting into a small room and annoying each other for many, many hours. That's the heavy lifting of the show, plotwise." He noted: "This season, is, however, an allegory for the tragedy ongoing in Iraq, something that only a few people have picked up on."
Chapter 26 - Time After Time, the season premiere, by Simon and Burns, was filled with delicious ironies -- they have "the wire" all right, but it's not turning anything up, except one talkative drug dealer who "If that idiot worked for us, he'd be a deputy commissioner by now." "McNulty" is less central but he's still resentfully going out on his own sniffing for clues through old files, determined to get the top dealers ("You don't look at what you did before, you do the same shit all over.") When his annoyed colleague complains: "It's you against the world, is it?", he, as usual, protests: "What the fuck did I do?" Other of the cops are aggressively full of themselves, frustratingly chasing dealers in circles while blasting the updated theme from Shaft on their car radios. The notorious public housing towers are intentionally blown up as an impotent reminder of 9/11 -- that we're losing the domestic war on terrorism, against drug dealers who are destroying our cities, as well as recalling The Pruitt Igoe Myth in St. Louis. For my discussion of Rhonda Pearlman as an unstereotypical Jewish woman character on TV in this season. Davis says: The song playing during the opening wiretap sequence is 50 Cent's "In Da Club."
In Chapter 27 - All Due Respect writers Simon and Richard Price (commentary on this episode by the latter on Season 3 DVD) were still ironically laying the groundwork web of relationships, while "McNulty" is doggedly following up on D'Angelo's death--the character who has been the Rosetta Stone throughout the series-- that everyone else wants to call a suicide. HBO BB posters are reporting "Stand Up" by Ludacris played when a rival dealer drives up on the corner and "Atomic Dog" by George Clinton played during the dogfights.
Chapter 28 - Dead Soldiers, teleplay by Dennis Lehane, story by Simon (commentary by the latter on Season 3 DVD) and Lehane, was full of gritty, ironic poetry and funny, brilliant lines from beginning to end. His fellow cops ask "McNulty" where he was: At the library. Yeah at the prison library where he vividly demonstrates that D's death was no suicide, to their protests that We're supposed to be finding less murders not more. But they grudgingly josh that he's "here in spirit" as they pick their next focus to fixate on, and his lesbian colleague moans that I'm turning into McNulty as she recounts her drinking and infidelity to avoid returning home to her partner and baby. That's the Pogues doing "The Body of an American" in tribute both to the dead cop and the late actor/executive producer of the series, Robert F. Colesberry. Simon Says: "If it is not a tradition for the detectives to lay one of their own on a pool table and sing "Body of an American," it should be." (Mikey1962 says we also hear them singing Shane McGowan's "Sally MacLalane".) JThornton 13 on the HBO Forum says that's "In My Life" by DJ Technics playing at the party Cutty went to with Bodie.
In Chapter 29 - Amsterdam, by Simon and Pelecanos perfectly crystallized "McNulty"s problems and brilliance, as both po-lice and a man. According to a fan post on the HBO BB: "The track playing in the background at the party was done by a local Baltimore club producer named DJ Technics". Posters say that another background song was Biggie Smalls doing "My Downfall" from Life After Death, which Jay Z has also sampled and that the song playing in the fancy wheels is "Splash Waterfalls" by Ludacris. Davis says: "In the background of the bar when "McNulty" and "Bunk" are drinking 'Ain't No Mountain High Enough' is playing" (maybe by Marvin Gaye).
Chapter 30 - Straight and True, by Simon and Burns, is the out and out LOL funniest episode of the series. (Simon in an interview with Alan Sespinall in The Newark Star Ledger 8/6/2006: "You can't do a show this dark and not make it bearable (without) the humor.") "McNulty" scores points all around for his dogged po-lice work, then is roundly put down by the classy one-night stand he picks up in front of his ex at the school open house for his kids. An HBO BB poster reports: accompanied by "Stringer", "when "Avon" was throwing his prison clothes out of the window, War's 'Me and Baby Brother' was playing in the background." Davis says: "When "Avon" and "Stringer" are in the club, the song playing is Lloyd Banks' 'On Fire.'"
Chapter 31 - Homecoming, by Alvarez and Simon, had "McNulty" as the keystone in a very complex interplay among the machinations of law and outlaw. First he brags that he'll re-hook up with his one-night stand - What kind of detective would I be if I couldn't find a white woman in Baltimore? But his boss turns down his dogged following of the criminal mastermind - Fuck respect. He ain't right. His new partner wryly notes: With you on the other side of the argument, he'd rather be wrong. . . Not that you'd ever go in back of anyone's back on anything like that. Which of course he does, to his old friend, now a Major looking for innovative ways to deal with drug dealers, who accepts his inside info: You willing to backdoor on your lieutenant like this? You ain't changed Jimmy. It's always about your case. Ironically, "McNulty"s counterpoint has also lost in his efforts to turn the dealers into an organized cartel of businessmen - and the bodies are piling up in Baltimore again, forcing the higher-ups to reluctantly be open to "McNulty"s angle. The virtual lack of music was very significant in this episode- as any other series would have cheapened up the tension with unnecessarily dramatic counterpoint. Davis says: "In Hampsterdam, Jay-Z's 'Dirt Off Your Shoulder' is heard."
Chapter 32 - Backburners, by Simon & Joy Lusco Kecken has "McNulty" in vintage form, as he defends his backdealing against his boss who has gone to great lengths for him: I'd have gone to the devil himself. . .I did it because it had to be done.. His boss confronts him as you piece of shit and he tries ineffectually to justify his actions: I know you went out of your way to get me off that boat. As bosses go you're the best. But "Daniels" is implacable: When the cuffs go on Stringer you need to find a new home. You're done in this unit. Sheryl Crow's "Are You Strong Enough to Be My Man?" is ironically playing on the stereo as the crafty councilman plots his future with his wife and campaign advisor/"McNulty"s lover. He crashes her event in D.C., to the confusion of staffers as to what a Baltimore cop is doing there. He realizes he's out of his element when Jameson Irish whiskey isn't being served and is instead offered Bushmills: That's Protestant whiskey but laughs when the bartender notes the open bar makes the price right. He breezes late back to The Detail, Sorry, I woke up in the wrong town. His female partner wrinkles her nose - You smell like sex. Can't you even take a shower? I was late to work he leers in response. According to posters on the HBO BB, that was LL Cool J's "Head Sprung" playing on the radio of the two hit men. But even "McNulty" is set back on his haunches by "Hampsterdam" -- both for the audacity of creating it without the Bosses' knowledge and how it's turning into a circle of hell.
Chapter 33 - Moral Midgetry, by Simon and Price featured the Big Man - Clarence Clemmons of The E Street Band, perhaps as an HBO in-joke what with bandmate Little Steven being featured in The Sopranos. He played a similar role to Steve Earle's "Waylon" in the first season. "McNulty" was his usual obnoxious fulcrum - crucially moving the action forward for internecine warfare on both the Street and the po-lice, as he confronts "D'Angelo"s "Livia"-like mother about her son's death that only he investigated as a murder: Frankly, no one's gonna do shit about it anyway. I'm not supposed to give a fuck, but I kinda liked your son. All things considered, he was a pretty decent kid. He just got squeezed between the sides. But I was looking for someone who cared about the kid. Whew, he even drew tears out of her! But on a "road trip" with his lesbian partner the cad drolly describes how he arranged infidelities to his ex-wife as lotsa extraditions. I brought back something like 500 fugitives in a five year period and even puts the moves on her. That was Bob Marley's "Buffalo Soldiers" ironically playing at the minimart. An HBO BB poster reports: "DC/Baltimore bluesman Daryl Davis was the first person "McNulty" and "Kima" interviewed on their burner quest. He was the store clerk behind the counter." That almost sounded like Hank Williams's "I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry" playing in the country police station such that McNulty misreads the local cop as a cracker (he points out to "Kima" that her partner is a real asshole -- and she has to act surprised). An HBO BB poster thinks that "Everybody in the Club Gettin Tipsy?" by J-Kwon was playing in the club when Marlo picks up Avon's bait. Davis says: "While "Colvin" and the Deacon are in the billiards parlor, James Brown's 'The Payback' is heard."
Chapter 34 - Slapstick, by Simon and Pelecanos has "McNulty" with all his faults flying. He goes out on a booty call while he has overnight custody of his kids. He's in work on Sunday: No life, no marriage, no kids, no problem. What the fuck else am I going to do? . . .You know something Lester? I do believe that there aren't five swinging dicks in this department who can do what we do. I'm not saying that like all chest out and shit, it's just, you just think about it. There's maybe 3,000 sworn, right? 100 or so are bosses, so not a fucking clue there. A few more hundred are sergeants, lieutenants, most of them want to be bosses one day, so they're just as fucked. Then there's 6 - 700 house cats, you know desk men. In the patrol department there's probably a little bit of talent there, but the way the city is right now that's probably 100 or so guys chasing calls and clearing corners. I mean nobody's nobody's post [?], building nothing right. CID's the same. Catching calls, chasing quick clearances, keeping everything in the shallow end. Who else is there out there can do what we can do with a case? How many are there really?. . . Ed Burns. . . Oh they bring it in, but there's not many. There's not many. We're good at this, Lester. In this town we're as good as it gets. . Fuck, yes, natural po-lice. "Det. Freaman" puts him in his place with a pungent monologue back, including: The job won't make you whole. The job won't save you Jimmy until the next case. It won't fill your ass up. "McNulty" wavers: I don't know. A good case. . . "Freaman" shoots right back: Ends. They all end. . .The next morning it's just you in the room with yourself. "McNulty" ripostes, but stubbornly insists: . .until the next case. . "Freaman" won't let up: . . Hey, a life, Jimmy.. You know what that is? It's the shit that happens while you wait for the moments that never come. "McNulty" also overplays his hand with the lover, cutely asking for a dinner date to expand their relationship. While we learn more about "McNulty"s biography (that he spent a year at Loyola before he dropped out to marry his knocked up girlfriend), it's painfully obvious, with the U.S. Capitol in the background, even as he lamely tries to repeat his braggadocio monologue, that he's not in her class - heck he didn't even bother voting. She as a campaign manager is a CNN junkie; he falls asleep to the History Channel. An HBO BB poster reports that was OutKast playing in "Gerald's" car.
Chapter 35 - Reformation, by Simon and Ed Burns features McNulty in very uncharacteristic introspective mode. His boss is still burning against him - We're all pieces of shit when we're in your way. He ruminates to his partner on the latest relationship that's turned to shit via a special floor in her fancy hotel: Feel like I don't even belong to any world that even fucking matters. . . Some sneering fuck was calling upstairs to give me permission to go get laid. First time in my life I feel like a fucking doormat. Like anyone with any smarts would do something else with his life, like earn money, or get elected. Like I'm just a breathing machine for my fucking dick. I'm serious. I'm the smartest asshole in three districts and she looks at me like I'm some stupid fuck playing some stupid game for stupid penny ante stakes. She fucking looks through me. The episode has a theme of every character who feels like a big fish in one pond getting their comeuppance as a small fish in another pond. The Councilman's wife was reading a crime novel by Dennis Lehane, who has also been writing for the show this season.
Chapter 36 - Middle Ground, by Simon and Pelecanos, was positively Shakespearean - and finally earned the series its first Emmy nomination, for writing. (But Simon really is this pessimistic, Simon disdains the comparison: “It's funny you should say that, because the portrayals in Deadwood are in the Shakespearean model. On The Sopranos, there's an awful lot of Hamlet and Macbeth in “Tony”. But the guys we were stealing from in The Wire are the Greeks. In our heads we're writing a Greek tragedy, but instead of the gods being petulant and jealous Olympians hurling lightning bolts down at our protagonists, it's the Postmodern institutions that are the gods. And they are gods. And no one is bigger.” Amidst breathtaking confrontations among the druglords and political and legal machinations by the law--with a forgiving handshake between McNulty and his boss as they savor what will be a Pyrrhic victory on the wire tap after the judge warned him Jimmy, what's done is done. For your own fucking sake, just let it go., "McNulty" actually Does The Right Thing - his D.C. political operative ex-lover suddenly reappears in his life, but with a quid pro quo proposition as she suggestively fingers the hotel card key while plumping him for info on the Baltimore Police Department. He denies knowing his colleague who initiated Hampsterdam and then actually walks out on her! There was a lot of ambient music playing in backgrounds in many scenes that I couldn't catch or ID. HBO BB posters claim "White Tees" from 'Dem Franchise Boyz was playing when Bubbles was selling white tees. Another poster says that the background to a "McNulty" scene is "Little Bit of Soul" by Music Explosion. On the HBO BB JimKing says that "A Place Nobody Can Find" by Sam & Dave is playing inside the barbershop as "Brother Mouzone" confronts "Avon" about how "Stringer" tried to have him killed.
Chapter 37 - Mission Accomplished, the season finale by Simon and Burns, had characters shaken to the core. (commentary on this episode by Simon and producer Karen L. Thorson on third season DVD) "McNulty" is practically in shock over "Stringer's" body: I caught him on the wire. And he doesn't fuckin' know it. He later admits to his old partner: I'm tired. The wheels are turning in his head as he re-evaluates his life --even though he covers up for his lesbian partner as she screws around like he always did. He looks up a Port Authority cop/single mother he had flirted with last season. I was in my old district tonight. Which is where I used to feel pretty good I think, when I wasn't so angry there anyway. . . I finished something today. (A case? she asks.) More that that. It's like everything I poured into a glass came out the bottom and I just kept pouring like the thing had a hole in it, y'know. Maybe things that make me right for this job made me wrong for everything else. (She invites him in for a drink.) Not tonight. But if it's not too late I wouldn't mind meeting your kids. "Daniels" offers him the possibility of continuing to work for him on The Detail if he can trust him. "McNulty" surprisingly demurs: It's better for me if I do something else. It's not you, it's me. The Western [District] feels like home. We last see him happily in uniform walking as a beat cop and joshing with the local residents -- exactly what the community had said in the previous episode they felt makes for good policing. Ironically, his boss's promotion is over that district. I've read mention that Snoop Dogg's "Drop It Like It's Hot" is heard. The closing song is Solomon Burke doing Van Morrison's "Fast Train" from Don't Give Up on Me (which made my Best of 2002).
But how is it, once again, that The Wire didn’t make EVERY critic’s Best of 2006 list? Here’s one at least: TV Guide 12/18/2006 – Matt Roush: “HBO’s devastating urban epic of Baltimore is the opposite of a standard TV crime drama (of which there are too many). More like literature in its realism depth and honesty, The Wire reveals breathtaking flaws in city politics, law enforcement, and, this year, the school system, where four eighth-grade boys face a violent, uncertain future.”
Chapter 38 - Boys of Summer - "McNulty" is sobered up on the beat, happy living with "Bedie" and her "ankle-biters", even as his colleagues keep trying to tempt him with booze and work You're too damn good to be humpin' calls. They complain He's in the wrong fucking place. . . For us yeah, for him? He is still just as cynical as he dumps the anti-terrorist training manual and saves the binders: Back to school for the kids. "Det. Freaman" is now key as he's mystified by this phase of the drug war, How do you hold that much real estate without making bodies? and the less technically adept detectives up on the wire and the computers mourn I miss Prez man I do. . . I hear you.. But "Prez" is getting his first taste of a parallel bureaucracy- the school system. He's hired even before he's certified just on the basis of his credential: I was police. In the city. He's brought right to a messy classroom: So this is me. Watch for the camera angles as the silences in the visuals are even more telling then the spot-on dialog and you'll feel a bit queasy the next time you go by nail guns in Home Depot. Much of the episode and the season, recalls the Oscar-nommed doc about the tough tactics in the Newark mayoral race Street Fight even as it remembers another former Maryland corrupt politician: One man's shithead is another man's Vice President. . . Truer now than it ever was.
Chapter 41 - Refugees continued the series' tradition of leisurely waiting until the fourth episode of each season to get everyone in place (symbolized by "Bunk"s drunken plaint in the cop bar: Where's McNulty?) and set up the basic confrontations. It was in the 4th episode of the 1st season that the titular mechanism got set up - and now the 4th of this season when it was disconnected. "McNulty" in effect passes his stubborn wise-ass baton to "Det. Freaman" as he grins: Guys like you never learn. In my first watching, I couldn't understand most of what the dealers said in the teleplay written by Dennis Lehane, with a story by Burns and Lehane. But it didn't matter because Jim McKay's direction was so superb that I'm going to pull out my tapes of his previous TV and other films and I immediately nom him for an Emmy for Best Directing, as if the Academy notices this show. The camera was brilliantly restless, roving like a drive-by observer around all those reflecting tables of very different meetings - from poker games to ministers to teachers to barflies to campaign strategists of very different campaigns, all woven together with very complex editing. Unlike virtually all TV directing there was a minimum of close-ups. Instead, the camera moved along in long shots on ensembles of reaction to speakers and empty corridors of streets and hallways. Black and white faces and body language passed by in what could have been pantomime, if the story wasn't also so compelling, though one must have watched this series from the beginning to pick up all the subtle issues - otherwise you wouldn't GASP when "Omar" takes on "Marlo".
In Chapter 42 - Alliances by Burns and Simon, "Prez" is trying to get control of his class with incentives, but the kids are full of back talk, and virtually the whole class ends up in detention -- until they talk him out of that too. And then easily help him break into his car where he's left his keys. "Marlo" is recruiting the kids just like the military: We always in the market for a good soldier. But no wonder one of the students is freaked out - he has personal knowledge that there's no zombies: No special dead. Just dead.
Renewed after just one episode of the 4th Season to universal ecstatic acclaim and even editorials in newspapers around the country! Per HBO Co-president Richard Plepler at the summer Television Critics Association presentation, The Wire will come back for its final season in first-quarter 2008. "The fifth season, says Simon, will focus on America's 'culture of violence,' which encourages people at all levels of society to solve their problems with aggression instead of diplomacy." (from "Down to The Wire: Why television's best crime show ever may not be coming back" by Matt Zoller Seitz, 12/19/2004, Newark Star-Ledger)
From the AP: “Fans Await Closure Of HBO's `The Wire'” By Jake Coyle, 11/5/2007: “HBO has kept firm ties with Simon . . . He and writing partner Ed Burns . . . are now producing a miniseries for HBO titled Generation Kill, based on Evan Wright's 2004 book about Marines in Iraq. Simon hopes then to do a series about musicians in New Orleans.” (out on DVD) (Nominated for 2009 Emmy Award for Outstanding Miniseries and David Simon for Outstanding Writing for a Miniseries, Movie or a Dramatic Special for the "Bomb in the Garden" episode, as well as for Outstanding Art Direction For A Miniseries Or Movie, Outstanding Cinematography For A Miniseries Or Movie, Outstanding Directing For A Miniseries, Movie Or A Dramatic Special, Outstanding Sound Editing For A Miniseries, Movie Or A Special, Outstanding Sound Mixing For A Miniseries Or A Movie, Outstanding Special Visual Effects For A Miniseries, Movie Or A Special, and Outstanding Casting For A Miniseries, Movie Or A Special) (updated 12/18/2010)
“David Simon’s Show Me a Hero Trailer: You Should Start Boning Up on Affordable-Housing Law” had Nate Jones in Vulture asking on 7/13/2015: “Will this show do for affordable housing what The Wire did for crime, drugs, policing, manufacturing, politics, education, and journalism?” Luckily, I have an friend:
Real met reel on 4/27/2015 in Baltimore, when protests against police brutality erupted into violence:
Arjan Beens, a diligent fan in The Netherlands, continues to identify and compile the music tracks, as well as for other notable series.
First Season
How can you not love a stubborn, complex rebel tryin' to do the right thing who responds to the state's attorney's post-coital plaint that he's an asshole with, what becomes a trademark response What the fuck did I do? (each chapter that's intonated with different emotion and meaning). Simon Says: "McNulty was the most difficult character for us to define initially. There is the complex mix of genuine talent and intellect and all those self-destructive impulses." Jeremiah let me know that in Orlando's, Ja Rule's "Down Ass Bitch" plays.
In the ironically titled season finale Chapter 13 - Sentencing by Simon and Burns, "McNulty" gets a "Nicely done" from the #2 drug dealer, the judge, the very excited state's attorney, and his boss (You do not make it easy, Jimmy, I got to admit you got some stones on you. But did you really . . .) -- before getting the fatal question: Where don't you want to go? Jeremiah let me know that while "Bodie," "Poot," and "Wallace" are having chili dogs in the restaurant, "Put Your Head on my Shoulder" by Paul Anka plays. The closing song on the first season finale was "Step by Step" from Jesse Winchester's Let the Rough Side Drag album on Stoney Plain Recordings.
The draw for the high-wattage writing talent, Simon says, is ability to control the final product. "This is a writer's show," he says. "If you're already telling stories in the medium of a novel, the equivalent is a long form season on HBO. I think part of the appeal for someone like Richard [Price], who's had a very long and successful career as a screenwriter, is that here the writers are in control. It's not like in features, where once you turn in the script, it's the director and the studio and the stars who exert influence."
Simon Says: "Ed Burns and I wrote a book called The Corner which was published in 1997. It was an examination of one Baltimore drug corner, and by extension, the drug problem in microcosm. The book suggests that the drug war, which Ed himself fought as a 20-year detective in the BPD, has gone badly astray. "Hamsterdam" has been tried in a number of European cities with varying degrees of success. Drug decriminalization was suggested by Baltimore's mayor in 1988, though everyone beat him up for suggesting anything of the sort. It was not much of leap for Ed and myself to contemplate a fictional story based on our earlier reporting and the general notion of decriminalization. . . ."
Simon further lashed out on 12/26/2004 at fans at online BBs who he felt had completely misunderstood the conclusion of Season 3:
"[I]t is just about killing me reading posts on this site and others where some viewers have genuinely taken a wrong turn.
Like we spent twelve hours doing something thematically and with a great deal of detail -- and yet, in some viewers' minds -- the political hyperbole wins the day nonetheless. Come to think of it, I guess that's kind of realistic in way."
He cooled down a bit three days later, but continued:
Fourth Season The streets are talking. . . No Corner Left Behind
While I'll have to get around to posting the text of interviews that are no longer up on the HBO site, see this insight into the work of Ed Burns on the series.
Simon Says: "The writers have planned two additional seasons because with a show like this, you must plan several seasons in advance. . . I think the writers have enough steam for a couple more seasons after this one, maybe a few sidetrips included. More than that and we will begin to hate each other, this Wire universe and all it represents. Dramas need to have a beginning and an end, and I have never been comfortable with the idea of trying to sustain a story past its appropriate and most meaningful end. . .I would very much prefer to leave The Wire at its ultimate end, which would involve another two seasons, give or take a sidetrip or two. But if it ends here, there are 37 hours of drama that are, I believe, as smart and resonant as anything written about the American city at the millennium. And I would include not just television in that assessment, but film and literature as well. Boy that sounds smarmy and arrogant. But you asked how I would feel if it ends here, and so..."
Simon said. . ."This is basically going to be the beginning of a new arc. The thing that we tried to convince HBO was that there was more to be said about the American city. It's gratifying to have the opportunity to continue to explore this urban universe that we created. While we only got the order for one season, the feeling is that if we execute well on season four, we'll be back for another." From an interview with Ed Burns in the 11/20/2006 TV Guide: “You’ll never look at Baltimore—or any city—the same way again. . .It sounds brutal and depressing, yet we try to keep the show very human and very intimate so that people care about the characters.” Oy, care is putting it mildly as each kid’s arc is unpredictable and you’ll cry and scream.
From the blog of Newsday's Diane Werts on the summer TV Critics Press Tour: "Wire writer-producer Ed Burns used to be a police detective and became a social studies teacher. Wonder which task he found tougher? "When you step into that classroom after being 20 years in the street,' he says, 'you think you are pretty tough. And you find out real quickly that you are not. It tested things that nothing else in my life tested.'"
Chance Encounter with Jim True-Frost
Fifth Season -Read Between the Lines.
From Rocky Mountain News July 20, 2006 by Dusty Saunders: [HBO's CEO Chris] Albrecht says the response to season four will determine if creator David Simon's five-season arc of stories will be completed. . . The fifth, if one is produced, will concentrate on the media. 'We'd ruffle some feathers on that one,' says Simon, a former print journalist."
An additional Simon quote in USA Today, 7/13/2006 by Robert Bianco, from the same session: "'In our own heads, we have a five-season arc. ... They all connect in a way that explains why we are what we are and why we can't get out of our own boxes.' The goal is to pose a question he's unable to answer: 'Why is it the richest, most powerful country in the world can't solve its fundamental problems when it comes to places like Baltimore? And there are a lot of places like Baltimore.'" TV Guide's Matt Roush blog posted different quotes from the same session between HBO and TV critics in July 2006: "Albrecht isn't yet willing to commit, taking a wait-and-see approach to episodes he describes as, what else, brilliant. 'There's definitely a sense that life goes on after this particular season, and you could certainly tell more Wire stories.... There is also a thought that you don't necessarily have to wrap everything up.'. . . Simon reiterated that he had mapped out a five-year arc after finishing the show's third season. If the show were to go forward, the fifth season's theme would focus on the media. 'I want to take a very careful look at how all of what we've been portraying on The Wire has been perceived, and how it is that it never quite gets back in any honest fashion to the people. . . Quips Simon: 'Would that we be grit-less and simple, we'd be fine.' But, he insists, "I don't think the show is any more complex than any modern novel with multiple POV.... It is complex by the standards of television." He's also added his thoughts about a potential Season 5: "I'd be a lot more confident if the messy situation with Deadwood hadn't happened. But that's a different story, and let's hope HBO takes the high road and gives this most excellent series a fifth and final year. Having seen all 13 episodes -check out my review - I can tell you that while this particular season's story has a satisfying arc, the elements are in place for one more dynamite season, and fans will not be happy if it's canceled. The best we can hope for is that critical acclaim will help drive more viewers to the show this year, and maybe HBO's strategy of moving its movie night to Sundays as a lead-in will also do the trick. And if not, HBO needs to live up to its "not TV" motto and disregard ratings where a show this uncompromising, this powerful, is concerned."
My Younger reports that Simon at the Block Museum Q & A vented ire at the Tribune Company that he felt had decimated The Baltimore Sun, so the role of 50% cutbacks in reporting staff on the press's ability to cover hard news will definitely be included in Season 5. In Simon really is this pessimistic, Simon says he hopes Spike Lee will direct an episode, but he’ll probably be busy with his Katrina-inspired NBC series.
HBO posted three short prequels, “Bunk and McNulty 2000”, showing their drunken first day as partners, “Proposition Joe 1962” showing how he got his name as a kid, and “Omar 1985”, showing that he early challenged how things are done in his neighborhood. Two backgrounds on the series, “The Last Word” and “The Odyssey”, with too much critics’ superlatives and too few plot summaries, were to try and help newbies and remind loyal fans. I know from friends who I importuned to watch that they still didn’t get it after the first episode: “So where’s the great acting?” I begged them to stick with it. After all, this is the show that has featured more great African-American actors than in the history of television combined. But someone new to the series wouldn’t be crying like I am at what’s happened to the four boys from Season 4 each time we see them now. According to Diane Werts in Newsday 8/12/2008, the DVD of “Season 5 Final season extras include snazzy half-hour documentaries on urban disintegration and the role of the media; six cast/crew commentaries”.
Official song with scene list. More links with past seasons – from the Judge in Season 1 who with McNulty got the whole ball of was rolling and watching the Mayor’s press conference was Season 2’s angry ex-dockworker “Nicky” (the estimable Pablo Schreiber who so deserved his Tony nom for his Broadway acting I saw in the revival of Clifford Odets’ Awake and Sing).
Post Wire
Tremé
Next up is Tremé in N’Orlins: Says Dave Walker in The Times-Picayune, July 10, 2008: “To research the script for the pilot, a prospective first episode of a drama based in the New Orleans music community, Simon consulted with Donald Harrison Jr., Kermit Ruffins and Davis Rogan. Eric Overmyer, a sometimes New Orleans resident with writing and production credits including . . . Homicide: Life on the Street and The Wire, collaborated with Simon on the Tremé pilot script and is expected to write and executive produce for the series. . .Location scouting has already begun in New Orleans. Casting will begin soon, but production issues surrounding the practicality of shooting during hurricane season could affect the show's time line. "If it were up to me, I'd shoot it in the fall," Simon said in a recent interview. If the pilot pleases HBO, shooting on regular-season episodes could begin as early as late winter or early spring provided subsequent episodes could be written in time. Simon said he expects the casting mix of imported actors and locals to match the cast mixture of the Baltimore-set The Wire, which used non-Baltimore actors for most of its lead roles. "We're looking to use local people when we can," he said. Though the show's main storylines will focus on musicians, other elements of the city's unique culture will be spotlighted. One of the pilot script's principal characters, Simon said, runs a restaurant. The pilot story begins two or three months after Hurricane Katrina, Simon said. If Tremé goes to series, each season would advance New Orleans recovery story by one year.
From Is It Okay Not to Love ‘Treme’? in The Wall Street Journal, "Speakeasy", 5/22/2010: "Some fans of The Wire are giving the new series time, hoping that Simon will be able to pull off another addictive show. 'To some degree, his track record means that people are more than likely to give him the benefit of the doubt,' says Ben Greenman, a novelist, and an editor at the New Yorker. Greenman began watching The Wire a few seasons into the show’s run on DVD in hours-long chunks. He is hoarding episodes of Tremé on his DVR to try to replicate the experience. So far, he isn’t captivated."
From an interview with Ed Burns in The New York Times, After ‘The Wire,’ Moving On to Battles Beyond the Streets by Michael Wilson, 7/6/2008: "His next projects include a feature film about a true but unlikely romance between Donnie Andrews, a Baltimore holdup artist who robbed drug dealers (and inspired the character Omar Little on The Wire), and Fran Boyd, a crack addict who recovered with his help and married him last year (and was also a character in The Corner). [Featured in From Two Broken Lives to One New Beginning by Ian Urbina, in The Times, 8/9/2007, that backgrounds Burns' and Simon's involvement in their lives.] . . .After that Mr. Burns hopes to make, with Mr. Simon, a period mini-series about the Haymarket bombing in Chicago in 1886. . .“We’ve forgotten what it’s like to be a working man,” he said. “There was a flush of money, and we’ve forgotten our roots. These stories have a power because it’s when men stood up.” . . .“I’m not a fatalist,” he said. “I’m very optimistic. In America, before we notice things, things have to become bad.”"
Show Me a Hero
For his “What’s Alan Watching: Inside Television”, Alan Sepinwall’s interview posted on HitFlix, 8/11/2015: “Show Me a Hero director Paul Haggis on Oscars, TV, and his love of The Wire: . .My agents called me with a list of projects that people wanted me to consider. Most of them were films to direct this or direct that. And they got to number three and they said, ‘You know, David Simon has a miniseries. I said, Say yes.’ He said, ‘Okay, well we’ll send you the script and you can read it and we’ll discuss it.’ I said, ‘Say yes and then send me the script.’. . . Because I was such an admirer of his work with The Wire. Oh my God, please. It’s one of the greatest series of all times. And certainly my favorite. And Generation Kill, wonderful. And Tremé, great, great work. So no, I think I admire him so much that I guess I was happy to listen to his point of view and to look at things from his perspective and learn from them. And he was very open with me. . .You look at The Wire. The Wire was really unpopular when it was first out. Nobody watched it. Only later on did people come to it. I was there. I think it was genius. Sometimes people come to the thing and sometimes they don’t. I like writing for smart people. I like challenging folks, and I don’t think that’s arrogant. I just like to see things that I would want to watch. And it comes back to the British miniseries that I used to watch when I was growing up. They were so subtle in so many of those. And so nuanced. I loved them.”
Interview in The New York Times, 8/12/2015, with Michael Kimmelman, “David Simon and Cory Booker on Show Me a Hero and the Future of Cities”: “Q: Show Me a Hero continues a story you’ve been telling about American cities since The Corner. Do you see it as one grand project? David Simon ‘Listen, it’s a big enough elephant that you can grab it at any narrative point and come up with something new. But The Corner began the conversation as a case study in addiction and a street-level schematic of the largest single industry and employer in many American inner cities. It was, I hope, an introduction to the other America, the one that our politics and our economy left behind. And The Wire was a pointed critique of the drug prohibition as well as a depiction of unaccountable institutions in American civic life. Tremé is the most patriotic thing I think I’ll ever be able to write in that New Orleans and its recovery afford a filmmaker the opportunity to use sound and image to argue for the American city. I believe in the city. I have to. I live on a planet where the rise in urbanity requires all of us to master the multicultural beast that is the city. We figure out the city or we fail. “Treme” was an argument for the American city. And now, Show Me a Hero, because of all of our pretense of being a post-racial society, is just that. For every city to thrive, burying the American pathology of race has to be this next century’s first order of business.’”
Brian Lowery in Variety, 8/14/2015: “David Simon Brings Hero-ic Nuance to HBO Dramas. . .David Simon produces spare, sophisticated unflinching dramas. Which is notable, given his journalistic training, and the fact that his former profession – in its quest for what’s next – often finds scant time for the sort of nuanced look at what ails big cities that Simon has delivered in his dramas. The Wire, of course, stands at the heart of that filmography, representing a modern classic devoted to the fruitless nature of the drug war and its toxic effect on both the police and the inner-city residents who have found it to be a lucrative if dangerous source of employment. Yet he has taken other deep dives into urban dysfunction, from The Corner to Tremé, the latter chronicling post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans, to his most recent effort, Show Me a Hero . . .Simon’s work, steeped as it is in exploring race and class divisions, has come to mind often in recent months, given the civil unrest unleashed by the deaths of young African-American men in cities like his native Baltimore as well as Ferguson, Mo. Time and again, the media look flat-footed in response to such events, seeking answers before quickly moving on to the next story of the moment. During an interview on his recent swing through Los Angeles to promote Show Me a Hero, Simon downplayed the notion that his fictional examination of Baltimore captured the city’s turmoil better than, say, cable news ever could. ‘No fictional narrative is a surrogate for actually discussing it,’ he said. That said, Simon, once a reporter at the Baltimore Sun, remains an astute observer and acerbic critic of media, citing the failure of mainstream media to identify those voices that would provide genuine insight into these stories, and the willingness of cable pundits to weigh in on issues about which they are at best ill informed. ‘The 24-hour cable cycle is full of people who act as if they’re experts on everything. …I wish people who’d never actually covered a city would shut the f–k up sometimes. Everyone’s seen enough cop shows that they think they know what policing is.’ Simon is particularly pointed, not surprisingly, in his critique of media in relation to the drug war, adding that, as a society, ‘We’ve used drug prohibition to stomp on our underclass.’ As for a frank discussion of whether the cost of those efforts outweigh the benefits, because of the dearth of diversity at major media outlets, he said, ‘You couldn’t get a good argument going for 20, 30 years in these newsrooms because nobody was arguing from the point of view of what it actually was like on the street.’ When it was suggested Simon’s productions have brought more nuance to some of these complicated matters than most news coverage, he said wryly, ‘I can bring a nuance to it. Regrettably, not an audience. . .HBO has given me this much (latitude), and I’m grateful for it. These guys are like the Medicis, from my point of view.’” In Lowery’s formal review, on 8/12/2015, of the mini-series “feeling very much of a piece with the third season of The Wire in capturing the dysfunction of municipal politics. . . there’s an overarching theme to Simon’s work, and if this doesn’t represent the peak of his glory days, it’s praise enough to say it certainly belongs in that neighborhood.”
Reunions:
Spring 2015: The Wire Reverberates through the Baltimore Insurrection
Though directors Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady filmed their short doc A Dream Preferred in 2013, the “Black Lives Matter” triggers were starting, so Matt Barone references: “The media’s representation of Baltimore in 2015 hasn’t been the kindest—well, aside from that time President Obama praised HBO's The Wire.” in “New Doc Looks At A Group Of Young Men Who Are Uplifting Baltimore With Ice Cream Business”.
Sheryl Gay Stolberg, in The New York Times, 10/20/2015, “A Fragile Baltimore Struggles to Heal Itself. . . Baltimore has long been a city of extremes. There is the glittering Baltimore of the Inner Harbor, of tourist treks to the aquarium and twilight Orioles games at Camden Yards. And there is the Baltimore of boarded-up rowhouses, furtive alleyway heroin deals and cut-rate corner stores where cheap booze is sold from behind bulletproof glass, the jagged Baltimore of HBO’s The Wire.”
References to The Wire in Pop Culture and Posthumous Appreciations
In politics, and as the series came out on DVD, it gained more and more fans, famous fans discovered it, and posthumous references pop up:
Generally Through 2008
I’m sure there are many hip hop songs that reference/incorporate The Wire. Here’s Dickie Man’s video from 2007.
“Come New Year's, wine guru Robert Parker, rapper Mims and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner all expect to be in the same place: curled up on their couches at home, watching the premiere of the final season of The Wire. Says Mr. Kushner: ‘It's my favorite TV show -- and I watch TV a lot.’, per Lauren Mechling, in The Wall Street Journal, 1/2/2008 in "The Wire" Central To HBO's Post-"Sopranos" Strategy.
From “A Very Busy Mama” Q & A with Amy Poehler in Newsweek 4/21/2008: “Q: What cereal are you going to have? A: Right now I’m down with Honey Nut Cheerios because that’s what Omar eats on The Wire.”
PAJIBA picks the 100 Greatest Quotes from The Wire.
In “A Festival Not to Be Taken Seriously, Unless It Is” by Melena Ryzik, The New York Times, 9/27/2008, described “the inaugural Eugene Mirman Comedy Festival began with the awards ceremony. . .On opening night. . .Patrick Borelli, a comedian and friend of Mr. Mirman’s, . . .won an award for Best One-Man Show, which he performed only at the ceremony, not solo but with audience members using paper puppets on sticks: an imagined sixth season of The Wire revealing rampant corruption in the Baltimore zoo. He plans to display his award prominently in his office.”
From “The Joy of the Ensemble” by Joe Morgenstern in The Wall Street Journal, 10/17/2008: “As every devotee of The Wire knows, the most fertile soil for ensemble acting these days is TV.”
The Onion zinged an appropriate satire at some of such encomiums: "NEWS IN BRIEF: TV Critics Admit To Never Having Watched The Wire, January 25, 2008 | ISSUE 44•04, New York—Despite heaping lavish praise on the HBO crime drama The Wire , television critics across the country admitted Monday that not one of them has ever sat down to watch an entire episode of the show. 'The Wire has done what no other television program has come close to achieving—namely, presenting the life of a decaying American city and doing so with the scope and moral vision of great literature,' said New York Times critic Virginia Heffernan, who was surprised to hear that the groundbreaking series had already started its fifth and final season in early January. 'It sounds fantastic. I really wish I had HBO.' Many reviewers from top media outlets assured reporters that they would start watching the Peabody Award–winning show just as soon as the first season reaches the top of their Netflix queues."
Dominic West answering New York Magazine Vulture’s Mike Flaherty on 8/15/2011: “Last year you made an appearance on “Dr. West,” the opening track of Eminem’s album Rehab. How did that come about? I adore him; I think he’s brilliant. He’s watched The Wire four times through and I said to him, ‘You know, you should get out more.’ But, amazingly, he just rang me up one day and asked. He said he was in rehab and he had an English doctor who was helping him, and that he’d heard I was English and thought I’d be a perfect type of a guy to play his doctor on the album.”
Generally Through 2009
The New York Times "Modern Love" column featured a poignant essay Down to ‘The Wire’ on 4/19/2009 by Natasha Sajé. Here's excerpts: "Tyrone and I never watched TV together -- at least we didn’t until last fall, when his lymphoma came back. We knew then what we were in for, months of waiting for the injections of Campath to knock down the cancer, and fear that it wouldn’t. We knew there would be many homebound evenings, so I put all five seasons of The Wire on my online DVD list. Sitting together on our couch in Salt Lake City during those months, Tyrone and I couldn’t help reveling in The Wire. There was so much that we recognized as true. . .[W]e married at City Hall, without ceremony or family. By then we had settled in Baltimore, the city of The Wire, where we stayed for 18 years. . .We watched our sick city as it declined and rebounded, then declined and declined, mired in a cycle of drugs and crime, as ever-present as the boy rolling a tire down an alley in the opening sequence of The Wire. . .Every morning and every night -- up until the last 36 hours, when he couldn’t speak — Tyrone would say to me: 'Another day. I’m glad to see it.' We celebrated his ability to read the newspaper, to eat the flan I made, to sit with me in the den and watch yet another episode of The Wire. . .Tyrone and I sat on our couch in Salt Lake City and said, “I feel you” to the memory of Baltimore, to illness, to realism. When he became so weak he couldn’t leave the house or even make it up the stairs, he could still rally for an evening of watching people kill one another and toss the bodies into boarded-up houses. "
When I was researching to review A French Village (Un Village Français) for its 2015 DVD release in the U.S., the background references were not in English, so I found this French blogger on 8/22/2009 comparing the World War II series about the German occupation in rural France to The Wire - twice. While this made me realize how many other non-English commentaries I have left out, Arjan Beens roughly translated the points for me – that this ambitious French TV series is similar in tone to The Wire in terms of quality and the way that it does not try to please the public and public opinion.
Even years later, on 10/24/2009, The New York Times was still referencing the series in the "Travel Section": "36 Hours in Baltimore" by Joshua Kurlantzick: "If you watch HBO’s police drama The Wire you might think that Baltimore is filled with drug dealers and crime ringleaders. But in truth, the city has attracted a different breed of misfits: artists. Lured by cheap rents and warehouse spaces, artists and photographers have flocked there to claim the city as their own. Once rough neighborhoods like Hampden and Highlandtown have been taken over in recent years by studios, galleries and performance spaces. Crab joints and sports bars now share the cobblestone streets with fancy cafes and tapas restaurants. But against this backdrop, there are still the beehive hairdos and wacky museums that give so-called Charm City its nickname." And revisited in the same column again 9/19/2012 by Charly Wilder re: the Edgar Allan Poe House and Museum (203 Amity Street): “There may be no better place to stand witness to the outsider’s Baltimore, past and the present, than that stretch of Amity Street where Poe meets The Wire.” By the same column on 4/16/2017, there was no mention of The Wire!
TV Guide 12/7/2009 cited The Wire in its Best of the Decade perspective (also in AV Club, and there are probably a lot more out there if I looked for them): "David Simon: Creator/executive producer of The Corner, The Wire and Tremé: His unflinching, exposition-free and often bleak portrayal of the city of Baltimore and the war on drugs is one of the most entertaining pieces of social commentary ever on television." Asking him to look back and forwards, Adam Bryant interviewed the ever trenchant and eloquent Simon in "The Reporter: David Simon Creates Commentary Disguised as a Cop Drama on The Wire" for a lot of insights on the making-of-the series.
Generally Through 2010
Given how few critics, let alone viewers, joined me in appreciating the show from the beginning, I find these retrospective accolades from Johnny-come-latelies amusing if welcome: From The HBO Auteur by Wyatt Mason, New York Times, posted online 3/15/2010: "Given the role in which Simon himself has lately been cast by critics and viewers, expectations for Tremé couldn’t be higher. By the time The Wire reached the end of its run, commentators went from posing the coy question, 'Is The Wire the best show on television?' to making the bold statement, 'The Wire is the best show on television'— boldness that soon seemed spineless once seemingly everyone defaulted to calling it simply, 'The best show in television history.' In the two years since The Wire concluded, a pitched battle of ongoing praise has upped the comparative ante. If likening Simon repeatedly to Dickens and Dreiser, Balzac and Tolstoy and Shakespeare hasn’t proved adequately exalting, Bill Moyers lately freshened things up by calling Simon 'our Edward Gibbon,' while the literary critic Walter Benn Michaels went so far as to suggest that the beauty and difficulty of watching The Wire in English — the multifarious 21st-century English of Baltimore detectives and drug dealers — compares with that of reading Dante in 14th-century Italian. It should go without saying that Duke; the University of California, Berkeley; and, next term, Harvard, are offering courses on the series, seminars focused not merely on the sophistication of its storytelling but also on its sociological and political perspicacity."
The Avon Barksdale Story: Legends of the Unwired: DVD that "chronicles the meeting between the real Barksdale and Wood Harris" who played him. "The two tour the actual locations depicted in the program, while Barksdale's mother sheds lights on her son's upbringing and her own struggles. 72 min." (3/14/2010)
College courses use The Wire
Maybe because he's British is why this sounds like an odd comparison, but the new "Doctor" Matt Smith was quoted in TV Guide 4/5/2010: "Watching Dr. Who is as addictive as The Wire or The Sopranos."
"New David Simon Project To Investigate Happy, Upper-Middle-Class Streets Of Wilmette, IL"-- satire in The Onion, May 15, 2010
British satirists got in the 2012 Christmas spirit with The Wire Monopoly game, albeit with a few inaccuracies due to misunderstanding Baltimore and the U.S.
Twice in one week The New York Times used The Wire for ironic comparison (more than it did while it was first screening): In the Business section, 6/4/2010, Stephanie Clifford wrote about Bravo's fan-driven reality TV series in "We’ll Make You a Star (if the Web Agrees)": "It’s hard to imagine, say, David Simon, creator of The Wire, replacing drug-selling plots with romantic ones because HBO, its network, conducted research showing that was what audiences wanted. But some analysts say Bravo’s rather superficial programs are just as innovative as HBO’s esteemed lineup." Then Randy Kennedy in a 6/6/2010 story about the FBI's retired stolen art investigator's book, "His Heart Is in the Art of Sleuthing": “Priceless can read at times, not unpleasantly, as if an art history textbook got mixed up at the printer with a screenplay for The Wire.”
The New York Review of Books only discovered the series, via DVD, in the issue dated October 14, 2010, In the Life of The Wire by Lorrie Moore, combined with consideration of books about the series.
Not just in the U.S.: "Iceland’s Best Party, founded in December by a comedian, Jon Gnarr, to satirize his country’s political system, ran a campaign that was one big joke. Or was it? . . .With his party having won 6 of the [Reykjavik] City Council’s 15 seats, Mr. Gnarr needed a coalition partner, but ruled out any party whose members had not seen all five seasons of The Wire.. . .[He] is now the fourth mayor in four years of a city that is home to more than a third of the island’s 320,000 people. . .The Best Party, whose members include a who’s who of Iceland’s punk rock scene, formed a coalition with the center-left Social Democrats (despite Mr. Gnarr’s suspicion that party leaders had assigned an underling to watch The Wire and take notes)." From "Icelander’s Campaign Is a Joke, Until He’s Elected" by Sally McGrane, The New York Times, 6/26/2010
Originally in The Washington Post, 9/12/2010, William Julius Wilson, director of the Joblessness and Urban Poverty Research Program at Harvard Kennedy School, and Anmol Chaddha, a doctoral student of sociology and social policy at Harvard University, explained: “Why We're Teaching The Wire' at Harvard, in a course on urban inequality: “Of course, our undergraduate students will read rigorous academic studies of the urban job market, education and the drug war. But the HBO series does what these texts can't. More than simply telling a gripping story, The Wire shows how the deep inequality in inner-city America results from the web of lost jobs, bad schools, drugs, imprisonment, and how the situation feeds on itself. Those kinds of connections are very difficult to illustrate in academic works. Though scholars know that deindustrialization, crime and prison, and the education system are deeply intertwined, they must often give focused attention to just one subject in relative isolation, at the expense of others. With the freedom of artistic expression, The Wire can be more creative. It can weave together the range of forces that shape the lives of the urban poor.. . .These story lines draw students into important academic research, such as sociologist Bruce Western's book Punishment and Inequality in America."
Nicolas Rapold in The Wall Street Journal, 12/9/2010, compared watching the re-release of Shoah to: "single-day showings of all portions of long films, which taps an urge for immersion familiar to anyone who's sat down on a Saturday with a DVD set of The Wire and barely made it to work on Monday."
Generally Through 2011
The Wire Alumni Watch 2010 and into early 2011 and late 2011.
In Wire and Fringe star makes music, too" by John Carucci, Associated Press, 1/10/2011: "How did you end up doing so many groundbreaking television series? [Lance] Reddick [who was promoting his first, jazz album, Contemplations and Remembrances] : I was never interested in television. I always saw it as a means to an end. Like so many actors, I was only interested in doing theater and film. But Oz changed television. It was the beginning of HBO's reign on quality, edgy, artistic stuff. Stuff that harkens back to great cinema of the '60s and '70s. When the opportunity for Oz came up, I jumped. And when I read the pilot for The Wire, as a guy that never wanted to be on television, I realized I had to be on this show."
Look how many times Alessandra Stanley references The Wire in her review of a new FX series in The New York Times, 1/10/2011, "With a Life on the Ropes, Seeking Redemption in the Ring": "But circling around the ring are characters who once would be called Dickensian and nowadays are likened to people in The Sopranos or The Wire. . . Pablo Schreiber (The Wire) is Johnny, Patrick’s younger brother and business manager, or mismanager. . .And the secondary characters who cajole and provoke him are superb, including Reg E. Cathey (The Wire) as Barry Word, a witty but ruthless boxing promoter who wants to own the sport — and Patrick’s comeback fight. . . The pedigrees behind the camera may be a greater selling point, assurance that Lights Out won’t become a rejiggering of hoary clichés. . .Clark Johnson, an actor who played an idealistic newspaper editor in The Wire and who directed the final episode, is one of the directors." She did it again in “Killers Who Just Won’t Lighten Up” in a 8/8/2013 review of an AMC series that includes James Ransone and other actors from The Wire: Low Winter Sun “presents a dystopian view of urban decay that makes the Baltimore of The Wire look almost like Monte Carlo. This Detroit is a fetid no man’s land that law-abiding citizens fled long ago, leaving whole blocks abandoned, houses boarded over and feral dogs roaming empty streets. . . It’s inevitable for viewers to yearn for the kind of odyssey that series like The Wire and Breaking Bad provided. Low Winter Sun isn’t that, but it’s an entertaining way station.”
The debut of Fox's The Chicago Code, 2/7/2011, set off similar comparisons: "Stirring Chicago’s Corruption Stockpot" by Ginia Bellafante, in The New York Times, – "Natives must have hungered for a more expansive evocation of their hometown, one that explored the dirty genetics of a place that gave rise to both Al Capone and Rod Blagojevich. Citizens were possibly even irritated when Baltimore received rich dramatic excavation in The Wire before their own city had even been skimmed. Chicago taught Baltimore everything it knows." And "This Time The Good Cops Get A Shot" by David Bianculli on NPR's Fresh Air: "The Chicago Code quickly finds its way. It borrows a little from The Wire, HBO's landmark series about entrenched, corrupted city institutions, and a little from EZ Streets, the vintage Paul Haggis cop series that gave equal weight to its good guys and its bad guys. But those are great places to start."
Even a reference on PBS, in April 2011 – In Rediscovering Alexander Hamilton director/producer Michael Pack and writer/host Richard Brookhiser use a (bleeped) scene from The Wire of the drug dealers discussing with incredulity how it could be that there is one dead white man on a greenback who wasn't a president to demonstrate the lack of knowledge about the guy on the ten dollar bill.
Heather Hendershot in "Losers Take All: On the New American Cinema", The Nation, 5/30/2011 edition: "If the ethos of the New American Cinema has endured, it is not on the big screen but the little one, TV, where today’s multi-channel, niche-audience environment allows for long-term character development, genre innovation and aesthetic risk-taking. Rather than bemoaning the tragic loss of [the production company] BBS, and assuming that the black hole of the superhero franchise has swallowed up any remains of innovation not devoured by Jaws, we might point to programs like The Wire as signs that complex, character-driven American drama did not perish in the late 1970s. Yet what has regrettably also lingered is the snobbism of much of the New American Cinema—hence, the ridiculous idea that TV can be good only if it transcends TV, as in the slogan 'It’s not TV. It’s HBO.'. . .Embracing a complicated seriality, sometimes in terms of plot but even more important in terms of character development, the best of contemporary television is simply more compelling than most contemporary American cinema. So enough with the hand-wringing about the decline of directorial autonomy, and the grumbling about the mind-numbing sameness of the franchises that crushed the New American Cinema more than thirty years ago. The New American Cinema is dead. Long live the New American TV."
The Wire as 1970s Hanna-Barbera Cartoon in a "Why Don't You Caption It Contest". (6/7/2011)
USA Today's Pop Candy Blog: "Metal Monday: A novice begins her journey" by Whitney Matheson, 6/27/2011: "Some people decide to spend a summer reading War and Peace. Others declare this is the season they'll finally watch The Wire." (She's listening to metal music for the first time instead.)
In Newsweek, 7/4/2011, "The Most Dangerous Show on Television" by Andrew Romano: "When Breaking Bad returns, it should have the sort of momentum that helped convert cult favorite The Wire into a canonical drama at the same stage in its run; years of 'you have to watch this' buzz, both in the press and around the water cooler, seem poised to pay off." Presumably this description of its Season 4 also parallels The Wire: "That’s the addiction: getting to know a person so well, through television, that when he goes bad, we can begin to comprehend something that real life simply doesn’t allow us to comprehend—how people become dangerous."
Even a reference on tween’s cable channel Nickelodeon, but as Rick Porter pointed out in a Zap2It Blog on 7/18/2011: “We're guessing that the crossover audience between iCarly and The Wire is, give or take a few parents who watch the former with their kids, pretty much nonexistent. Which could explain how a clip from iCarly that spoofs/pays homage to The Wire and which aired in January 2010, is just now being discovered online.” The episode “iSaved Your Life” by Peter Tibbals and Eric Goldberg originally aired January 18, 2010.
I’m not going to even go into the much coverage of the sad news that Felicia Pearson, who portrayed "Snoop", who is satirized in this exchange, was jailed in 2011.
In the “Respect” episode of the American adaptation of the dark comedy Wilfred (aired 7/21/2011 on FX), written by Michael Glouberman, the titular Australian-talking-dog-as-human reassures his nerdy, woebegone minder’s moan: What am I doing with my life? Nothing. with the compliment: How many people can watch a whole season of “The Wire” in one sitting? Not many I wager. That shit is dense!
In the “Object Impermanence” episode of the 7th season of the marijuana comedy Weeds (aired on 8/1/2011 on Showtime), written by Stephen Falk, an annoying student in a college criminology class pesters the New York police detective: How accurate is “The Wire?. . .Have you ever seen “The Wire”?
Surprisingly few analysts have seen The Wire as a key predecessor for a significant trend, as revealed by British critics, as “Is Slow TV Taking Over The Airways?”, 11/17/2011, by Jon Kelly in BBC News Magazine: “The widely hailed novelistic style of HBO's The Wire saw story arcs rise and fall across series. Though the Baltimore-set crime drama may have had its fair share of action, eventually, writer David Simon's follow-up, Tremé, about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, was profoundly slow-paced. . . . Certainly, fans of such shows frequently compare the viewing experience to that of reading a book, with The Wire's creators in particular claiming to have consciously framed their stories using literary rather than televisual plot structures. . . .Boyd Hilton, TV editor with Heat magazine . . .‘It doesn't always work. I found the second series of The Wire, the one set in the docks, quite boring, because I wasn't really interested in that world’."
Comic References on Comedy Central’s Daily Show:
Generally Through 2012
Open Culture noted: “Slavoj Žižek, your favorite Slovenian philosopher/cultural critic, presented a talk at The University of London (2/24/2012) called “The Wire or The Clash of Civilisations in One Country”. And it takes the show seriously as a work of tragic, realist art.”
In June 2012, Williams starred in another terrific satire, for Funny Or Die The Wire: The Musical, with additional scenes, along with other original cast members Andre Royo, Sonya Sohn, Larry Galliard, Jr., and Felicia Pearson. David Simon’s real reaction: “Hilarious. Just great.”
USA Today’s “Pop Candy” blogger Whitney Matheson on 6/8/2012 saw the Canadian bully mockumentary The Yard (streaming on Hulu) as: “[W]hat The Wire would look like . . . if someone did the show with only child actors”. Mike Hale in The New York Times on 6/13/2012 agreed in “Tough Times at the Playground and the Church”:“The first episode, in which the advent of a new brand of trading card hits the school like the introduction of a potent new form of cocaine, is also reminiscent of The Wire and the claustrophobic playground setting evokes yet another grim HBO drama,Oz”.
There was another sit com reference, in the “Out in the Burbs” episode of Suburbatory (broadcast on 1/11/2012 on ABC), written by Bob Kushell & Corinne Marshall. An undercover cop comes to the high school investigating steroids dealers prompts the Asian-American guidance counselor to trill: This is very exciting! It’s just like “The Wire”! A week later (on 1/19/2012 on NBC) in the “Rivals” episode of Up All Night, written by Caroline Williams, the parents plan on watching The Wire once they finish Friday Night Lights. Similarly, in Jane by Design (on ABC Family, 3/6/2012), set in a suburban high school, “The End of the Line” season finale, written by series creator April Blair and Paul Haapaniemi, had a white bimbo gossiping about a student who spent a night in jail: He got shanked. His friend rolls his eyes: Do you even know what that means? The mean girl gives an answer that makes little sense or accuracy: Of course I do. I watch ‘The Wire.’. (3/7/2012)
David Simon and Michael Kenneth Williams were interviewed in the The Crusader episode of PBS’s America in Prime Time survey of television archetypes (first broadcast 11/20/2011). They discussed “Omar” within The Wire. Simon was emphatic in negatively comparing and contrasting the murders in Dexter.
In an interview with Kate Murphy in The New York Times 2/12/2012, Jimmy Wales, “founder and the public face of Wikipedia”: “I’m always looking for something to watch on iTunes because I travel on planes all the time, and I like to have a nice long list. I like the modern genre of really complicated TV shows — something like Lost or The Wire, with many characters, very interesting story lines and so on.” Murphy got a similar quote on 8/5/2012 from: “Wouter De Backer, known as Gotye, is a Flemish-Australian singer and songwriter whose quirky breakup anthem, “Somebody That I Used to Know,” has been inescapable this summer. . . WATCHING: Favela on Blast, Leandro HBL and Diplo’s film on the Brazilian baile funk scene. It’s an interesting little window onto street party dance culture. Also the fourth season of The Wire. It’s really dark and gripping. I wonder how accurate the police and the people in the drug scene in Baltimore would say it is.”
David Simon and The Wire were commented on in the same first week of April 2012. Sarcastically lionized by Ben Kessler in “Mad Mania: ‘Smart’ TV and the Gray Flannel Ego”, in City Arts, 4/3/2012: “Mad Men, like The Sopranos and The Wire before it, now enjoys a singular cultural status. Neither pop nor art, it is smart TV. And smart TV, we’re told, is not for analysis or even entertainment; it is to be dutifully let into our lives, much as we’re meant to bring in the newspaper every morning. Smart TV is a unique kind of aesthetic nonentity, but even nonentities have to come from somewhere. Mad Men’s creator Matthew Weiner, like HBO’s three Davids (Chase, Simon and Milch, of The Sopranos, The Wire and Deadwood respectively), has a media profile that mixes elements of many leadership archetypes—he’s part film director, part producer, part CEO. Because they preside over a vast creative apparatus rather than yoking themselves to any particular aspect of production, Weiner and his fellow smart showrunners are presumed by journalists to be above the unfortunate susceptibilities that plague the individual artist.”
Emily Nussbaum in The New Yorker, 5/21/2012, “Primary Colors: Shonda Rimes’s Scandal and the Diversity Debate” compared that network (on ABC) series with a black female lead to: “And surely one reason that viewers took so long to catch on to HBO’s The Wire was all those black male faces.”
A comparison among HBO series by Matt Zoller Seitz in “How Game of Thrones slew all comers”, 6/17/2011, in Salon : “Has there ever been a cable drama as meticulous and confident as Game of Thrones”? Not since the first season of Deadwood, or perhaps The Wire.”
Reviewing the next season finale of the fantasy swords epic Game of Thrones, which would presumably be far from the streets of Baltimore, Maureen Ryan in Out Of The Frying Pan, Into The Fire, 6/4/2012, incongruously compared a giant female warrior: “Brienne: Presented for your approval, this is my theory about Brienne -- She's the Omar of Westeros. I'm serious about this. Almost everyone who's seen The Wire designates Omar their favorite character, or he's at least in their top three. Why? Because he asked nothing of anyone else, he was a ferocious warrior, and most importantly, he had a code. So does Brienne, and we love her for that. She's not blindly pledged to some vague concept of ‘honor’ (how could she be, given how many men of "honor" have mocked and abused her over the years?). Also important: She's loyal to an individual . . ., not a region or a city or a class. She's basically boiled down the code of chivalry into goals we can all get behind: Serve someone who at least tries to be good; be strong but fair; defend the weak, treat smallfolk with kindness and the dead with respect; and be able to take on three guys at once and make it look easy.”
In June 2012, Maxim “Interrogates the Makers and Stars of The Wire: We speak with the men and women who made one of the best TV shows of all time.” Marc Spitz conducted the oral history: “Ten years ago this month, The Wire premiered on HBO and… almost nobody cared. The Baltimore saga of cops and dealers, junkies and politicians, poverty and hope, polarized critics, was ignored by the Emmys, constantly struggled for ratings and faced cancellation more than once. But it also inspired a future President, created a bona fide American folk hero, and helped launch the current ‘Golden Age’ of television. Now for the first time ever, the creators, writers, cast and crew recall the making of an American classic.”
MTV added a hip hop perspective by Philip Mlynar, posted 9/6/2012, in “The Wire Turns 10: Pusha T, Sean Price, Bun B and Big K.R.I.T. Remember Their Favorite Moments”. Their discussion centered more on its gritty reality, slang, and distinctive characters than the soundtrack: “First Impressions”, “Barksdale and Bell: The Rise and Downfall of an Empire”, “Everybody Loves Omar”, “The New Generation: Marlo, Snoop and Chris”, and “Favorite Characters, Favorite Seasons, and Pet Peeves”.
Yahoo Trending 6/30/2012: Fast and Furious meets The Wire by Vera H-C Chan: “The federal investigation into Mexican gun-trafficking was dubbed Operation Fast and Furious, because the suspects involved liked a little auto-sideshow action. The better analogy might be The Wire—to cover a roiling case of vindictive office politics, cowboy agents, sensationalized reporting, the clash of Second Amendment rights and gun crimes, and election-year bickering that has resulted in the first-ever contempt charge against a sitting Cabinet officer.”
A satirical mash-up of The Wire with Pittsburgh Steelers coach Mike Tomlin dodging questions in July 2012 about receiver Mike Wallace not showing up for June training camp due to a contract dispute. (Thanks to Arjan Beens.)
In “Binge Viewing: TV's Lost Weekends: Bet You Can’t Watch Just One” by John Jurgensen, in The Wall Street Journal, 7/13/2012: “The Wire (HBO): 5 seasons, 60 episodes, 2 days, 11 hours, 58 minutes* As anyone who has been harangued at a party for missing this series well knows, there’s consensus on this epic about decay and corruption in Baltimore: It’s required viewing, and a regular object of binges.* Total time to watch every episode nonstop.” That figure is a minimum – anyone with the DVDs will watch all the extras as well, but does the Netflix stream include them?
“Snapshot | Clarke Peters: A New Character Turn, but Still a Familiar Face” by Jeremy Egner (The New York Times, 7/26/2012): “Mr. Peters, 60, has spent most of the past four decades as a stage actor in Britain. But it was his turn as the cagey, dollhouse-furniture-building detective Lester Freamon in the HBO crime drama The Wire that made him, if not a household name, then a face of the ‘How do I know you?’ variety. . . Mr. Peters grew up in Englewood, N.J., and now splits his time between Baltimore, where he bought a home during filming of The Wire, and London. . . Q. What changed for you after The Wire? A. I didn’t expect to be experiencing what I’m experiencing now at this age, the celebrity. Of course it feels good for the ego, but you’re thinking, ‘Wait a second, I’ve done other things in my life.’ You want be nice to everybody, but then it gets to the point when someone asks you for the fourth time, ‘What did I see you in?’ I just tell them I don’t know. . . They look at me like: ‘Well what is wrong with you? You know what you’ve been in.’ No, man, I’m sorry. I can’t roll like that.”
There were, in effect, two obituaries in The New York Times for DeAndre McCullough, who died 8/1/2012, the first by Daniel E. Slotnik, noted that since he was in The Wire, he had worked in set design and security there, as well for Tremé: “but his addictions became unmanageable. ‘He went to work for the television shows, time and again lasting only as long as a paycheck or two,’ Mr. Simon wrote in an online tribute.” In a follow-up obit in The New York Times “A Better Life Eternally Eluded the Boy From The Corner, by Rachel L. Swarns, 8/29/2012, expanded: “In good times, DeAndre McCullough inspired nearly everyone he touched. He was a small-time drug dealer made good, a recovering addict who had a fledgling career counseling troubled teenagers. He played bit roles on HBO in The Wire and in The Corner, which chronicled his life in the drug trade at the age of 15. . . Michael Potts, the actor who played ‘Brother Mouzone’ on The Wire, heard the news just as he was about to perform in The Book of Mormon on Broadway. Mr. McCullough had played Mr. Mouzone’s sidekick, ‘Lamar’. ‘I was devastated,’ said Mr. Potts, who said he had to steady himself for his performance. ‘As an African-American man, I thought: ‘Oh my God, I’m losing another one, not another one.’. . . ‘Once The Wire and everything hit, I thought life was going to be good for DeAndre,’ said Kevin Thomas, the only one of Mr. McCullough’s close male friends to graduate from college. . . .‘To see him go down that road of self-destruction was heartbreaking,’ he said. . . Ed Burns, who with Mr. Simon wrote the book The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood, which inspired the HBO mini-series, said Mr. McCullough stood apart. ‘He seemed to know a lot of what the world was about,’ he said. ‘He could articulate the injustice, which was all around him. The other kids couldn’t. They suffered it, but they weren’t conscious of it. He was conscious of it.’ . . . He got his G.E.D. and went to community college for a semester with help from Mr. Simon and Mr. Burns. . . . In The Corner, he played the policeman who arrests the character based on his life. In The Wire, he took on the role of the assistant to ‘Brother Mouzone’, a hit man [“dapper”, the first described him]. . . . Last fall, he turned to Mr. Simon again, pleading for work on the set of Tremé in New Orleans. ‘He said, ‘I’ll get clean. I’ll do whatever I have to do,’ Mr. Simon recalled. ‘There was a weariness and a fear in his voice that convinced me that we had to try.’ Mr. Simon offered him a position on the set’s security team. Mr. McCullough started in October. By January, he was out of a job. ‘There are corners here, too,’ he told Mr. Simon. ‘What was the trigger that sent him back to addiction?’ Mr. Simon asked. ‘It’s the biggest question in the world. But the journey from one America to the other is epic, Once you’ve become a citizen of one, it’s really hard to find citizenship in the other’.”
The debut in the U.S. of new cop shows set off another slew of comparisons: From Mike Hale, in The New York Times, 8/20/2012, “Endless Gray Zones for Thin Blue Line: Hulu Offers Line of Duty From BBC: Line of Duty is slightly reminiscent of The Wire in the way it presents police work as a miasma of compromise, careerism and endless gray zones. . . All of the plot complications and conspiratorial film-noir ambience, however, don’t make us care all that much about the characters, who are mostly made of cop-show clichés — idealistic and headstrong here, gnarled and cynical there.” And to BBCAmerica’s Copper, in Entertainment Weekly’s Popwatch in “Copper series premiere: A big-city Deadwood? Or Masterpiece Theater sans the masterpiece?” by Darren Franich, 8/19/2012: “And there are just as many shows that have tried to be the next Wire— or anyhow, they’ve tried to be a version of Wire that could actually attract a healthy amount of viewers, mixing the show’s specific strengths (twisty serialized narrative, massive cast, end-of-empire themes) with eyeball-grabbing affectations (sex, violence, sexy violence.) . . . If The Sopranos was TV-as-cinema, and The Wire was TV-as-great-American-novel, then Deadwood was TV-as-Broadway-play, creating a universe that felt at once overtly stagey and remarkably intimate. . . Copper is co-created by Tom Fontana, who created the great HBO series Oz, and Will Rokos, who worked on a season of Southland. Oz was a great melodrama; Southland- an exceptional cop show.”
In Rolling Stone, 8/30/2012, Brian Hiatt interviews “Chemical Brothers: Breaking Bad Stars Bryan Cranston and Aaron Paul”, and makes the usual comparison: “Breaking Bad is . . . a desert fever dream about a doomed America – though few nightmares have such clockworklike plot construction. Its tone is distinctly less naturalistic and its situations less plausible than other greatest-show-ever contenders (The Sopranos, Mad Men, The Wire)."
In WNYC’s On the Media “All About the Elections” episode the 2nd week of October 2012, the segment Your Brain on Politics, Sasha Issenberg, the author of The Victory Lab: The Secret Science of Winning Campaigns (2012), noted that Mitt Romney’s 2002 gubernatorial campaign in Massachusetts targeted premium cable channel subscribers as persuadable to a Republican. He noted that journalists theorized that watching The Wire made them want to be tough on crime, though the host drily protested “That’s a stretch!”
In Eugene Jarecki’s anti-drug war documentary The House I Live In (in film festivals and theaters in 2012; broadcast on PBS’s Independent Lens 2013), David Simon is a prominent “talking head” against the drug laws, because of The Wire, arguing in straight-forward non-fiction what he fictionalized more powerfully, and in the long term, with more impact.
The New York Times Magazine cover essay “Empire of the In-Between” by Adam Davidson, 11/2/2012, on “the Acela strategy: what happens when there’s an unhealthy mix of government and private interest” opened with: “As anyone who rides Amtrak between New York and Washington knows, the trip can be a dissonant experience. Inside the train, it’s all tidy and digital, everybody absorbed in laptops and iPhones, while outside the windows an entirely different world glides by. Traveling south is like moving through a curated exhibit of urban and industrial decay. There’s Newark and Trenton and the heroic wreckage in parts of Philadelphia, block after block of hulking edifices covered in graffiti, the boarded-up ghost neighborhoods of Baltimore made familiar by The Wire — all on the line that connects America’s financial center and its booming capital city.”
In How I Met Your Mother, “Twelve Horny Women” episode (11/26/2012) written by Eric Falconer and Chris Romanski, kindergarten teacher “Lily Aldrin” (played by Alyson Hannigan) proved in adolescent flashback that she had been a bad-ass bully in her NYC neighborhood by whistling “The Farmer in the Dell”, just like “Omar”, but stalking with a baseball bat instead of a shotgun. At the sight of her, kids ran away yelling Lily comin'! (Thanks to Arjan Beens.)
In “The Rise of the New Gay Villains” by Tim Molloy, in The Wrap, 11/27/2012: “The model for the modern-day gay villains may be Omar, the brilliant stickup man from the beloved HBO series The Wire. Not every writer in Hollywood takes cues from The Wire, but plenty do. . . As played by Michael K. Williams, Omar holds up drug dealers for a living, sometimes with a pretty younger man by his side. Like [Isaak] Sirko [of Dexter] and perhaps [Gus] Fring [of Breaking Bad], he longs to avenge a lover's death, which makes him more sympathetic than the usual bad guy motivated by greed. Omar's homosexuality, in other words, brings out the best in him. And it does nothing to make him less of a man. Even as his enemies denounce him as a ‘cocksucker,’ they fear him as much as they fear anyone.” Molloy continued referencing the series on 12/4/2012 in Game of Thrones: 4 Things Networks Can Learn From the Cable Show That's Beating Them. . .Networks are wary of serialized dramas like Lost, The Wire, and Breaking Bad, which are most rewarding to those who watch every episode. It's incredibly satisfying to watch stories unspool over weeks or years. But it's harder for heavily serialized shows to draw in new viewers, or to play in syndication.”
A surprise admission from “David Chase “On Not Fade Away, Avoiding Thrillers, and His TV Diet” to Jennifer Vineyard in Vulture on 12/20/2012: “Q: What do you watch these days? A: On TV? Only Boardwalk [Empire] and Mad Men. I like them both. The Wire was on during the time I was making The Sopranos, and I never had the time for it. I just never had the time to watch it. And now, it's like, How many seasons do I need to catch up on? You know? I also need to read and eat and take a walk. So I watched part of season four, and I liked it, but I haven't gone further.”
“Donnie Andrews, the Real-Life Omar Little, Dies at 58” by Daniel E. Slotnik, The New York Times, 12/15/2012. “. . .a reformed stickup man whose story inspired the character Omar Little on the acclaimed HBO drama The Wire, died late Thursday or early Friday in Manhattan. He was 58. . . Drawn from Mr. Andrews’s life, the character Omar Little was a thief who terrorized drug dealers. Mr. Andrews also wrote for the show and appeared as one of Omar’s allies. Omar died without remorse, but Mr. Andrews sought redemption.
Generally Through 2013
Another obit headlined an actor’s most well-known role: In, The New York Tims, 1/19/2013, “Robert F. Chew, Actor on The Wire, Dies at 52” by Daniel E. Slotnik, quoted David Simon: “’We were looking for somebody that was sensible and even paternal, as almost a foil to the rest of the brutality and ambition that you were seeing in that underground economy. . .So you needed him to be incredibly human, funny, connected to whoever’s in the room, and yet he’s a gangster. . . . He recalled one scene in which Mr. Chew [playing “Proposition Joe”] used four different voices while calling a telephone number that turns out to be that of Baltimore’s homicide unit. ‘He becomes four different characters before your eyes. . .It was a soliloquy of pure acting.’”
Michael Kenneth Williams concluded his 2012 Human Rights Campaign PSA testimonial for gay marriage equality with a grinning threat referring to his gay character on The Wire: “Let’s keep it real y’all – or Omar gonna come after you.”
On the PC sketch comedy satire Portlandia in the “Missionaries” episode, (1st shown on IFC Channel 1/4/2013) written by Fred Armisen, Carrie Brownstein, Jonathan Krisel and Bill Oakley, opened with a parody of a warning: “The following scene contains spoilers. VIEWER DISCRETION ADVISED.” Two characters who in the previous season watched a marathon of Battlestar Galactica, “Doug” (Armisen) and “Claire” (Brownstein), invite another couple for dinner, at their house on NorthWest Thurman Street in Northwest Portland, and they talk plot twists on essential TV series. They start with Breaking Bad, move on to Game of Thrones, Mad Men, The Sopranos, True Blood, Downton Abbey, Homeland, while trying to avoid spoilers, so try going back to Six Feet Under, and the first Star Wars movies. But “Doug” goes further: You’ve seen “The Wire” right? “Claire”: I’ve only watched three episodes. “Doug” can’t hold back: Omar?! He gets killed by a little kid?! Did you see that coming? If you haven’t gotten to it, Omar getting killed by a little kid on “The Wire”, it’s not even a spoiler because the way they do it – the best! They shoot him! While the other couple keeps groaning for him to stop, “Claire”: You want to know what’s next, right? Don’t you want to know how this ends? The guests shout and make honking sounds: No! . . Don’t spoil it! “Doug”: It’s really cool! And it turns out the whole scene was another guy’s dream.
Comic animated references: on Bob’s Burgers, “Nude Beach” episode, written by Scott Jacobson (1st broadcast on Fox 1/13/2013), health inspectors visit the family restaurant and give the owner an instructional DVD on the proper way to wash hands: Hi, I'm Andre Royo. I played Bubbles on the critically acclaimed series The Wire. Today I'm here to talk about a different kind of bubbles, soap bubbles. Remember when washing your hands, do it for the time it takes to count to a thousand. 1...2...3...4. . . On the “Space Cadet” episode, written by Alex Carter, first shown 1/6/2013: "Family Guy" Perfectly Sums Up People Who Watch The Wire And Breaking Bad”. (Thanks to Arjan Beens for the citations.)
From op-ed columnist Bill Keller’s “Invasion of the Data Snatchers”, in The New York Times, 1/15/2013, “When our privacy is invaded in the name of national security, we — and our elected representatives, afraid to be thought soft — generally go along quietly. Our complacency is reinforced by a popular culture that has forsaken Orwell’s nightmares for a benign view of authority. In many of my own guilty-pleasure television favorites — The Wire, the British thriller series MI-5, the Danish original of The Killing, the addictive Homeland — surveillance is what the good guys do, and it saves the day.”
Strange, The Wire was NOT cited in this piece: “Kill These Characters at Your Own Risk”, by Bill Carter, in The New York Times, 2/18/2013
Indiewire had a Wire-fan headline writer: “Stringer Bell The Oscar Contender? The Weinstein Company Pick Up Mandela: Long Walk To Freedom Starring Idris Elba” for Kevin Jagernauth’s blog post on 2/22/2013, and most subsequent articles and interviews with him, such as “Idris Elba’s transformation from drug dealer to ‘Mandela’” by Reed Tucker in the New York Post on 11/23/2013: “Scoring the role of Baltimore drug dealer Stringer Bell on HBO’s “Wire turned Elba’s life around. ‘I don’t get tired of being associated with The Wire. I love when people call me ‘Stringer!’ Well, I won’t say I love it, but . . .it’s part of my history.’ The series, which ran from 2002 to 2008, became one of the most acclaimed American television shows ever and led to a string of films for Elba. . . We always knew [former Oasis frontman Liam] Gallager was crazy, but messing with Stringer/Luther? Now that’s certifiable.” On NPR’s Morning Edition in “Idris Elba Portrays Mandela In Long Walk To Freedom, 11/29/2013, interviewer Renee Montagne “That's Idris Elba, best known to American audiences for the acclaimed HBO series The Wire. So effortlessly did Elba slip into the role of Stringer Bell, a Baltimore drug dealer's second in command, most fans had no idea the actor playing him was actually British. . .[T]he story of Nelson Mandela's life includes several scenes where you are delivering rousing speeches before thousands of South Africans, these extras, who seem to be responding to you emotionally as Nelson Mandela. . .Elba: [M]y films have been playing in South Africa. They're aware of The Wire. So I'd come out and what would happen is - there would be two things that happen. One - oh! It's Idris Elba. I didn't know he was playing Mandela. And there was that reaction. And then it was - oh! He can do the voice. I didn't know he could do the voice. And then what I'm saying began to evoke emotion for them as countrymen. So all of this was just this weird magic happening all at the same time. If I messed up a line or forgot a line: Boo! Come on, Idris! One more!”
Not the usual comparisons, by Mike Hale, “In Pursuit, on Wheels and on Foot”, in The New York Times, 2/26/2013: “Most of us have no way of judging how realistically television shows portray the lives of police officers. If you scan Web sites where law enforcement professionals gather to chat, however, you can assemble a list of series that get some grudging praise for being slightly more authentic than the norm: Adam-12, High Incident, Hill Street Blues, Homicide, The Wire and — many a deskbound cop’s favorite — Barney Miller.” He then lauds Southland and Third Watch.
On Talking Dead, the talk show follow-up to AMC’s The Walking Dead, guest comedian Kumail Nanjiani on 3/17/2013 noted that he was still seeing the character “Tyreese” as played by the actor Chad Coleman: “In my head, he was “Cutty” on The Wire, he’s the same character. So now his boxing gym shut down and he’s in the zombie apocalypse trying to work the straight and narrow.” On the season finale, on 3/31/2013, host Christ Hardwick, of The Nerdist, reported to guest Coleman that executive producer Gale Anne “Hurd is a huge fan of The Wire -- as are we all—and Chad Coleman was always the choice for ‘Tyreese’. She told casting not to bother to audition anyone else.” Coleman said he saw the talk online: “I was really flattered.” As to working with this cast: “Some of them were fans of The Wire. . .Like The Wire, they are passionate and committed people.”
Kate Murphy in The New York Times again got a quote, on 7/6/2013 from Susan Kare: “an independent digital designer whose ubiquitous on-screen icons are clicked by countless users every day. Known for her minimalist, intuitive and often witty designs, she started her career at Apple when Steve Jobs selected her to create the graphics and fonts for the original Macintosh computer. . . WATCHING: In stolen moments while I’m working, or waiting, I catch up on my phone with a lot of TV series that I missed the first time around. I loved The Wire. There’s a great speech by the character Omar, who robs drug dealers, in a courtroom engaging in repartee with a lawyer: I got the shotgun and you got the briefcase.”
In June 2013, The Writer’s Guild of America named The Wire the 9th Best Written TV Series, crediting all its writers: “No series, arguably, is more responsible for the novelistic ambitions possible for television writers now. The Wire was creator David Simon’s Baltimore-set follow-up to his HBO miniseries The Corner, but this time he expanded his gaze to the multi-pronged bureaucracies and civic institutions that fed into and mirrored the ghetto drug trade. The Wirehad a Dickensian sense of breadth and social relevance; its stories were told as microcosms of larger ills. In 2010, when Simon won a MacArthur ‘genius’ grant, he told The Los Angeles Times: ‘One thing we were explicit about with The Wirewas that the drug war needed to end. Now, the drug war is no closer to ending than it was when we started the series. And I don't expect that we're ever going to get there. But you can't go into it thinking you're going to change anything; you have to go into it based on the story itself.’"
In July 2013, Entertainment Weekly named The Wire “The #1 Greatest TV Show of All Time”, HBO, 2002-08, The most sustained narrative in television history, The Wire used the drug trade in Baltimore, heavily researched by creator David Simon, to tell tales of race and class with unprecedented complexity. (Perhaps that's why the show never won a much-deserved Emmy for Outstanding Drama Series and earned only two nominations for writing.) Politics, the war on drugs, labor unions, public education, the media — these were among the big themes, all examined through exquisitely drawn characters, such as the brilliant yet broken detective Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West) and the great avenging thug Omar Little (Michael K. Williams), who will live on in legend.” Dalton Ross then got “Former cast members react to The Wire being named the greatest TV show ever by EW”: “I happened to be on the set of The Walking Dead right as the news broke and was able to get reactions from two former Wire —and current Walking Dead — cast members: Lawrence Gilliard, Jr., who played doomed dealer D’Angelo Barksdale, and Chad Coleman, who was reformed killer Cutty. . . it seems Gilliard is something of a seer. ‘I remember the first season we actually did an interview and they asked me — I think it was for the DVDs or something like that — and they were asking me questions and I said, ‘In 20 years from now, The Wire is going to be the show that they will say was the best show on television that nobody watched.’ I was prophetic! I knew it was a big deal when we were doing it, and it was just a shame that people didn’t watch it when it was on. But everyone is catching up now, and it’s a big hit. I really loved being on that show. It was just a magical show — the cast, the crew, the writing, everything. That’s why it’s number one at EW.””
“‘Breaking Bad’: 7 Lessons Showbiz Can Learn From the Gamechanging Series” by AJ Marechal, in Variety, on 9/27/2013, “Breaking Bad now ranks among the great dramas of television, surrounded by the likes of The Sopranos, NYPD Blue and The Wire. Showbiz could learn a few lessons from the series, especially given its prominence in the digital space.” However, he doesn’t draw the lesson that most current appreciators of The Wire discovered it on DVDs and through Netflix, both DVD and digital.
How To Make Money Selling Drugs includes instructive clips from The Wire and interview clips with David Simon. (My additional note.) (previewed at 2013 Tribeca Film Festival)
In Suits, the ethically-challenged private lawyers’ series on USA, the 3rd Season episode “Conflict of Interest”, first shown 8/6/2013, written by Daniel Arkin, included an off-hand reference, enjoying being a bit more adventurous in its use of profanity. As pretend lawyer “Mike Ross” (played by Patrick J. Adams) makes a realization about a case, he exchanges a series of Shits with a competitive associate “Katrina Bennett” (played by Amanda Schull), until he draws one out long, like the distinctive Sh-ee-i-i-t. catch phrase of a fictional Baltimore politician. She’s surprised: You’re into ‘The Wire’? And then she repeats the drawn-out word. (As it is, their repetition of the word was in itself an homage to the classic repetition of Fuck that The Wire did.) He later mocks her for making another reference: All right, you watch The Sopranos too? She chuckles: Nobody watches “The Wire” without starting with “The Sopranos”. They shake on an agreement with another Shee-i-t. Not leaving well-enough alone, “The Other Time”, written by Rick Muirragui, includes another reference. In a flashback to college, “Mike” BFF introduces him to a secretive white computer geek who goes by the name “Omar” with the explanation: He’s obsessed with ‘The Wire’. And the guy proceeds to talk, ridiculously, with “Omar” grammar and phrases.
Michael B. Jordan’s outstanding lead performance in the searing based-on-a-true-story film led to many interviews that cited his early role in The Wire, such as “Michael B. Jordan of Fruitvale Station, Hollywood’s New Leading Man in The Daily Beast, 7/11/2013: “After roles on The Wire and Friday Night Lights, Michael B. Jordan delivers an award-worthy turn as real-life shooting victim Oscar Grant in Fruitvale Station. The actor opens up to Marlow Stern about the role, his journey, and race. Back in January 2008, HBO held a premiere party for the fifth and final season of its critically acclaimed series The Wire. The show, created by David Simon, was set in Baltimore and examined every facet of the city’s war on drugs, from inner city dealers and the cops on their tail to politicians and members of the press. At one point during the fête, Simon took over the microphone. He proceeded to rattle off the names of dozens of notable cast members, urging them to stand for an ovation. ‘The loudest cheers came for Michael B. Jordan, reported New York magazine [1/7/08]. In The Wire’s first season, Jordan played Wallace, a sympathetic teen drug dealer for the Barksdale Organization who wants out of ‘the game.’ The 16-year-old’s demise is arguably the most devastating moment in the series. More than a decade after that fateful scene aired, Jordan is back as another tragic hero. . .”
”Luther postmortem: Idris Elba and Neil Cross talk episode 3 shocker” made comparisons to his other great role he’s known for, as quoted to Mandi Bierly in EW, on 9/5/2013: “Having played Stringer Bell [on The Wire] and been shot in the third season, there were some similarities there. Taking one to the chest as well. We laughed about that a little bit. But the point is, I remember telling him how [that] was a tough moment for me having to know this is going to be my last scene in a show that I was part of.”
Referenced in Anna Sale’s report on the 2013 NYC Mayoral primary on WNYC, posted on 8/25/2013, “De Blasio, a Practiced Critic, Confronts New Role of Frontrunner”: Public Advocate Bill deBlasio says: "’The personal is political.’ That's also the case when we talk about his home life and how he relaxes. He likes baseball, and The Good Wife, the television show about the life of a politician's wife after her husband's sex scandal. He's also a fan of The Wire, the HBO show about crime, corruption and government in Baltimore. I asked his favorite character. ‘I love the aide to Carcetti. That’s a brilliant and very realistic character,’ he said. Not the mayor himself. Or the crusading police commissioner. De Blasio picks the mayor’s aide, a character whose name he can't remember. It's fitting, because before de Blasio was ever a candidate for city office, he was that guy. As Hillary Clinton’s Senate campaign manager, under Andrew Cuomo when he was Clinton’s Housing Secretary, and with David Dinkins, the last Democrat to run the city.” The transcript doesn’t get across just how enthusiastic he sounded about the series, which may be enough to get my vote after the primary.
Another politician was also inspired, but in a surprising place—in Russia, reported Steven Lee Myers in “Mayoral Run by Putin Critic Vexes Kremlin”, in The New York Times, 9/6/2013: “The improbable campaign of Aleksei A. Navalny, the corruption-fighting activist, has exposed disarray in the political system [President Vladimir V.] Putin has constructed. Beginning with Mr. Navalny’s conviction for embezzlement and prompt release on appeal in July, the Kremlin’s response to his campaign has been contradictory and at times confused. . .Mr. Navalny has openly campaigned before larger and larger crowds. He modeled his efforts, he said, on those he learned watching the HBO series The Wire, speaking to voters in a way that has not been seen since the early years of democracy after the Soviet Union’s collapse. That has tested the limits of the authorities’ tolerance, provoking responses that seem tentative and uncertain. When a recent rally drew thousands of supporters, the police promptly detained Mr. Navalny, only to release him, he said, because they had no orders telling them what do next.”
10 reasons why today's TV is better than movies by Stuart Heritage in the British The Guardian, 10/23/2013: “5. Actors do their best work on TV: Because television is increasingly becoming a writer's medium, it is attracting the best acting talent. Actors who would have run from television a decade ago are now embracing it precisely because the quality is so high. Now the letdown comes when actors move from TV to film. . . . Idris Elba followed The Wire by making a ropey thriller with Beyoncé. . . 7. British actors have ruled US TV for years: [Y]ou barely watch any American TV show at all without seeing a homegrown actor elongating their vowels. . . .The Wire had Idris Elba and Dominic West. . . .This could be because they're brilliant actors, or it could be because they're cheaper than hiring real Americans. Either way, it still counts.”
The New York Times film critic A.O. Scott in “The Big Picture Strikes Back” on 11/25/2013: “the notion that television is better, a provocative claim just a few years ago, when the memory of The Sopranos was still fresh and The Wire was winding down, is now conventional wisdom in the era of Mad Men,Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead, and Girls. The case for the supremacy of television is hard to refute: such an abundance of fine acting, complex storytelling and, increasingly, visual polish, available whenever you want it, in single-episode or binge doses, on the screen of your choosing, without overpriced concessions and rude strangers texting or talking in the next row; a thriving critical bazaar of online recapping and water-cooler plot-spoiling; a business model, free of reliance on first-weekend grosses, that encourages risk-taking and the patient cultivation of a devoted audience.”
The references extended into movies in 2013, in writer/director Todd Berger’s satire It’s A Disaster. As the apparent end of the world disrupts their couples’ brunch, “Tracy” (played by Julia Stiles) tearfully bemoans a list of things she now won’t get to do, concluding: I never even watched “The Wire”! Her date “Glen” (played by David Cross) fails at comforting her: All those things you mentioned don’t matter. Except “The Wire” – that was really good.
On Aspen Institute Presents (PBS, 1st broadcast 7/1/2013) “Reinventing Television”, The Wire came up twice as a model for the future. SONY Entertainment CEO Michael Lynton: “A new technology has come along that dramatically affects the economics of our business, whether it’s pay TV or DVDs or something else. In the case of the internet. . . as it relates to things like Netflix, for the first time we have a platform that allows people to catch up with television that they hadn’t done in the past. And I think what has resulted is an enormous improvement in the quality of TV. Why? Because you can have these open-ended dramas which you couldn’t have in the past. Because before, you missed one episode of The Wire and that was it. You’re out of it. Now all of a sudden you find these writers who would like to create these 13 episode character arcs, better than creating a 2-hour arc. For television, you have a huge boom in dramatic TV. . . Good writing brings good directors. . that gets good actors. That reinventing the technology has improved the quality of television.” Noted TV director James L. Brooks, who I usually think of in terms of his comedy work, in an interview with Kurt Andersen, revealed he, too, is a fan. He first responded about the impact of violence on TV: “Entertainment Weekly just did “Best TV Shows of All Time” and no one can argue with their choice of The Wire, and that was one of the most violent shows in history. Arguably, the best TV show ever made was the most violent, so the conversation ends. . Are you bad or good?. . .The Wire enfranchised characters who were real. . who lived in violence, as many people do in this country.” Anderson: “But that’s using the perfect and the best to potentially. . .that poorly done. . .have to cop to effect.” Brooks: “The issue is whether you’re good or bad. . . I did The Wire on a binge. Something like 60 shows, so it was a real binge, and it’s a different experience, and it’s a richer experience, when you’re surrounded by it, you go to sleep and wake up and do it again. You can immerse yourself in it, you can become part of it. It’s like great literature for a reader.” (That may be an unintentional Dickensian reference.)
On Charlie Rose (PBS), 11/13/2013, he asked Claire Danes how her Showtime series Homeland fits into “the third Golden Age of Television” for her as an actor. She credited “cable television and the number of liberties it affords creative people. I started really getting excited with the show The Wire, which is quite awhile ago now. I was just so profoundly kind of impressed by that show. It got me eager to participate again in that medium and break through the screen to go from audience to participant. People watch television now like they read novels. They can really burrow into a series and they don’t have to wait for the commercial break. . .They can binge. The quality of the material just keeps escalating.”
Generally Through 2014
The 2014 documentary 12 O’Clock Boys, directed by Lofty Nathan, is promoted as: “The most thrilling trip into Baltimore since The Wire the film is a stirring, up-close ride with a notorious urban dirt bike crew, poetically seen through the eyes of a young boy determined to join their ranks.” Producer Eric Blair has worked in the crew of Homicide and The Corner. In “Shooting a Two-Hour Wheelie”, by Steve Dollar, in The Wall Street Journal, 2/3/2014, Blair described the documentary as “another chapter in Baltimore’s vibrant history and complex future”.
In Broad City (on Comedy Central, originally shown 2/26/2014), “Stolen Phone” episode written by Chris Kelly, show creators/comediennes Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer play versions of themselves in hipster Brooklyn. “Abbi”: Why would you have a burner phone?. . .Why would you need a phone like from The Wire? Why do you have that? “Ilana”: For dick picks, and sex media in general. . .I’m still on my family plan and I don’t fully understand the cloud and I don’t trust it. And I can’t risk just having dicks floating around. I feel like they’re going to pop up on my parents’ phone. “Abbi”: How many dicks are floating around? “Ilana” counting: Like the late 20’s? In “Destination: Wedding” (originally shown 3/26/2014), by the creators, ”Dr. Lincoln Rice” (played by stand-up comic Hannibal Buress) is pleading for a rental car. The nasty clerk “Mary” (played by Michelle Hurst): You think because you come in here lookin’ all Idris Elba I’m supposed to give everything up? Oh don’t act like you don’t know you look like him. He: Wait – are we talkin’ Luther or “The Wire”?
On Comedy Central’s The Daily Show, Jessica Williams in a comic “senior correspondent” response on 2/18/2014 to another Florida jury acquitting another white guy of killing a black teen, in Unjustified – Michael Dunn & Jordan Davis, used The Wire for another comparison: “Four black kids could be taking a calculus test together then to jumpy white folks it would still look like a scene from The Wire.”
In a “Critic’s Notebook” piece by The New York Times architecture critic Michael Kimmelman, on 3/18/2014: “A new public school in one of the poorest neighborhoods in East Baltimore wants to challenge the blueprint. Designed by Rob Rogers, of Rogers Partners in New York, Henderson-Hopkins, as it’s called, aspires to be a campus for the whole area — with a community center, library, auditorium and gym — as well as a hub for economic renewal. This is the neighborhood where parts of The Wire were filmed. In 2000, when the city’s mayor convened local business leaders, the vacancy rate was 70 percent. Poverty was twice the city average. Crime, infant mortality and unemployment were all through the roof. The idea that emerged — of making the school the centerpiece of a major redevelopment project — is a grand urban experiment. Operated by Johns Hopkins University in collaboration with Morgan State University, the school, which opened in January, belongs to a $1.8 billion plan that also includes new science and technology buildings, a park, retail development and mixed-income housing. While gentrification might threaten to displace the poor, the school is to be the glue that helps bind the district together.”
If I went back through Maureen Dowd’s columns in The New York Times wouldn’t I have found references that she’d seen the series? But on 4/4/2014 in “Bring Me My Dragons!” she claimed: “I’d been hoping to get the flu. I hadn’t had it in years, and there were so many TV series I’d never seen — The Wire, Breaking Bad, House of Cards [mea culpa, too], True Detective, — that required an extended convalescence. When I finally succumbed to a fever and crumpled in bed a couple of weeks ago with saltines and Gatorade, I grabbed the clicker, murmuring, ‘Alright, alright, alright.’ The only celebrated series I had no interest in was Game of Thrones. . . But after I finished tromping around the bayou with Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey, I decided to watch one Game of Thrones to see what the fuss was about. It is not only the most pirated show on the Internet, but one of President Obama’s favorites — although he hasn’t picked up any good tips about ruthlessly wielding power, either from Game or from Maggie Smith’s Countess of Grantham on Downton Abbey another show he raves about. After a marathon of three seasons of Game and the beginning of the fourth, starting this Sunday, I’m ready to forgo reality for fantasy.”
For once a comparison with Game of Thrones seems legit, as noted by Katie Walsh in her Indiewire recap on 4/6/2014 of the Season 5 opener Two Swords, written by the series’ creators D.B. Weiss (who also directed) and David Benioff: “Arya [Maisie Williams] wants a horse, as she's clearly outgrowing riding with The Hound (Rory McCann). They’re also hungry and have no money, because The Hound takes the stance that he’s not a thief. Arya rightly points out that he has no problem murdering little boys, to which he replies, “a man’s got to have a code” (to which I say: OMAR COMIN’!).”
The New Yorker 4/14/2014 cover promotion for Jeffrey Toobin’s “Letter from Baltimore - This Is My Jail: Where gang members and their female guards set the rules” was Post-The Wire. He also discussed his investigation on WNYC’s The Takeaway on 4/11/2014, “How One Gang Took Control of a Baltimore Jail”. [Forthcoming – I’ll read through the article for specific references.]
In “Amazon to Stream Original HBO Content”, 4/23/2014, Ravi Somaiya noted: “Beginning May 21, Amazon Prime members will have access to older HBO shows like The Sopranos and The Wire, and mini-series. . . Terms of the agreement, described as ‘multiyear,’ were not disclosed, but a person briefed on the deal said it was worth at least $300 million. That kind of price tag underscores the enormous value attached to the kinds of popular, high-quality movies and TV shows that can reliably draw audiences. The Sopranos and The Wire in particular, are considered pioneers of novelistic, highbrow TV as a genre and are rewatched like classic movies.” Slate’s headline on a 4/23/2014 piece by Aisha Harris was: “Omar Coming to Amazon Prime: HBO and Amazon Strike A Deal. . .if you’re an HBO-less viewer who has longed to catch up with Tony Soprano and Omar Little and hated waiting for the next disc in your queue to arrive in the mail, this deal is great news.”
At 2014 Tribeca Film Festival panel “Pen to Paper: Adaptation to Creation” at Barnes & Noble, Amy Berg, director of Every Secret Thing, Nicole’s Holofcener’s adaptation of Laura Lippmann’s novel, said the locale was switched from Baltimore to New York City because of the lack of tax incentives that had been available to The Wire. (The high profile House of Cards series negotiated a deal with the state of Maryland.)
Wendell Pierce joked he was at “the Oscars of housing in New York” at the annual luncheon, in May 2014, of the Citizens Housing and Planning Council. Margaret Anadu of Goldman Sachs in her introduction to him mentioned his role with The Wire, before detailing “It’s his commitment to rebuilding his hometown of New Orleans following the devastating effects of Hurricane Katrina that really won our hearts.” He gave a heart-felt introduction to Housing Impact Award-winners BRP Development: “I have synergy with CHPC and for 20 years to BRP Development. . . My passion is Pontchartrain Park where I grew up.” Afterwards, he posed with the CHPC staff, including Senior Fellow Harold Shultz, on the far left.
On Inside Amy Schumer “Down for Whatever” episode, 1st shown 5/6/2014, she’s interviewing a centenarian fellow alumna of Towson University. Amy asks: “Baltimore is wonderful, but it also has its dangerous parts. Did you ever watch the show The Wire?” The elderly woman, who still lives near the college in suburban Baltimore: “I don’t know enough about it, darling.” Amy: “You are a Baltimore girl!”
NBC News broadcast Brian Williams’ interview with NSA leaker Edward Snowden, on 5/28/2014: Q: “This is a big cultural change. You in effect moved to Russia from Hawaii – food, language, TV shows, what do you watch?” A: “It is a major cultural gap and it requires adjustment. Even though I didn’t choose to be here. Circumstances really trapped me here. I can adapt and live life as in America, more or less. That’s the beauty of the internet, is that we are no longer tied to our communities merely by physical location. You mentioned TV. Right now I’m watching a show The Wire about surveillance, which is, I’m really enjoying it. The second season is not so great. It’s nice.”
On Orange is the New Black (on Netflix, released 6/6/2014), “Hugs Can Be Deceiving” episode, written by Lauren Morelli, set in a women’s prison: The white “Piper Chapman” (played by Taylor Schilling) bangs the table in frustration. Guard: Watch yourself Chapman! “Sophia Burset” (played by Laverne Cox): They got your number now, honey., and grabs her chin and looks at her. “Chapman”: What you're looking at? “Sophia”: I knew them bitches was lying when they said you left here looking like Omar from “The Wire”. “Chapman”: See I told you everyone was looking at me. “Nicky Nichols” (played by Natasha Lyonne): Relax Omar. (Thanks to Arjan Beens for the citation.)
Here’s an indirect reference to The Wire influencing the next generation in Variety’s “Top 10 TV Scribes to Watch”, 6/10/2014: 30-year-old Chris Rogers, co-creator of Halt and Catch Fire, told Andrew Barker his inspirations are: “Robert Penn Warren, David Foster Wallace, David Simon”.
Michael Koresky and Jeff Reichert grudgingly acknowledged The Wire in 6/15/2014 American Interest, while insisting “Reviews Gilding the Small Screen” only in passing: “Even long-gone shows like The Wire, Deadwood), and The Sopranos still claim passionate proselytizers among cinephiles, whereas movies seem to increasingly have sell-by dates of interest.”
Clarke Peters’ serious image as “Lester Freaman” was satirized in his lip synching of Wiley’s “You Know the Words” music video in a Summer 2014 pool party. In the animated series BoJack Horseman, “The Telescope” written by Raphael Bob-Weksberg and Methar Sethi, (episode 1.08): BoJack does a typical ”Shiiiiiiiiiiiiiit”!
Chuck Klosterman’s collection of essays I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling with Villains (Real and Imagined) (Scribner, 2013) only has one citation in the index for The Wire (incorrectly identified as a film), on page 48, but guest host Kurt Andersen, on Charlie Rose 7/9/2014, cited “the guys on The Wire” among villains we love in popular culture when he introduced the author. And then they mostly went on to talk about “Walter White” in Breaking Bad.
In the U.K., The Guardian, “British TV drama – can it compete with the US?” by Mark Lawson, 7/25/2014: “It is now routine, in surveys of best-ever TV fictions, for US series screened during the last decade – including The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, and The Wire – to slug it out for gold, silver and bronze, while Britain's main hope of making the podium comes from productions that date from far back into the last century. . . If we are to achieve absolute equality with America, drama departments here may need to hang up a sign that reads: ‘No cops, no spies.’”
The old “Stinger Belles” fans must have been delighted that when Details Magazine Magazine put “The Undeniable, Indescribable Appeal of Idris Elba” on its 9/1/2014 style cover, Adam Sachs remembered: “Having achieved cult status as the drug kingpin Stringer Bell in a career-making run on HBO's The Wire, he's gone on to. . . ‘That he isn't James Bond yet is a complete failure of imagination on somebody's part,’ says David Simon, creator of The Wire. ‘I don't know who bollixed-up that obvious triumph.’. . . Music, spinning records and making them, has been a part of his life from his early career in London through his New York City years and his big break in Baltimore—where he'd record with his Wire costars. ‘Me and Wood Harris, who played Avon, and Hassan Johnson, who played Wee Bey, we'd book out a studio and make records of us rapping. I'd make the beats and chords—just fun, freestyle stuff.’. . .
Vanity Fair’s alert, by Joanna Robinson on 9/2/2014, to watch just a rumored remastered into HD HBO Wire showing and possible Blu-Ray release: “The Wire was killing off your favorite characters before Game of Thrones was even a glimmer in HBO's eye. . . The Wire is often called the greatest TV show of all time, so we’re going to assume you’ve probably seen it. But just in case you never quite got around to watching and have been faking it for years at cocktail and dinner parties, now’s your chance. . . I do look forward to ‘you come at the king, you best not miss’ making its way back into every day conversation. . . .There are pleasures to be had in a marathon of The Wire, whether this is your first time or your fiftieth. Beyond the superficial joys of seeing actors like Michael B. Jordan and Idris Elba at the beginning of their careers, there’s the deeper realization that the passionate appeals for social justice in David Simon’s show are as applicable today as it ever was.” (Thanks to Danielle Shapiro) EW confirming the rumor, Esther Zuckerman commented on the series that was: “under-appreciated by viewers when it was on the air, but has now been deemed by many the best television show ever. Surely, someone has told you that you have to watch The Wire. EW has.” Paste Magazine chimed in, by John Riti, 9/3/2014, “Viewers can now see one of the best TV series of all time in a different light. . . is regarded by many as one of the greatest and simultaneously most underappreciated shows of all time.”
In Daily Beast interview 9/16/2014 with Marlow Stern: “Inevitably, The Wire came up. [Dominic] West spoke fondly of the ‘astonishing afterlife’ of what many consider the greatest television series of all time and said he is still taken aback by the absurdity of strangers confronting him on the street and saying, quite apologetically, ‘I haven’t yet watched The Wire…I’m so sorry! But I mean to.” Asked whether the cast and crew were ever planning on making a feature-length film of the show, West offered an interesting response: ‘Constantly, There was constant talk of The Wire movie in the bar for five years, but nothing seemed to come about. I was talking to Wendell Pierce about it more recently because he was the driving force behind the movie idea, and we wanted David Simon to write it, obviously. But David Simon said, ‘It can’t be a sequel, it has to be a prequel. And that’s going to be all right for the black actors, but for the white ones, they don’t look younger than they did 10 years ago.’ West laughed, before adding in jest, ‘Whitey doesn’t look so good.’”
On the musical sitcom Garfunkel and Oates (on IFC), in the season finale “Maturity”, shown 9/25/2014, thirty-something “Kate Oates” (played by Kate Micucci) is trying online dating to prove she’s grown out of Peter Pan Syndrome by being ready for a boyfriend: I said I wanted a 33-year-old who liked frogs, closns, puppets, trains, kazoo parades, hacky sacks, and "The Wire". But she only gets a response when she changes her criteria to “all ages”—from a high school boy, who decides she’s too immature and inexperienced.
I don’t agree with Mark Harris’s comparisons in Grantland, 10/16/2014: “Should we see (or hear) [Shonda] Rhimes when we look at her characters? I’m sensitive to the glib offense of assuming that, as NPR’s Linda Holmes wrote dryly, ‘everything women write is really journaling.’ But male show creators transmute their best and worst qualities into their protagonists all the time. Josh Lyman, swinging through the West Wing and charming the ladies with banter, always felt like Aaron Sorkin’s self-idealizing surrogate, just as Toby Ziegler was his leave-me-alone-I’ll-do-it-myself dark mirror. The Don Draper [of Mad Men] who thinks his subordinates can’t ever quite nail it the way he can surely possesses some of Matt Weiner’s DNA. And there’s a lot of David Simon in Jimmy McNulty and every other know-it-all bastard on The Wire who is better and wiser than the morally stunted bosses who get in his way. It’s no insult to suggest that Rhimes’s many years as one of the only women of color in her field, rising to the top by learning to handle dolts who thought they knew better without alienating them, feels like it informs her characters (especially Miranda [Bailey of Grey's Anatomy] and Olivia [Pope of Scandal], who must manage both up and down).”
The Paley Center for Media cast and creator reunion at Paley Fest NY on 10/16/2014 got a lot of coverage, with photographs, commentary, and linkages to the hour-long panel discussion: at moderator Alan Sepinwall’s HitFlix, AV Club, EW, IndieWire, Rolling Stone, Variety, Vulture, and probably more, each emphasizing different angles. There wasn’t this much attention at the similar session I attended while the series was airing first-run.
Actress is an unusual follow-up to “the whatever happened to. . .” of a cast member of The Wire. The 2014 documentary follows Brandy Burre after playing tough political consultant “Theresa D'Agostino” over 15 episodes. (And the film certainly doesn’t make clear hers was a quite minor role.) At one point when she brings her mother in from Ohio to babysit her kids in Beacon, NY so she can go out on auditions to re-start her career, she shows her mom her scenes, evidently for the first time, skipping over the sex scene, but pointing out she was five months pregnant by the time by late-scheduled episode was filmed. Some might find the intimate close-up exhibitionist self-indulgence, but the insights of how difficult it is for women to balance work and family are not limited to the problems of self-presentation role-playing for an actress.
Alan Sepinwall (among others) positively compared the documentary podcast “Serial”, on 11/13/2014: “Similarly, Simon's The Wire (also set in Baltimore) was often at its most powerful when its stories ended in ways we didn't want them to. (Though that show never really trafficked in ambiguity about who did what, plenty of its characters got fates — good or bad — they didn't deserve.)”
HBO’s December 2014 marathon showing of the re-mastered episodes is renewing interest in The Wire, as noted by Audra Schroeder, on 12/27/2014, in The Daily Dot: “If you're a fan of the HBO series The Wire, and come across someone who's never seen it, there's inevitably a pained silence in which you try to not be That Guy and blurt out, ‘You've never seen The Wire???’ The show has a devoted fandom.” Baltimore Sun crime reporter Justin Fenton was inspired to photograph “then and now” settings from the series. E. Alex Jung in Vulture, 12/28/2014, had a different perception: “It looks like time may have passed, but some things don't really change.” (I’m not on Twitter to follow his postings.)
The upcoming Netflix action series Marvel’s Daredevil was described by showrunner Steven S. DeKnight to EW, 12/29/2014, evidently without irony about what David Simon had to go through to make his series: “We really wanted to take our cue from [films like] The French Connection, Dog Day Afternoon, Taxi Driver, and make it very, very grounded, very gritty, very real. We always say we would rather lean toward The Wire than what’s considered a classic superhero television show.” With reports that now Netflix has linked the two shows in their algorithm for subscriber preferences.
In 2014, Isiah Whitlock, Jr. was teaching a class of his students how to properly hold out “Sheeeeeeeeeit”.
Generally Through 2015
The complete series in HD availability for purchase at iTunes, Google Play, X-Box Video and Vudu on 1/5/2015, led Yahoo TV’s Kimberly Potts to link to David Simon’s reaction and to interview: “The Wire in HD: Stars On the Series Finale, Unhappy Endings, and Why a Reunion is Unlikely”.
NPR’s Eric Deggans, on 1/6/2015, “Rewatching The Wire: Classic Crime Drama Seems Written For Today: HBO's The Wire Now Looks As Modern As It Feels”.
Comics Kenan Thompson, Kevin Hart, and Jay Pharoah satirized The Wire’s corner boys as if they were gentrified in Saturday Night Live Bushwick, Brooklyn 2015 (on NBC, 1/19/2015)
Chad Coleman, in an interview with Variety, posted 2/9/2015, compared his characters’ sensitivity and being “soft” in The Wire and The Walking Dead: “I’m such a seasoned vet at this, I’m never not in a place of ‘It’s gonna come one day.’ The thing I always carry with me is when Stringer Bell got killed off on The Wire it was like, ‘OK, all bets are off, anybody can go.’ He was the most popular character on the show. . .I’m a big black man [laughs] and I still have to cross the street. I don’t mean no harm. There’s still that stigma. Whenever you can step inside a stereotype and blast it out of the water you want to do that. I won’t just take it to color, every man at his best must show vulnerability. You can’t be a father and not show vulnerability, you’ll be doing a disservice to your child. I’m grateful to carry that.”
On 2/11/2015, cited for setting a standard of comparison on the announcement of Jon Stewart’s retirement by Jason Zinoman in The New York Times: “[A]t Comedy Central. The Daily Show’ss impact on late night was arguably as great as that of prestige HBO shows like The Sopranos and The Wire on television drama.”
Spike Lee “spoke with Vulture about the movies, books, and people that have influenced his latest joint, as well as his career as a whole: “The Wire: I'm a big fan of The Wire; it's epic, you know. Five years, great storytelling, the whole package was very complex.” (posted 2/12/2015)
The AV Club cited in “Stream once and destroy: 20 great TV episodes too painful to watch twice”, 3/2/2015, with William Hughes listing at #2 “The Wire “-30-“: “His storyline in the show’s final episode earns its place on this list, as Dukie returns to Edward Tilghman Middle School to ask Prez for some money. He tells his former teacher that it’s for his GED, but Prez suspects the truth. We last see Dukie in the show’s final montage—and while there’s no lack of moments in that sequence to prove the show’s thesis that the system is designed to reward the bastards and punish the weak and the kind—the sight of a young man left with no option for happiness but to give himself over to heroin, as so many of the show’s wounded characters have before, makes it impossible to watch again.”
Vulture bothered to debate in a podcast, on 3/23/2015: “What show is more well written, The Wire or The Sopranos?”
In “This is Television’s Silver Age”, in The Washington Post, 4/4/2015, Hank Stuever, “Remember when people at parties started talking about television the way they once talked about movies? It was the late 1990’s, early ‘00s and we were enjoying what came to be known as ‘Golden Age of Television,’ a term repeated so frequently that critics began to shun it as cliché. . .The The Sopranos was on. Buffy the Vampire Slayer was on. Later on it was The Wire, Six Feet Under, Mad Men. . .Hyperbole took over; every show became the bet show ever. In other words, viewers certainly know what a Golden Age of TV is supposed to feel like. The question now is whether or not we’re still in it. Probably not. . It’s time to admit that we’ve now deeply settled into a Silver Age of TV that might last a long while.”
Surprise: front page article in The New York Times “Business Section “At the Head of the Pack, HBO Shows the Way Forward” by John Koblin and Emily Steel, on 4/13/2015, did not mention The Wire!
“2010-2015: A eulogy for Justified, the most underappreciated drama of our time” by Adam Epstein in Quartz, 4/14/2015: “The Sopranos. Breaking Bad. The Wire. Mad Men. These are the prestige television dramas that most say form the foundation of the 21st century’s ‘Golden Age of Television.’ But those four shows don’t tell the whole story. Justified might not be one of the pillars of TV’s Golden Age, but it too, was great—at times, transcendent, even. But it often feels like no one watched the show, placing it squarely in the realm of great TV shows like The Wire that somehow flew under the radar when first on the air, and relied instead on its few loyal fans proselytizing to their friends to convert them into fans. A victim of the Golden Age that spawned it, Justified was routinely overshadowed by other cable dramas, in both the ratings and awards departments. . . . The show was not part of the television zeitgeist. Actually, it wasn’t very popular by any standard. But it was so very good, and so very fun, and it didn’t really care about being anything besides those two things. I can only hope, that in a few years, more people will come around to it, and then we’ll become collectively annoyed when people act as though they’ve “discovered” it, just as they do with The Wire. I long for that annoyance. So long, Justified.
In Collider: “The Leftovers Season 2: Damon Lindelof Teases New Direction, The Wire’s Influence”, 5/12/2015. In an interview with Chris Cabin: “We got a chance to sit down with Lindelof recently to talk about how the writer-producer decided to approach the second season of The Leftovers, and Lindelof was quick to point to the narrative trajectory and storytelling of another HBO series, namely The Wire: ‘Although some people think the second season for The Wire is its least successful, I was just completely and totally captivated by the audacity and boldness of just shifting the storytelling down to the docks, and taking the characters who I had become deeply enamored of and sidelining them in favor of entirely new characters. In my mind, it paid off huge because it set up the paradigm for what the third season and the fourth season of The Wire could be, not to mention the fifth season. So, I’ve always felt that the next logical season of The Leftovers would just be the continuing adventures of these people in this place. Let’s not do that. Let’s try something different.’” [Now I’ll need to catch up on Season 1!]
Unexpected context reference on the PBS News Hour, 5/29/2015, amidst a discussion of the U.S. indictments of FIFA executives by Roger Bennett, Liverpool-born soccer analyst of Men in Blazers: “The FBI case revolves around hundreds of millions of dollars of money, wire fraud, racketeering, bribery taking place on American soil. The lead protagonist is a whistle-blower, Chuck Blazer, who lived in the Trump Tower, and had creamed off enough money to have a huge floor for his own use and a $6,000-a-month apartment just for his own cats. He’s turned evidence. They’re now trying to roll up with his evidence, and try and roll it up like Avon Barksdale in The Wire and land [FIFA President] Sepp Blatter. But this is an American story that’s taken place in America, the crimes have taken place here. And if America cracks FIFA, it will be their greatest gift to the world since the Marshall Plan.”
That wasn’t the only reference in discussions of the FIFA scandal. Tony Maglio in The Wrap, 6/3/2015, reported ESPN’s top journalist Bob Ley: “apparently has an encyclopedic memory of HBO’s The Wire. Ley’s name became a trending Twitter topic on Tuesday when he dropped the following quote from Wire character Omar Little during his ongoing and highly-praised “SportsCenter” coverage of the FIFA scandal. Come at the king, you best not miss, he offered. The one-liner was in reference to FIFA president Sepp Blatter’s announcement that he will step down amid a massive bribery scandal, just four days after being re-elected atop the all-powerful soccer organization. As one of his favorite series of all-time, Ley has been drawing similarities between Little’s fictional Baltimore gang and Blatter’s very real international one. “I devoured The Wire. I watched it four-five times just to study it. I love it,” Ley told TheWrap on Tuesday, laughing off the Internet Vine that has exposed him to a whole new legion of fans. “It’s so well-crafted, anybody who enjoys reading books, I think would enjoy watching The Wire.” Ley was just as passionate about the FIFA situation as he is about Michael Kenneth Williams‘ character on the pay-TV drama — it’s just that his emotions lie in the opposite direction.“What has long been suspected of being a near-criminal enterprise in terms of lax business standards, kickbacks and bribes.”
Vulture reported 6/1/2015 that Elba rapped about “Stringer Bell” on Sketpa's remix of "Shutdown". As quoted in The Hollywood Reporter by Abid Rahman on 6/3/2015: "See that Wire? Shut it down/Ain't nobody else selling brown/Ain't nobody else Stringer Bell/Boy from the East End did well."
In Thrill List, on 6/14/2015 [timed with the S5 finale of Game of Thrones], Kevin Alexander did “Every HBO Show Ranked” – and The Wire was only #2, even with criteria of “The shows were ranked on overall quality, dialogue, originality, influence on culture, and my subjective preferences.” At least he explained why, and atypically it wasn’t because of S2: “Best character: Omar Little. Come at the king, you best not miss. I’ve seen this show all the way through more times than any other HBO show. . .In fact, because of this piece, I started over again, and every time I do, I find something else fascinating that I never saw before. Simon stacks layer after layer, like some complicated and beautiful brickwork, and when you’re finished and you step back, all you can do is shake your head and marvel at what he’s accomplished, how he’s managed to paint a portrait of a city more accurately than even a book or film. The reason such passionate, creative work isn’t in the top spot is because of the fifth season -- the journalism arc, closest to his heart, seemed to play out with an agenda and didn’t bother fully developing the new characters caught within it. But that’s a minor squabble in what is otherwise the seminal profile of a small, struggling city and its inhabitants.”
The Mets, on 6/22/2015, posted an interview from Atlanta’s Turner Field stands on Facebook: “Seth Gilliam, star of The Walking Dead and The Wire, is a huge Mets fan. He came to the game yesterday while filming in Atlanta. He talks about spending Father's Day with his son watching his team.” He was surprised how many of the team members came up to him as fans of the show, calling him “Sgt. Carver”.
Among Vulture’s end of the 2014/2015 TV season lists was: “The Cast of The Wire Was Everywhere This TV Season”, by Ivan Cohen, 6/18/2015 – and even I haven’t had a chance to watch them all. He included: Aiden Gillen in Game of Thrones; Pablo Schreiber in Orange Is the New Black; Amy Ryan in Broad City; Wendell Pierce in The Odd Couple (but left out his corrupt, gambling parole officer in Ray Donovan and recurring role ni Suits); Dominic West in The Affair (but he missed John Doman’s co-starring role in the series); Isiah Whitlock Jr. in Veep; Domenick Lombardozzi in Boardwalk Empire and Daredevil; Glynn Turman in House of Lies; Reg E. Cathey in House of Cards and Grimm; Michael K. Williams in Boardwalk Empire and the upcoming The Spoils Before Dying; and, multiple actors together in The Walking Dead and The Good Wife. (He missed several others, including Jim True-Frost in American Odyssey).
Even in June 2015, Danielle Schwartz Shapiro could report finding “Map of D.C. from the set of The Wire at Second Chance, a salvage store in Baltimore.”: 
Josef Adelian in “How 50 Cent and a Feminist Action Hero Are Finally Putting Starz on the Map, in Vulture, 7/9/2015, describe how premium channel Starz learned from The Wire: “Strong social-media support for Power has certainly helped, but just as with Fox’s megahit Empire— which the Starz drama predates — it’s a big spike in one audience segment (African-Americans) that has fueled ratings growth. Even though Starz is available in only about a quarter of all TV homes, Power this summer regularly lands on Nielsen’s list of the top 20 TV shows among black viewers. And according to Starz research, the show has the biggest concentration of black viewers of any premium-cable drama since The Wire. [Ex-HBO programming chief/Starz CEO Chris Albrecht] notes that African-American audiences subscribe to premium networks at a higher rate than many other demographic groups — and yet despite this, pay-cable networks have historically served up few shows directly targeted toward them. Power took advantage of that untapped potential. ‘From a business point of view, it makes a lot of sense,’ Albrecht says.”
There’s been many appreciations of the 20th anniversary of the film Kids, generated by a panel discussion and screening at Part of BAMcinématek’s BAMcinemaFest 2015 on June 26, 2015, but until “Kids, Then and Now” by Ben Detrick in The New York Times, posted 7/21/2015, I had forgotten about The Wire connection: “After Kids [Leo] Fitzpatrick exiled himself to London after the film’s release, but he returned to New York and acting several years later. After appearing in Mr. Clark’s Bully in 2001, he spent three seasons on The Wire on HBO and had a role on Sons of Anarchy. More recently, Mr. Fitzpatrick appeared in an episode of Broad City and he has a part in Pee-wee’s Big Holiday, scheduled for release in 2016. Mr. Fitzpatrick is also a D.J. and art gallerist. Along with the artists Nate Lowman and Hanna Liden, he founded a pop-up gallery, Home Alone, that produces art shows in TriBeCa storefronts and other tiny spaces. He recently joined the Marlborough Chelsea gallery as a creative consultant.”
On the Huffington Post Black Voices blog, on 7/21/2015, Paul Achter, Associate Professor of Rhetoric at the University of Richmond, wrote: “Have You Seen The Wire?” about a course he annually teaches with political scientist Dr. Andrea Simpson, and talking about the series he loves outside the classroom: “When we say we have watched The Wire and then distance ourselves from its criticism of us, we exempt ourselves from an ongoing crisis in America.”
Uproxx, on 7/22/2015, by Jason Tabrys started in on “Stringer Bell’s Guide To Running A Business On The Wire”’, which was mostly a list of quotes on his economics. Uproxx then posted, on 11/24/2015, Christian Long’s list “Cedric Daniels Lines From The Wire For When You Mean Business”, with clips of Lance Reddick. For no obvious reason, Christian Long in Uproxx continued on 12/15/2015 with “Let Bunk From The Wire Help You Channel Your Inner Swagger”, with more quotes. This seems to be a continuing obsession of having just discovered the series in binge-watching on DVD, as in “What’s Stopping The Wire From An Epic Return To HBO?”, by Beware, posted 12/8/2015.
An ironic reference in “Cheap Fix: Heroin’s Resurgence -- ‘And then he decided not to be’”, in The Washington Post, 7/26/2015, by Marc Fisher. In a sad portrait of a young man who overdosed in Falmouth, Maine: “Everything finally seemed back on track. David was home for a short visit and looked happy, calm. He had a job, a girlfriend, a plan. His father, Kevin McCarthy, came home from work that Thursday and smiled to see his son take his dog, Kima, named for the drug-fighting detective on The Wire, out for a long walk.” Spoiler alert: it ends badly for him, and his brother.
“If The Wire Were Israeli, It Would Be This Show”, according to Jacob Kaplan in Jewniverse, 7/31/2015, also quoting interviews in a May 6 article in The Times of Israel by Jessica Steinberg: “Created by Israeli journalist Avi Issacharoff and writer, actor, and former undercover counter-terrorist Lior Raaz, the show follows an Israeli army unit and the Hamas militants the unit is tracking down. Fauda is Arabic for ‘chaos’, and the show more than lives up to its title—it’s an honest portrayal of the complexity and disorder at the heart of the Israel/Palestine conflict. There’s no clear ‘good guy’; often, characters in the Hamas camp are portrayed with remarkable sympathy.” Otherwise the reporter misinterprets The Wire for comparisons. But here’s the English subtitled trailer.
Gothamist, on 8/16/2015, reached too far for a Wire reference that made no sense in describing what The New York Times’s Maureen Dowd got of Republican Presidential candidate Donald Trump, followed by a long quote that doesn’t support this comparison: “There's also this gem about his warped, um, code. Trump is basically the Omar of the 2016 election.”
Matt Zoller Seitz, in “The Radical Humanism of David Simon”, Vulture, 8/12/2015, finally “apologizes” to Simon for not getting The Wire, in an essay on his oeuvre.
I agree with Christian Long, but why did he not realize this until 8/21/2015 in Uproxx? “Why McNulty and Bunk’s Relationship Was Vital To The Success Of The Wire’” But cool that people are still interested. (Thanks to Tom Ucko for the citation.)
Yet another young and/or amnesiac critic scorning True Detective Season 2 while not knowing The Wire was underappreciated in its time: Brogan Morris in “Golden Age Problems: Have We Come to Expect Too Much from TV?” , Paste Magazine, 8/20/2015: “Rather than viewing cinema as television’s better, it would appear we’ve come to expect more from the small screen than we do from its bigger, older brother. And as the so-called ‘golden age’ of television stretches on, every year looking more and more like it’s set to stay, it seems as though our tolerance for anything but the best has weakened. It’s somewhat understandable: The Wire, Deadwood, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, and the like forced other showrunners to up their game, so now we’re living in a time where it seems there’s always at least one great, unmissable show on at any one time.”
Another comedy reference: on Playing House, “Knotty Pine” episode, written by Vera Santamaria (1st shown 8/18/2015), “Emma Crawford” (played by Jessica St. Clair) interrupts her old high school boyfriend “Offficer Mark Rodriguez” (played by Keegan-Michael Key) in his suburban police station: Emma! I was in the midst of solving a crime right here!. . .Someone wrote the word“turd” on every single vending machine in town. “Emma”: Just like “The Wire”, huh. Where is McNulty when you need him?
Idris Elba has become such a big star that his “Stinger Bell” is less remembered – except the week of 9/1/2015, Washington Post pieces: TV critic Alyssa Rosenberg in “What we talk about when we debate who should play James Bond . . .Anthony Horowitz, who has written an authorized Bond novel, mentioned in an interview that he didn’t think that perpetual candidate Idris Elba was right for the role. . .Do we want a sexier Bond? Anyone who looks at Elba and sees only size and physical force, doubting Elba’s abilities as a seducer, might do well to revisit The Wire” Style writer Soraya Nadia McDonald weighed in on “Here’s what we’re missing when we discuss Idris Elba and James Bond . . .Of course, as an actor, Elba is capable of stepping outside of himself to play Bond. He mastered an American accent to play Stringer Bell on The Wire, so much so that he fooled creator David Simon into thinking he was American when he auditioned for the part.”
Stay Tuned, Vulture's TV advice column was dated 9/2/2015, but was the familiar “The 100 TV Dramas Everyone Should Watch” by Margaret Lyons was in categories and alpha order under: “THE OBVIOUS MEGAPRESTIGE ONES: When people try to make claims about a ‘golden age’ of TV, this is what they're talking about, usually. These are the straight-up masterpieces. . .The Wire is, somehow, as good as everyone says it is.”
The Hollywood Reporter compiled “Hollywood's 100 Favorite TV Shows”, 9/16/2015, but The Wire only rated #30 out of 100, with no new commentary on why.
In The Atlantic, 10/5/2015, “A Black Boy in Baltimore” by Melinda B. Anderson: “Mired in unemployment, poverty, and crime, West Baltimore is a community made famous as the setting for HBO’s The Wire, a drama series that centered on the city’s drug trade.”
On Comedy Central’s The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore, the 10/8/2015 panel of comics discussed media mogul Rupert Mudoch’s tweet in praise of Republican Presidential candidate Dr. Ben Carson: “What about a real black President who can properly address the racial divide?” Contributor Jordan Carlos retorted that the tycoon would only consider “Omar” in The Wire a real black.
Just about every review of Beasts of No Nation, adapted by Cary Joji Fukunaga from Uzodinma Iweala’s novel set in a fictional, nameless African country of a civil war “manned” by abused child soldiers, made the same comparison that A.O. Scott did in The New York Times, 10/15/2015: “The Commandant is a demonic father figure, a seducer and a predator who rules his young charges less through fear than through the motivational grandiosity of a football coach. That [Idris] Elba can be scary and charismatic at the same time will not be news to anyone who saw him in The Wire, but the Commandant lacks the ambition and the entrepreneurial savvy of Stringer Bell.” [An odd claim, because the character is ambitious and sets off internecine warfare when he’s passed over for a promotion.]
Saturday Night Live “cold” opening on 10/17/2015 was a parody of the first Democratic Presidential Candidates Debate that was held by CNN earlier in the week. Making fun of how poorly the non-leading candidates sold themselves, Taran Killam as former Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley said: “When I was mayor of Baltimore, I did such a good job, they made two TV shows about my city, Homicide and The Wire.”
On Supernatural, “Thin Lizzie” episode, 11/4/2015, written by Nancy Won, the Winchester Brothers set off to hunt suspicious happenings in Fall River, MA. “Dean” (played by Jensen Ackles) asks what to do with former angel “Castiel”, who as part of adjusting to life on earth now had recently discovered Netflix. “Sam” (played by Jarad Padalecki) assures him: Oh, he's knee-deep in binge-watching “The Wire”. Just started Season 2. “Dean”: Oh yeah. He's not coming out any time soon. In the next episode, “Our Little World”, written by Robert Berens, “Castiel” looks haggard watching reruns of Jenny Jones talk show. “Dean” calls: I thought you were going with socially acceptable binge-watching, you know, like “The Wire” or Game of Thrones. “Castiel”: Well, you know, Dean, man cannot live on caviar alone. “Dean”: I’ve been there before. I’ve heard the siren song of the idiot box. Go outside and get some air.
Many entertainment outlets picked up The Baltimore Sun’s 12/3/2015 obituary by Jacques Kelly: “Melvin Williams, whose life as a West Baltimore drug kingpin in the 1960s and post-prison redemption earned him a place in HBO's The Wire, died Thursday at the University of Maryland Medical Center. Friends said Mr. Williams, 73, told them he had cancer. . . David Simon, who co-created The Wire, covered Mr. Williams as a reporter for The Baltimore Sun. ‘Melvin did a lot of damage — and he'd be the first to admit it,’ Mr. Simon said Thursday. ‘He was a fascinating man in terms of Baltimore and what the drug war was going to do to this country.’. .. Mr. Simon recalled a meal with Mr. Williams at Moe's Seafood in the Inner Harbor. They met with Edward Burns, a former homicide detective who had built a successful case against Mr. Williams — and was collaborating at the time with Mr. Simon on The Wire. ‘Melvin was polite to Ed, if not cordial. They shared some very funny moments.’ He said they came away from the meeting and offered Mr. Williams the role of the deacon on The Wire. Fans of The Wire have long speculated that Mr. Williams was the inspiration for the drug dealer character Avon Barksdale. Mr. Simon addressed the question in 2004: ‘Avon Barksdale? He is not Melvin Williams, or Warren Boardley, or Linwood Williams, or Peanut King. He is in a sense, all of those kingpins from Baltimore's criminal past — and therefore none of them.’ He offered a slightly different answer on Thursday. ‘There's a piece of Melvin in The Wire. We used a lot of different people. There's the DNA of a half-dozen people we used.’"
One of the best films of 2015 Spotlight, about The Boston Globe’s series on pedophile priests, was inspired by The Wire: Jada Yuan’s interview with David Simon in Vulture, posted 12/4/2015, followed up his 11/3/2015 interview with writer/director Tom McCarthy that revealed he was influenced by his acting the role of the fabricating – “bad guy for most journalists” and fan despised-- “Scott Templeton” that he wanted to salute investigative journalism by newspaper reporters. Simon: “We’ve joked about Spotlight being his penance. . . .I think there’s a great deal of forgiveness for the streetwise badass in this world. I mean, there’s a peculiar way in which the gangster chic tends to overwhelm some viewers’ sense of morality. . . if you do your dirt with paper or with a briefcase, it’s somehow less forgivable. That’s just people enjoying the gangster-movie part of that. . .[He’s] based on a lot of fabricators. It’s a repetitive theme. . . I said, ‘Your character’s going to do some things that are increasingly less ethical ... The secret to your performance, and I know you’ll get it, is that your character thinks that he’s the good guy. He thinks he’s right, and that what he values is best — at least until the confrontation with McNulty at the end — and you’re able to compartmentalize very carefully what your sins are and the reasons you’re doing them.’. . . And to be fair, I think everyone was paying attention to the fabulist that gets away in the last season of The Wire, but that season we bookended with two very good pieces of journalism. In the first, the city editor discovers something in a City Council agenda that is a real conflict of interest, and they report the hell out of it, and he writes that to the front page. That’s the first thing you see happen. And the last thing is a very honest piece of narrative journalism about Bubbles. . . So we were critiquing a newspaper that was no longer really attentive to the problems of its city. In contrast, Spotlight harkens back to a moment where a newspaper sat up, took notice of a problem in its city, and surrounded it with real conviction and ethical fervor. They’re both the same argument, in some ways; one’s just being made in the best-possible example, and the other using the worst. In the Hollywood Reporter “Writers’ Roundtable”, Amy Schumer teased him that he had used a line from The Wire in his script: “You look good girl!”
On Chicago Fire (on NBC) episode “2112”, written by Ian McCulloch, 1st shown 11/17/2012, “Joe Cruz” (played by Joe Minoso) is visited by a gang member from his old neighborhood. “Brian "Otis" Zvonecek” (played by Yuri Sardarov) offers to help, but is rebuffed: What do you know about gangs? “Otis”: I watched “The Wire”.
Sisters, the December 2015 re-teaming comic vehicle for Tina Fey and Amy Poehler written by co-star/comic actress Paula Pell, sticks in a lot of references to their glory days and looking to past, so that’s probably why “Maura Ellis” (Poehler) references that she’s always meant to watch The Wire, especially to binge watch since it came out on DVD, while she’s miserably failing at flirting with her neighbor “James” (played by Ike Barinholtz). [Atypically, I wasn’t taking notes at the press screening so didn’t note the exact quotes, but hope to remember to get it eventually.] In contrast, her sister’s unhappy alpha nemesis, “Brinda” (played by Maya Rudolph) is up-to-date with Game of Thrones.
When The Queen’s New Year’s Honors List was announced, The Hollywood Reporter headlined on Facebook: “Stringer aka Idris Elba gets another honor!” Abid Rahman continued on 12/30/2015: “Elba. . .received an OBE for services to drama, capping off a fine year for the former star of The Wire.”
Especially noteworthy after being passed over for an Academy Award, Idris Elba himself cited the importance of The Wire to his career in a speech to Members of Parliament , on 1/18/2016, demanding more diversity in British TV (though that is also an issue in the U.S.): “I knew I wasn’t going to land a lead role. I knew there wasn’t enough imagination in the industry for me to be seen as a lead. In other words, if I wanted to star in a British drama like Luther then I’d have to go to a country like America. And the other thing was, because I never saw myself on TV, I stopped watching TV. Instead I decided to just go out and become TV.”
During SuperBowl 50 on 2/7/2016, Toyota Prius commercials were considered by David Simon and fans a comic “Sobotkas” reunion, featuring The Wire actors Chris Bauer, Pablo Schreiber, and James Ransone together: “The Longest Chase” and “Hunters”. I think this series is continuing.
Reviews of the PBS Frontline episode “Chasing Heroin”, first broadcast 2/23/2016, included comparisons to The Wire’s “Hampsterdam” in the discussion of Seattle’s LEAD - Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion to decriminalize heroin use downtown. Similar comparisons were made when Mayor Svante L. Myrick of Ithaca, NY, proposed the next day a legal site for using heroin. All commentators cynically noted that the proposals came from areas where the heroin addicts are now primarily white.
NPR’s television commentator Linda Holmes, on 3/16/2016, compared the FX mini-series “The People Vs. O.J. Simpson Gets To The Gloves. . . It's always more complicated and daunting to attribute horrors of any kind to systemic problems and widely shared human frailties rather than the malice or incompetence of aberrant individuals, and it's particularly hard on television, which so favors stories about people over stories about institutions. (This is also what made The Wire so unusual.) It's easier to believe that the trial turned into a circus because it fell into the hands of the wrong people, but more interesting to consider whether it turned into a circus in spite of the best intentions of the right ones.”
Odd comparison reference by Donnell Alexander, on 3/22/2016, in “I Love My Children and I Owe Them So Much Money”, in Jezebel: “Let’s get real: Some fathers who don’t pay child support are indeed mustache-twirling deadbeats committed to shortchanging their children. (Perhaps you’ve read about them on Facebook.) Some are elusive junkies, switching up their cell phone numbers like burners on The Wire. (Perhaps you’ve read about them on Facebook, too.) Some are straight junkies. The majority are, for any number of reasons, just regular old broke.”
The New York Times expanded its usual description of the network in “With a Stand-Alone App, Starz Looks Beyond the Cable Bundle” by Emily Steel, 4/5/2016: “Previously, [Chris] Albrecht was the chief executive of HBO, where he helped assemble a slate of signature series like The Sopranos, The Wire and Sex and the City.”
I found out about this free public event too late via Twitter:
Even in the Marvel Universe, re-reported Kevin Anderson in The Nerdist, 4/13/2016: “Luke Cage Will Be Like The Wire, Producer Says. . . For what seemed like 62 years, people told me I needed to watch HBO’s beloved but canceled crime series The Wire, and for a good long time I resisted. Then, finally, my ability to flatly refuse awesomeness withered and I watched the five seasons of gritty Baltimore cops-versus-drug-dealers-and-also-other-things shenanigans and it was amazing. Obviously. A billion people can’t be wrong. But now that it’s over, what do we have to take its place? Apparently, Marvel and Netflix‘s Luke Cage series will fit that bill. At the premiere of Captain America: Civil War Tuesday night in Los Angeles, all of the Marvel who’s who were traipsing the red carpet and Cage‘s executive producer, Cheo Hodari Coker, teased the new series’ musical roots to [Joey Nolfi for] Entertainment Weekly, saying it has a ’90s hip-hop vibe, but also a gritty, urban tone. ‘We have a lot of different musical appearances,’ said Coker, who also wrote the show’s first two episodes. ‘But at the same time, we’ve got the Marvel action. We’ve got drama. I would like this to be, I mean, I know this is heavy but, The Wire of Marvel television, because we really deal with a lot of different issues’.” Luke Cage premieres September 30 on Netflix streaming – so let’s see how many more such comparisons there will be.
Another series compared to The Wire: By Maureen Ryan, now Chief TV Critic of Variety, 4/11/2016: The Last Panthers (Import on Sundance Channel): “Much of what transpires comes off as an homage to complex dramas like The Wire and The Shield and though The Last Panthers isn’t in the league of those American classics, it’s a credible and illuminating look at the movement of cash, guns and lucrative contracts in the interconnected Europe of today. . . And though it’s a sad fact of life that not all cops can be as charismatic and memorable as The Wires Jimmy McNulty or Bunk Moreland, the very slow reveal of backstories in The Last Panthers can leave the main characters feeling a little thin and underdeveloped. . . ‘Sometimes things are too rotten to change’, a character says at one point, sounding, as it happens, just like someone from The Wire. Brandon Nowack in The A.V. Club went further, 4/20/2016: The Last Panthers should have watched The Wire. . . Khalil [played by TR] has personally grown up in that environment, and he’s watched his brother fall into crime. That’s why he’s so intent on cleaning it up, on playing white knight. Unfortunately, as he learns from two The Wire plots stitched together and moved to Marseilles, that’s easier said than done.” The New York Times, too, Neil Genzlinger on 4/12/2016: “There are flashbacks galore, and the series owes quite a debt to the oblique storytelling of The Wire. This would be a better, easier-to-follow series if it allowed itself to be direct from time to time, but it will reward those who like their television dense and brooding.” Brian Grubb in Uproxx, 4/13/2016: The Last Panthers is a dark and gritty crime drama highlighted by strong performances. If you like shows like that —The Wire, Luther, other shows starring Idris Elba — there’s a solid chance you’ll like this, too.” Though the intellectual comparisons started when it was first shown in the U.K. on SkyAtlantic, David Stubbs in The Guardian, 12/10/2015: “Among The Last Panther’s many strengths is not just its fascinating and multiple shades of moral grey, but its strong political sense. . .showing that the rise of postwar Serbia has been hampered by corruption. It has been compared to The French Connection, but The Wire is a more apposite comparison. Although scripted byJack Thorne, who previously worked on This Is England, it was co-created by Jérôme Pierrat, a journalist specialising in organised crime.”
In “Why everyone is freaking out over Emily Nussbaum’s Pulitzer Prize for criticism” by Alyssa Rosenberg, in The Washington Post, 4/28/2016: “But even as the canon of television’s Golden Age was falling into place, television critics were absent from the roster of Pulitzer Prize winners during the crucial years when The Sopranos, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, The Wire and Deadwood were on the air. . . Nussbaum aims an even sharper pin at the Golden Age canard, most famously with an essay arguing that Sex and the City was just as important as “The Sopranos” in expanding the idea of what was possible on television. . . Nussbaum’s win [is] a reminder that it’s one thing to fight for a medium to get recognized as art, and another to win that fight and start pushing the medium to get bigger, more expansive, more eccentric and more specific.”
David Simon received a career achievement award and taught a master class in a “packed” Blanquerna University Auditorium at the third annual Serielizado, the International Television Show Festival in Barcelona “a festival about everything that is generated around television fiction and exclusively thought for the TV-Series fanatic”, where Variety’s Emilio Mayorga interviewed him, 4/26/2016: Q: “Years ago, audiences saw a chapter of one show once a week, now there’s many different ways to see a whole series. Do you have the feeling that this is affecting storytelling strategies?” A: “It only works I think as premium. I think I’ve proved it doesn’t quite work for episodic. I[’ve] never been able to glean an audience for these things while they’ve been on the air. Once they are all done, people start looking at them and then they notice that you may have built something and the word-of-mouth goes around. Nobody learned a lesson from The Wire. Nobody said: ‘While we were watching it, it didn’t seem like it had a plan, it didn’t seem like it was much and it built and built. and finally it was about something. So I’m going to watch the next show he’s doing. So people watched two episodes of Tremé and they said: ‘It’s not going anywhere?’ If you got to the end and you saw what we built, there’s a different dynamic. So now you start hearing people saying: ‘I actually watched and it was O.K. They knew where they were going’, but you did not hear that while The Wire was happening. So I think in some ways, Netflix and Amazon , the idea of just dumping the season and saying ‘here it is’. Watch it at your own pace.’ That may be the future: TV could be the lending library rather than the broadcast, the medium that it is now. . . But television seems to have part of that place where it is starting to, just starting to, engage in dramatic planned argument and I think that’s interesting.”
Data-cruncher Walt Hickey, Chief Culture Writer at 538, figured on 4/28/2016, that he could evaluate HBO’s prestige by the numbers using the extremely inadequate data base of “the IMDb user rating for every television episode” (which I have never bothered to participate in for TV) and includes: “The Wire was launched in 2002, bolstering HBO’s offerings, but in 2003, there was a pretty heavy dip in the overall quality compared with the average. . . By 2004, with the debut of Deadwood and strong seasons for The Wire and The Sopranos, the ratings go back to above-average. The level remained consistently above-average through 2008 . . . The network’s best calendar year was 2001. Its best consecutive 365 days was from June 17, 2006, to June 17, 2007, when we saw the third seasons of Deadwood and Entourage, the fourth and final good season of The Wire, the second season of Rome and the final episodes of The Sopranos. That’s certainly a hard tear to match! But still, we’re getting the chance to check out offerings among HBO’s best since the renaissance began.”
In Variety’s Jenette Riley 4/29/2016 interview with director Ben Wheatley about casting an American actress in his High-Rise: “[I]t’s ballsy for [Elisabeth Moss] to sit in the middle of a massive U.K. cast and pull off this great British accent. But she did it. When you get an accent right, it’s impressive. I remember seeing The Wire and looking up Idris Elba and learning he wasn’t American and just going “What the f—!”
On 4/28/2016, President Obama posted: “strong intellectual property protections make sure no one can undercut our economy or take advantage of America's great creators . . .With these protections in place, American innovators are free to create that unique brand of American culture that has shaped the heart and soul of this imaginative country for centuries. . .When I got back from Hannover Messe [global trade fair in Germany this week], I took some time to jot down a few of my favorite works - proud examples of what Americans can create, and what we have to protect:
Some actors seem always to be associated with The Wire, when there’s bad news, such as Wendell Pierce’s arrest in Atlanta reported all over the news on 5/16/2016, and when they are in movies, such as in A.O. Scott’s review: in The New York Times 5/12/2016: “What’s equally striking about Money Monster is the presence, in supporting roles, of excellent actors best known for their small-screen work. One of the film’s incidental pleasures is the game of cable-drama trainspotting it invites. Fans of Outlander will be happy to see [Caitriona] Balfe. [Dominic] West will stir up memories of The Wire and The Affair. And look! There’s Giancarlo Esposito (Breaking Bad), Chris Bauer (also The Wire), John Ventimiglia (The Sopranos).”
I’m sure any review of D. Watkins’ The Cook-up: A Crack Rock Memoir is going to mention The Wire. Here’s The New York Times, 5/13/2016, by Jason Parham: “Baltimore is perhaps best known for its tangled politics and its ever-swelling ¬congregation of illegal drug outfits, thanks to David Simon’s mid-aughts HBO show The Wire, the haunting urban panorama that lodged itself into the American pop consciousness. This time, though, the city’s wickedness — brought on by a trickling stream of bureaucratic failure through the years, from the early days of the 1960s segregationist police force to the more recent accusations of predatory practices among Housing Authority workers — finds a suitable host in Watkins’s self-labeled ‘crack rock memoir’.”
Jada Yuan at Cannes Film Festival for Vulture, 5/15/2016: “Dominic West’s Big Regret From The Wire: "Obama's met everyone on The Wire except for me. Because I’m white! And English! He did invite everyone else who’s American to the White House."
I don’t agree, but Matthew F. Delmont, a professor of history at Arizona State University, is the author of the forthcoming Making Roots: A Nation Captivated, in The New York Times, 5/27/2015, “How Roots Changed America” claims: “Why America Forgot About Roots. . .Roots has not been completely forgotten; artists like Kara Walker and Edgar Arceneaux have made reference to it, as have rappers like Missy Elliott and Kendrick Lamar. It inspired Henry Louis Gates’s PBS genealogy shows [including: Finding Your Roots in 2016; Finding Your Roots in 2015; Finding Your Roots in 2012; African American Lives/Faces of America]. And yet today there are more books on recent critically lauded television shows like The Sopranos The Wire, Breaking Bad, and Mad Men than on Roots.”
Alyssa Rosenberg in The Washington Post, 5/31/2016, on “What HBO needs to do when Game of Thrones is over. . . 3. Break with the white-dude brand: It’s not entirely fair to HBO that the network has a reputation for difficult white men as both subjects and showrunners. Series like Deadwood and Game of Thrones have fantastic female characters, and The Wire remains one of the richest displays of the talents of African American acting talent ever to appear on television.”
I’m sure any review of Del Quentin Wilber’s A Good Month for Murder: The Inside Story of a Homicide Squad, which follows detectives from Prince George’s County in Maryland, a suburb of Washington, D.C., which was inspired by David Simon’s Homicide, is also going to mention The Wire. (Well, The Washington Post didn’t.) Here’s Jennifer Senior in The New York Times, 6/2/2016: “Mr. Simon’s worldview, spelled out with rueful, crystalline precision in everything he’s ever done (particularly The Wire) is simple:The game is rigged. Young black men in poor neighborhoods are outrageously impeded by diminished economic horizons, the unforgiving rules of the street, centuries of institutional racism. The best-intentioned and brightest detectives are working on a shoestring in communities that have zero reason to trust them. And everyone’s getting the shaft from elected officials, who generally care more about poll numbers than the lives they’ve sworn to improve and protect. Mr. Wilber makes no such points.”
Michael Ausiello at TV Line on 6/30/2016, who only writes breathlessly about spoilers for upcoming TV episodes: Arrow's Season 5 Big Bad an Homage to Idris Elba's Wire Villain Stringer Bell?. . . TVLine has learned exclusively that the CW drama’s upcoming fifth season will introduce a new villain loosely inspired by Idris Elba’s Stringer Bell. The character, tentatively named ‘Anton Church,’ is a ruthless crime lord who sets out to fill the sizable void left by Damen Darhk and H.I.V.E. The initial casting notice describes him as an ‘apex predator’ who ‘cuts his way through the shadows’ by taking down ‘the biggest threat first.’ (Um, he’s looking at you, Ollie Q[ueen].) While the role is being likened to Elba’s classic Wire baddie [sic], the breakdown also references ex-Game of Thrones actor Jason Momoa as a physical prototype.” Which is casting-speak for a male actor of color.
Joe Nocera asks in the 6/18/2016 “Can Netflix Survive in the New World It Created?. . . The company shifted [from movies] to television. Cable networks like FX and AMC were developing expensive, talked-about dramas, the kind HBO pioneered with The Sopranos and The Wire. But these series, with their complex, season-long story arcs and hourlong format, seemed to be poor candidates for syndication, unlike self-contained, half-hour sitcoms like “Seinfeld,” which can be watched out of order.”
British actor Damien Lewis in New York Times Talk, taped June 23 2016, in explaining why he moved from films to TV series like Homeland and Billions (which I still have to catch up with on Showtime On Demand) credited David Simon and The Wire for starting "the novelization of TV" worth watching over hours in DVD box sets, or binge on any platform.
A July 1 promotion for a Brooklyn-based web series on my FaceBook feed: “It's being called The Wire for the new generation. Don't miss #MoneyandViolence. Seasons 1 & 2 on Digital HD.” So I went back for other commentary. Evette Dionne, who identifies herself as a Black feminist culture and fashion writer, on 1/31/2016, in Complex: “It's full of violence, grittiness, and the twists-and-turns that made HBO's The Wire a sleeper hit.” Season 1 was on CloudTV; Season 2 streaming on Tidal. While the YouTube subscription series is promoting that both seasons can be purchased as of 8/16/2016, I’ll only catch up if I don’t have to shell out for another subscription service.
In New York Magazines “Case Against the Media By the Media” issue, 7/24/2016, David Simon is quoted several times with the identifier as “Creator of The Wire”. His full interview, in “The Transcripts: A Master Class in What’s Wrong (and Right) With the Media by Those In the Know” asked more specifically how he chose to portray the media in the series and the difference between journalistic and dramatic storytelling.
A 7/25/2016 promotion for WNYC’s Studio 360“My Fair Radio Host: If Hugh Laurie and Carey Mulligan and half the cast of The Wire can nail an American accent, can Nebraska-born Kurt Andersen learn a convincing English accent? He teamed up with a professional voice coach to see if he can pronounce "horse" and "daughter" like someone who’s been received into British society.”
If I had known that Michael K. Williams was in HBO’s The Night Of, I would have attended that preview and panel at 2016 the Tribeca Film Festival. He was also promoting the Viceland channel docu-series he hosts and executive produces Black Market, which explores and provides his insights on underground economies in America and around the world [His episodes’ introduction: “Why people do the things they do? Desperation drives them to it. When the system fails you make your own system.”], when he was interviewed on NPR, July 25, 2016.
Late Night with John Oliver, first shown on HBO 8/7/2016, identified David Simon as “Before he was the creator of The Wire he was a reporter at the Baltimore Sun”, and played a clip of his despairing testimony on The Future of Journalism, in a larger piece decrying the dying of local newspapers.
In “Donald Trump’s Description of Black America Is Offending Those Living in It”, by Richard Fausset, Alan Blinder and John Eligon, 8/24/2016: “as [Alexis] Scott, [a former publisher of The Atlanta Daily World, a black-owned newspaper] put it: ‘He is giving voice to every stereotype he’s ever heard. I heard someone say, ‘It’s like he only watches The Wire, and that’s what he knows about black people.’”
During the 3rd debate on October 19 , Secretary Hillary Clinton: “You know, every time Donald thinks things are not going in his direction, he claims whatever it is is rigged against him. The FBI conducted a year-long investigation into my e-mails. They concluded there was no case. He said that the FBI was rigged. He lost the Iowa caucus, he lost the Wisconsin primary. He said the Republican primary was rigged against him. Then Trump University gets sued for fraud and racketeering. He claims the court system and the federal judge is rigged against him. There was even a time when he didn't get an Emmy for his TV program [The Apprentice] three years in a row and he started tweeting that the Emmys were rigged.” Donald Trump interrupted: “Should have gotten it.” Seth Meyers@sethmeyers, of Late Night With. . immediately tweeted: “Now if he was taking a stand on THE WIRE never winning an emmy....”, liked by some 2.6K and ret-tweeted by over 700, when I checked a few days later.
On NPR/WNYC’s ”Ask Me Another” trivia comedy game show, house musician/singer-songwriter Jonathan Coulton: “So in this next game, the band They Might Be Giants helped me update some classic theme songs. We rewrote their lyrics to be about more modern TV dramas and asked contestants…to identify both shows…So, you see, you have to tell us what the drama is that we are describing with the lyrics. And for a bonus point, tell us what sitcom the theme song was originally from. And if you get either part incorrect, your opponent can steal that point. Are you ready?” JOHN FLANSBURGH: (Singing) “Now the drug war failed, and we see that every day institutions are corrupt, and it's always been this way. The cops, the gangs, the mayor and the press. Now Stringer Bell is dead, but no one will confess 'cause it's Baltimore. Yes, it's Baltimore. Yes, it's Baltimore and Maryland. Yes, it is - Baltimore and Maryland.” [Contestant]: “Is it The Wire?” [But the 2 contestants can’t name that tune.] COULTON: “What is it, everybody?” AUDIENCE: “Diff'rent Strokes!”
“Sundance’s Rectify could be The Wire for small-town America”, said Todd VanDerWerff in Vox, 10/26/2016: “an executive for AMC Networks (the studio that produces the show [for Sundance Channel]) had recently shared his hope that Rectify will ultimately have a similar life cycle to The Wire. . . Yes, The Wire was little watched while on the air, but after it ended, more and more people watched it, became obsessed with it, and turned it into the enduring TV classic it was always meant to be. . . Like The Wire, which dug into the systemic failures of the American city, Rectify travels to a place TV rarely travels to, to examine people in crisis. Only in this case, that place is a small town in the South, and many of its residents would likely turn up on other TV shows as goofy rednecks — as stereotypes, more or less. . .”
Indiewire’s headline "The Wire star finally gets his very own leading role with Josh Locy's festival favorite” to Kate Erbland’s introduction on 10/31/2016 to the trailer of Hunter Gatherer led me to his interview with Eric Kohn, 4/1/2016, Indiewire : “Andre Royo on Life After ‘The Wire and Finally Getting a Lead Role . . .“The Wire is one of the best things ever done and it certainly changed me.But I wasn’t getting offers after The Wire. It was pretty much an East Coast show that ended in 2005 without that many people seeing it. Idris [Elba] and Dominic West had the normal leading man stature. They were big overseas and they had a certain weight to them as far as their size and energy. If you play a cop, there is a lot of work for you as cops. If you are the leader of a drug cartel, then you can lead an army or you can lead so and so. So that archetype is easy to insert places. And they’re fucking talented. But for a hapless defeated human tragedy like Bubbles, that doesn’t really go into a Disney film. That doesn’t go into a romcom. So nobody was like, ‘Let’s get Bubbles to play a Lieutenant’. . .Josh really enjoyed my Bubbles portrayal on The Wire, but he was also scared, like any artist, that that was going to overshadow his own creation. He didn’t want anyone going ‘Oh, look, it’s Bubbles!’ He wanted his shit defined. So we talked about it and I was like look, ‘No one is going to stop calling me Bubbles.’ And I don’t want them to, because that was a really defining character in my career. It changed me as a human being and an artist. It gave me confidence and it gave me such a connection for what I bring to the table. But I try to find the humanity in every character. I try to make that the foreground to anything else and I don’t want that to ever go away. . . What made The Wire really successful is that we all sat in a hotel room and decided that story comes first. No one cares about ego. No one cares about screen time. It’s about the city of Baltimore, it’s about the story. Let’s get it right and we held everyone accountable. That doesn’t happen throughout Hollywood filmmaking.”
Festival Albertine, curated by Ta-Nehisi Coates at the French/English book store in Manhattan, included this panel session on 11/3/2016: “From the Margins to the Mainstream: Producer David Simon (The Wire); graphic novelists Kelly Sue Deconnick (Captain Marvel) and Catherine Meurisse (La Légèreté); and spoken word artist D’de Kabal (Chants Barbares) will examine how, and why, certain art forms (from television to comic books and slam poetry) move from low art to high art, and how those same art forms are considered within the realm of French and American culture. Moderated by Ta-Nehisi Coates.”
In the “Who’s the Cool Girl Josh Is Dating?” (Season 2, Episode 7, first broadcast 12/9/2016) of the musical comedy Crazy Ex-Girlfriend (on CW), written by Michael Hitchcock, “Paula Proctor” (played by Donna Lynne Champlin) is studying constitutional law wth her law school study partner: I’m telling you I haven’t been this obsessed with something since the first season of “The Wire”! You don’t watch “The Wire”? What! I’m so jealous of you that you get to watch it for the first time. Rebecca and I binged that in like two days –we loved it! She is so Avon and I’m so Stringer Bell! Why am I talking about Rebecca?, her estranged best friend. Meanwhile, “Rebecca Bunch” (played by creator star Rachel Bloom) is with her clueless new best friend, watching a security tape: I'm gonna fast-forward through this to see if she is a hopper movin' g-packs. She's no corner boy, she's pushin' real weight. It's “The Wire”. Have you never seen “The Wire”? “Gabrielle Ruiz” (played by Valencia Perez): Am I supposed to? “Rebecca”: Oh, my God. I am so jealous of you right now. You get to watch it from the beginning. Paula and I binged the whole thing in two days, and we were obsessed. We talked like Avon and Stringer Bell - for a solid month. Wait. Why am I talking about Paula? I hate her right now. Okay, fast-forward, let's see….Have you seen Breaking Bad? How do you live your life? “Gabby” (Valencia Perez): I go outside.
In Amazon’s Kindle “Daily Deal” on 12/23/2016, TV (The Book): Two Experts Pick the Greatest American Shows of All Time by Alan Sepinwall and Matt Zoller Seitz is promoted in the first sentence with: “Is The Wire better than Breaking Bad?. . .For twenty years – since they shared at TV column at Tony Soprano’s hometown newspaper—critics Sepinwall and Matt Zoller Seitz have been debating these questions and many more, but it all ultimate boils down to this: What’s the greatest TV show ever?”
(Photo credit: Laure Joliet)
In The New York Times 1/9/2017 in the “My Space” feature in the “Men’s Style Section” by Steven Kurutz: “A Tour of Andre Royo’s Los Angeles Home…Far From the Bronx. ..One of Mr. Royo’s most treasured possessions is a tiny doll of Bubbles, the character he made famous on the HBO series The Wire. . .Dolls are usually for the Marvel Universe, the pop-culture phenomenon movies. I was on Twitter and saw this guy made a Bubbles doll. A Bubbles doll? I got to have it. I contacted the guy. I was like, ‘This is Bubbles.’ The Wire was one of those shows that was overlooked by the masses. We may have never gotten an Emmy or a Golden Globe. But I got a doll.”
The Atlantic on 2/15/2017 launched a campaign of questioning “conventional wisdom”, created with Wieden+Kennedy New York. From the press release: “In Typecast, we see Michael K. Williams, known for such roles as ‘Omar Little ‘in The Wire and ‘Chalky White’ in Boardwalk Empire, wondering aloud if he’s being typecast. But we soon discover that he’s not alone: He’s debating this complicated question with four versions of himself, all representing different aspects of who he’s been and who he is today. …[With the] two-and-a-half-minute film directed by David Shane of O Positive Films: ‘We tried to create the vibe of four dudes, four friends just hanging out and having this kind of thoughtful discussion. The degree of difficulty of this performance is actually hard to fully understand. He was playing, in effect, four characters, and trying to keep track of them.’”
In Timeless (first broadcast on NBC on 2/13/2017) episode “Public Enemy No. 1”, written by Anselm Richardson, Matt Whitney, and Kent Rotherham, “Rufus Carlin” (played by Malcolm Barrett) slips “Jya” (Claudia Doumit) a burner phone telling her he saw that on The Wire. (Thanks to Arjan Beens.)
In The Los Angeles Times 3/9/2017: “Joe Spano plays an FBI special agent on NCIS and was a cop on Hill Street Blues, but every Friday he lays down the law on where to find wildflowers in Southern California. He’s the voice of The Wildflower Hotline hosted by the Theodore Payne Foundation in Sun Valley. ‘I love it, it’s such an adorable thing to do. It’s not like being on The Wire or NCIS. We’re not dealing with global catastrophes.’”
Sonia Saraiya in Variety, on 3/10/2017, “American Crime Season 3, With Its Focus on the Collapse of Rural America, Becomes Heir to The Wire…[I]n creating a kind of socio-journalistic fictional document, American Crime is aiming, consciously or otherwise, to do what The Wire did for the drug trade in Baltimore in the mid-‘00s. . . Of course, The Wire is still going to have quite a leg up on American Crime. By virtue of that show’s place on HBO, it could curse, f-ck, and also be very funny; American Crime has found a creative way of both emphasizing and bleeping out its swear words, but still, this is a show trying to tell a story about sex work without being able to depict sex. At the same time, though, I wonder if one of the reasons we haven’t seen an heir to The Wire on cable is because the premium elements — the sex, drugs, and cursing — too easily erred towards titillation instead of investigation.”
Late Night with John Oliver, first shown on HBO 3/19/2017, used The Wire to make a satiric comparison: that a legal commentator on Fox News had any credibility to allege British intelligence services were involved in wiretapping President-elect Trump on behalf of President Obama, was like a parrot, then like an elderly relative says inappropriate comments, so the family makes the excuse: “We were only watching The Wire”.
Uproxx found another odd pop culture list to promote: “Ranking The Happiest Endings On The Wire by Christian Long on 3/28/2017: “Widely lauded? Yes, but The Wire wasn’t generally thought of as a happy show. Over its five seasons (available to stream anytime on HBO Now) it depicted life in Baltimore, MD: from the cops to the criminals, to the elite ruling class and those lost souls that were struggling to get by. The show wasn’t all bleak all the time, but violence and despair seemed to always be around the corner. Even characters that meant well had to confront a sense of disparity and the feeling of being trapped in a city that was slowly killing itself through greed, poverty, and addiction. Perhaps that’s why we still get an extra bit of satisfaction out of those few endings that pass for happy. And so, with that in mind, here’s a countdown to the happiest of those endings.”
The AV Club noted: “HBO cuts new trailers to finally get you to try Six Feet Under and The Wire”. William Hughes, on 4/19/2017: “Apparently HBO Now subscribers aren’t taking sufficient advantage of their access to the network’s impressive—if incomplete—library of TV lately…The Wire’s is wide-ranging in its scope, starting with Baltimore’s schools, before showing how the drug trade colors and taints every part of its world. (It also totally skips over the show’s second season, which seems depressingly apt.) …both trailers pull off their jobs without giving up much of the way in spoilers. If you’ve never seen the shows, they’ll be a good tease, and if you have, they’ll serve as yet another arsenal in your efforts to just get your damn friends to try The Wire, already.”
Marking the 15th Anniversary, HBO promoted bingeing the whole series on HBO Now and HBO Go:
“Steve Earle: My Wife Left Me For A Younger, Skinnier, Less Talented Songwriter” in The Guardian, written by Simon Hattenstone, 6/14/2017: “Earle might be better known to some these days through his acting than his music. I tell him I loved him as “Walon” in The Wire. He smiles. ‘Thanks. It was a great thing to be part of. That didn’t require any acting: I was playing a redneck recovering addict.’”
In the metro section of The New York Times on 6/30/2017, by Noah Remnick: “Michael K. Williams Is More Than Omar From The Wire, Mr. Williams has made a career of bringing nuance and contrast to his roles, inspired by the swaggering characters he grew up with in East Flatbush. The Wire, HBO’s five-season epic of Baltimore life, is a perennial contender for the greatest television series ever, and Michael K. Williams, in his role as the stickup man Omar Little, its most memorable actor. But on the show’s first day of filming, when a prop person handed him his character’s signature shotgun, Mr. Williams clutched it with a look of sheer bewilderment. ‘He didn’t know which end was which’, said David Simon, the creator and showrunner of The Wire. ‘Mike is a beautiful man, but a gangster he is not.’ Mr. Williams would not be deterred. Later that week, he left the set in Baltimore and returned home to East Flatbush, Brooklyn, and enlisted a local drug dealer to help hone his craft. Standing on the roof of the Vanderveer Estates, the man walked him through the particulars of firearms by spraying a hail of pellets into a steel door. ‘Best acting lesson I ever had,’ Mr. Williams said. In the years since then, Mr. Williams, 50, has continued to draw inspiration for his characters from the world of Vanderveer, a housing complex now known as Flatbush Gardens, where he lived for much of his life. Time and again, his work has returned to the complicated intersection of race, masculinity, crime and institutional failure… Mr. Williams, as Omar, will forever be remembered for his scowl, his scar, his mordant wit and the sawed-off shotgun he held at the ready, but he has always wanted more… Mr. Williams has made a mission of depicting his community in all of its nuance and variety… Capitalizing on the continued relevance of The Wire and the rest of his catalog, Mr. Williams is now delving into film and television production, and deepening his activist role with the American Civil Liberties Union… It was a warm Friday afternoon in June, the 15th anniversary of the premiere of The Wire, and Mr. Williams was back in East Flatbush to celebrate with some friends… Some of them were strangers familiar with his work, but many more were friends and longtime neighbors who knew him not as Omar from The Wire but Mike from Tower 3301. At one point, a young mother sheepishly stopped him to say she had named her child Omar in his honor… In Omar Little, Mr. Williams saw versions of himself and many of his friends, in all their complexities and inner conflicts. The character was at once menacing and jocular, openly gay and privately tortured, a lawless vigilante and regular churchgoer. ‘Omar is this dark-skinned outspoken man in the hood who didn’t care what anyone thought of him. He is everything I wished I could be… When it came to technique, Mr. Williams relied on his own emotional acuity. Building off his experience in dance, he often made detailed musical playlists that corresponded with the mood of each episode. Before filming the scene when Omar was killed, for example, he listened to “Let There Be Light,” by the rapper Nas. To this day, he finds the song so affecting that the mere mention of it brings him to tears…The show’s writers grew so enamored of Mr. Williams’s mastery of his character that they began to challenge him for sport. ‘We started writing these Britishisms for him just to see if he could pull it off,’ Mr. Simon said. Once, they included the word “constabulating” in the script as an inside joke they planned to cut. ‘That’s a word that hasn’t been said in the history of Baltimore, but he somehow made it work,’ he said. Even as The Wire staggered in the ratings — it was initially more admired than watched — Omar became its icon, the subject of tribute art and academic dissertations. Nowhere was the performance more beloved than in East Flatbush. When Mr. Williams moved back into his apartment in Vanderveer after the first season, in 2002, the neighborhood men who had harassed him for years were suddenly currying his favor. The attention was intoxicating, but he couldn’t help feeling unnerved. ‘There was just one small thing,’ he said. ‘No one was calling me Mike. They were calling me Omar. That’s when the lines got blurred.’ What followed was something of an existential crisis. Months removed from filming, Mr. Williams struggled to shake the grave psyche of his character. He was racked by doubts both personal and political: Had he lost hold of his identity? Was he glorifying the ills of his community, or exposing their roots? He couldn’t divine the answers, so he turned to cocaine. Even weighed down by addiction, Mr. Williams’s acting was sharp — perhaps even more naturalistic — but off camera, his life was deteriorating. He blew most of his money on drugs and stopped paying rent until he was kicked out of Vanderveer. When he wasn’t staying in a hotel during filming, he lived out of a single suitcase, often spending nights on a drug house floor in Newark. There were days he showed up to set visibly high, but the show’s producers didn’t dare let him go. ‘We worried that if he lost the work he’d become truly untethered,’ Mr. Simon said… During one particularly rough stretch in spring 2008, just after The Wire ended, he was on a three-day-long bender when his mother brought him to a rally for Barack Obama in Harrisburg, Pa. Earlier during his campaign, Mr. Obama had declared The Wire the best show on television and Omar his favorite character. When the two men met privately after the event, Mr. Williams, lock-jawed and high on cocaine, could barely speak. ‘Hearing my name come out of his mouth woke me up,’ he said. ‘I realized that my work could actually make a difference.’ Mr. Williams resolved to continue pursuing similarly powerful roles, no matter how agonizing the demons they unleashed…’Addiction doesn’t go away,” he said. “It’s an everyday struggle for me, but I’m fighting.’…, he is completing a documentary to be released this fall through Vice on HBO. The project intends to detail the dangers and inequities of the American criminal justice system, particularly the juvenile justice system, largely focusing on the stories of three people close to Mr. Williams: his cousin Niven, who is trying to reintegrate into society after more than a decade in prison; his nephew Dominic; and his friend and Wire co-star Felicia Pearson, who has cycled in and out of prison.”
Indiewire posted “The 20 Best HBO Series of All Time, Ranked” by Steve Greene and Michael Schneider, on 7/25/2017: #1 was The Wire: “David Simon’s magnum opus is one of the most thoroughly constructed and physically detailed looks at American life that American TV has ever put forth. But The Wire also helped teach generations of TV viewers how to approach televised storytelling of that caliber. The season-as-chapter approach was a fresh concept, and it showed that a TV series was more than just a handful of sets and some series regulars locked into a single viewpoint. As a result, HBO proved that gambling on shows that don’t have an established star at the head or that take place outside of the familiar New York and LA environs could be an artistic boon, something that would have a lasting legacy beyond its airdate. With the eye of a journalist, the ear of a novelist, and the heart of a city, The Wire shepherded Baltimore’s identity and established a blueprint for all the shows that came in its wake.”
Peter Preston in “The Americans are coming for British English – but we’re like, whatever” in The Guardian, on 7/30/2017, was probably referring to The Affair on Showtime: “English actors, from Dominic West to Ruth Wilson, learn to master an American drawl and star in hit series to the manner born”, but the photograph accompanying the article was captioned: “Learning to speak American: Dominic West in hit US drama The Wire”-- which was never a hit.
In anticipation of David Simon’s new series The Deuce, premiering 9/27/2017, preview articles are full of references to The Wire, like Indiewire on 9/3/2017 “HBO’s Outstanding Porn Drama Is David Simon’s Most Absorbing Series Since The Wire”, Associated Press’s Frazier Moore, 9/7/2017: “For devotees of The Wire and Tremé, nothing more need be said about The Deuce than it was co-created by David Simon and George Pelecanos, who can lay claim to those extraordinary dramas.”; The New York Times’ James Poniewozik, 9/8/2017: The Deuce, beginning Sunday, is about the sex trade in the same way that Mr. Simon’s The Wire was about drugs, his Tremé was about jazz and his Show Me A Hero was about zoning. Each of Mr. Simon’s works is ultimately about systems: people of different classes, races and levels of power, whose choices (or lack thereof) define an economy and a society.” Leading up to the premiere, HBO marathoned the series for binge-watching.
Huh? “How 2008 Changed Television” by Davis Richardson, 9/19/2017, in Paste Magazine: “Although Tony Soprano and The Wire sparked the ‘Golden Age of Television,’ the renaissance truly began during 2008.” Not convincing.
On The Daily Show with Trevor Noah on 9/21/2017, Noah joked that he had to reference The Wire in commenting on President Trump’s former press secretary Sean Spicer (with his face superimposed on a clip) and the investigation of collusion with Russia by Special Counsel Mueller: “Trump needs a Stringer Bell saying —‘You don't take notes on a criminal conspiracy!’”
On This Is Us, “The Most Disappointed Man” episode written by Kay Oyegun, first broadcast on NBC, 11/9/2017,“Randall Pearson” (played by Sterling K. Brown) is preparing to take his foster daughter to visit her mother: I have to go to the clink. His wife “Beth” (played by Susan Kelechi Watson) ripostes: Why do you sound like a characer from “The Wire”?
How could a piece in The New York Times on this topic NOT include a reference to The Wire?: “Rap Disrupted Music First. Now It’s TV and Film” by Questlove, Salamishah Tillet and Jon Caramanica, 11/9/2017
On Speakeasy, public television’s celebrity interview program at the Iridium, Season 3, premiering 11/17/2017, was David Simon interviewing Steve Earle. First Earle mentioned knowing Baltimore better than many other places he’s lived to inspire his songs, but: “I travel around the world and what I get recognized for more than anything else is being on The Wire. Where we’re at - the impact TV and film because the ratings weren’t that great. Simon: “They sucked. Earle: “So it was one of those deals people come to it on their own. And now I’ll be walking down the street and someone will say ‘Hey man, thanks for helping Bubs.’ These characters are very real. The best one, I was walking down the street and this guy said ‘Hey wassup ‘The Wire’!’ That was it. Other cultures where they don’t know my music, they know me from The Wire. So it’s a big deal.” Simon: “It’s a credit to you. Your first big scene, I wanted you to do a Narcotics Anonymous speech. I wrote some generalized language, because I’ve sat through a lot of NA mtgs as a court reporter. I thought I’ll take a shot. I basically cane to you and said you can make it your own if you want. And he was so determined to be a professional actor that you said ‘I’m going to read it the way it is.’ That’s when I thought - uh oh, we’ve got a live one here. Earle: “One thing I learned was when it comes to acting and just about plays, they’re an actor’s medium. The director can’t do anything about it if you turn it over to the actors. Nothing you can do about it.” Simon: “You can wince.” Earle: “Film is a director and producer’s medium. But TV has become a writer’s medium, so it’s a different thing. If you want to keep working in TV you read what your boss the writer put on the page. I figured I really clicked then.”
Paste staff, 1/9/2018, revisited a familiar topic: “The 25 Best HBO Series of All Time” #1 The Wire by Nick Marino “Series mastermind David Simon conceived The Wire as a modern Greek tragedy, a morality play set in a drug-infested urban war zone where conventional good guys and bad guys barely exist. Everyone is conflicted and compromised. We didn’t need The Wire to remind us that the system—the criminal justice system, the political system, the education system—is broken. But no other cultural enterprise (and certainly no television show) has shown us precisely how the infrastructure has collapsed, forcing us to consider the impossible decisions required for repair. Amidst the rubble of a failed city, Simon created an engrossing human drama about the eternal struggle between aspiration and desperation, ambition and resignation, in other words, the fight for the American Dream.”
The Chi premiere on January 8, 2018 of the Chicago-set, Showtime series, created by Lena Waithe (who last season broke ground as the first African-American to win a writing Emmy, for the “Thanksgiving” episode of Master of None comedy), brought forth a lot of mentions about The Wire. Here’s an informed sample:
Boston Globe, by Matthew Gilbert, 1/3/2018: “In a way, The Chi is most obviously comparable to The Wire. It’s about the tragic flaws in our criminal justice system, it’s about the schools the younger characters attend and the corners some of them work. The cast is large and primarily black, and, like The Wire, the writing encourages the viewer to pay attention; plot turns and character histories are not spelled out for us. And that comparison to David Simon’s masterpiece is half-right, as The Chi gives us the people behind the statistics, shows us the specifics of their sometimes-impossible situations. But Waithe is warmer than Simon, and The Chi is half multigenerational family comedy-drama, too.”
On NPR’s Monkey See: by Eric Duggans, 1/12/2018: “'The Chi' Falls Short Of Giving The South Side Its Own 'Wire' As a child of Gary, Ind., I've waited years for a TV show or movie to intimately explore Chicago's poor, mostly black South Side neighborhoods — like The Wire did for West Baltimore and Boyz N The Hood did for South Central Los Angeles. I so wanted Showtime's The Chi, which debuts Sunday, to be that show in this moment, but the first four episodes I saw didn't quite hit the mark.… It's also overshadowed by stories we've seen before, most notably on HBO's The Wire. That series made history a decade ago when it depicted an all-black neighborhood crippled by poverty and crime, and struggling with violence from an out-of-control, illegal drug trade. The Chi needs to tell a story that stands apart from those familiar themes, and so far I haven't quite seen it.”
In Chicago Tribune, though The Wire wasn’t mentioned in Nina Metz’s interview with the creator, there was reference in the pilot episode recap by reporters William Lee and Metz, on 1/7/2018 [I won’t check any more recaps until after I watch the season]: Metz: “…there will be inevitable comparisons — positive comparisons — to David Simon’s The Wire. It doesn’t hurt that there are a couple of Simon alumni on board with The Wire’s Sonja Sohn and Tremé’s Ntare Guma Mbaho Mwine.” Lee: “It will undoubtedly be compared to The Wire for obvious reasons, but it's more lighthearted instead of being relentlessly bleak.” NM: “To my mind The Wire was filled with sly humor, which is one of the reasons it was so watchable. . . The youngest characters … a trio of junior high schoolers who joke around together … are echoes here of The Wires Season 4, which also focused on boys this age.”
On TV Worth Watching (TWW), David Hinckley, 1/7/2018: “The Chi, which debuts Sunday at 10 p.m. ET on Showtime, has some of the urban menace of The Wire. It also has some of the everyday family drama of This Is Us. The writers combine those diverse concepts well, though some of the show’s half-dozen plotlines feel more compelling than others. . . Like The Wire and other urban dramas in recent years, The Chi tries to show the troubling and debilitating side of contemporary urban life while emphatically rejecting the image of all urban residents as hustlers, teenage mothers or drug dealers. For TV purposes, logically enough, the show telescopes and streamlines its drama in the setup episode. Where it goes over the coming weeks will determine whether it paints a fresh picture of urban America’s uphill struggle to claim its piece of the American dream.”
In Variety, Maureen Ryan, 1/4/2018: “At times, it feels like The Chi is trying to pay homage to several seasons of The Wire all at once, and it throws in some This Is Us-style romance and melodrama along the way. It’s a lot to take on, and the overburdened agenda leads to some draggy sections and awkwardly clashing tones…The most memorable characters in The Chi are not defined by the worst things that happen in their neighborhoods; these people, and these communities, contain multitudes. At this point, depicting the breadth and variety of those multitudes is The Chi’s most significant accomplishment. And it’s not a small one.”
Late Night with Seth Meyers (NBC) on February 8, 2018, intoned: “in the tradition of…the fifth season of The Wire” in a trailer for the satirical Newspaper Movie:
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Tweets on on February 9, 2018: David Simon: “Reg Cathey, 1958-2018. Not only a fine, masterful actor -- but simply one of the most delightful human beings with whom I ever shared some long days on set. On wit alone, he could double any man over and leave him thinking. Reg, your memory is a great blessing.” Fellow Wire cast members: Sonja Sohn: “1,000,000 times over. Masterful storyteller...an amazing life and human being. Truly a loss for the world.” Chris Bauer: “Reg E. Cathey went out of his way to help me nearly 30 years ago, and I am one of hundreds. His legacy is a portrait of the courageous, open hearted generosity that all good work comes from.” Wendell Pierce: “We lost a masterful actor, a sonorous voice, a great colleague, and a kind friend. A more gregarious human being you could not find. A man whose presence was always a blessing and joy. I’m hard pressed to remember a moment of anger. A beautiful human being who will be missed.” Terry Kinney: “RIP to dear Reg Cathey. Love you, brother.”
David Simon was kicked off Twitter for awhile, probably for his profanity-laden outbursts about politics. Here’s a tame sample that references The Wire:
Vulture on 7/12/2018, posted: “Best Episodes Ranked of The Wire, by Jennifer Wood: “When The Wire fell silent ten years ago, it was a critical darling but far from a hit. The show’s most-watched episode was its second-season premiere, which managed to pull in 4.4 million viewers — a number Game of Thrones, regularly quintuples. Toward its end run, viewership was barely registering on the ratings scale. The series never won an Emmy; amazingly, it was only ever nominated for two (both for Outstanding Writing). Yet a decade later, The Wire can reliably be found atop just about every Best Shows Ever list, right alongside HBO contemporaries like The Sopranos and Deadwood — a cohort you can blame for helping turn ‘prestige TV’ into a thing.” Spoiler alert: #1: Middle Ground” (Season 3, Episode 11)
On the 70th Emmy Awards, 9/17/2018, co-host Michael Che, of Saturday Night Live, did a comic sketch on giving “Reparation Emmys” to African-American sitcom stars like Marla Gibbs (of The Jeffersons), Kadeem Hardison (of A Different World), Jaleel White (of Family MattersGood Times) and John Witherspoon (of The Wayans Brothers) that included a riff on the unfairness of The Wire not getting Emmys because the cast was mostly black.
Shira Telushkin in Tablet Magazine, 11/1/2018, found a reference amidst the aftermath of the murders of 11 Jews at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life synagogue: “The FBI agents on the scene were also on lockdown, and the two groups sat together in the basement. ‘This was the first time they have ever let civilians inside the building,’ said one member of the chevra kadisha [the Jewish burial society]. ‘and they had never seen anything like it before, so they were pretty curious about our work.; In turn, the chevra kadisha asked them about FBI work, and, of course, which FBI television shows were the most accurate. ‘They said only The Wire was even remotely accurate,’ this member added.”
Prof. Toby Gordon wrote in the 11/17/2018 Baltimore Sun that he uses “The benefits of The Wire” at the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School. “I wanted my students at Carey, where we preach ‘business with humanity in mind’, to understand that they could make a difference in the life and future of the city by being better informed about it, using the skills and tools learned in business school, and then finding a way to contribute that would be meaningful and in partnership with folks in the city. Not for, but with them. In my class, we use The Wire as a case study of the "social determinants of health" so common in our city…My students design innovative yet feasible solutions to these urban ills…We are beginning to see how we can each play a part in shaping a new future for the city; it is not as hopeless as Mr. Simon may have portrayed it. My own contribution is in the classroom, where students largely from somewhere other than Charm City ache and weep over the issues and inequities found here and then aspire to make the city better thanks to The Wire's humanizing of the drug users, the drug dealers, the children in failing schools and the adults in failing institutions.”
Promoting Creed II on a CBS Morning News interview with Michael B. Jordan, Gayle King spent more time discussing his childhood experience on The Wire as “Wallace” back in 2002 than any other role in his career.
I’m behind on adding 2018 references!
Neil Cross, the auteur behind British series Luther, in Variety, 1/3/2019, to Leo Barraclough: “He says people talk about television drama now in the same way that people spoke about novels in the Victorian era. ‘Episodic television seems to be fulfilling a similar function to that in the way that people talk about it and analyze the characters.’ Cross picks what he admits to be a somewhat arbitrary cutoff point for the collapse in the influence of the novel and the ascendancy of the TV show. ‘I like books but I can’t think of a novel published since the year 2000 that is as culturally important as The Sopranos or The Wire or Breaking Bad. I just think that the narrative function of television is supplanting the novel.’”
The New York Times joined in the trend of listing “The 20 Best Dramas Since ‘The Sopranos’”, 1/10/2019: “2002-2008 - The Wire Because, indeed. Michael K. Williams, who portrayed Omar Little: I went into The Wire like any newly budding actor: I was narcissistic. It was just about my career and how much screen time I had and blah, blah, blah. Season 2 came in, the story line shifted to the docks where there were white actors that told that story. That shook me a little bit. I didn’t expect that. I came out on the other side of that with gratitude to be a part of this. I saw how David Simon [the creator] masterfully came back in to Season 3 and it became bigger than just a hood story. It was never about that. It was a social story told on an American tapestry. Just happened to be in the hood. It wouldn’t just be people saying, “Oh, that’s some good hood [expletive] on TV.” It was the way that the community was responding to the story. It was truth telling. That’s when I realized that I’m a part of something way bigger than me or my career, and it made me really grateful to be just a small part in that wheel. I saw a lot of homophobia in my community. Omar definitely helped soften the blow of homophobia in my community and it opened up a dialogue, definitely. There’s been more of a tolerance for alternative lifestyles in the community than prior to The Wire. Kima Greggs [Sonja Sohn], Felicia Pearson. It wasn’t just Omar, man. [The essence of my character is in] the speech that he gave just before he pulled the trigger on Stringer Bell [Idris Elba]. String tries to offer him money for his life. Omar says, “You still don’t get it. It ain’t about your money, bro.” It’s about loyalty. His boy gave him up. You know what I’m saying? Money can’t buy loyalty, man. Omar had a code of ethics. You may not agree with his morals or his ideals, however, you could set your watch by him that he was not gonna break codes for anything or anybody, or no amount of money. It’s code. Man’s gotta have a code, right?” — As told to Aisha Harris
On PBS’s Finding Your Roots, “Mystery Men” (S5 ep 2, first broadcast 1/15/2019), Prof. Henry Louis Gates voice-over: “Michael K Williams isn’t a household name but he should be. He’s one of the most talented actors of his generation. And he brought to life one of my all-time favorite charcters, The Wire’s doomed Robin Hood, Omar Little, a performance so ferociously intense that I was a bit apprehensive about meeting him. Michael knows Omar’s world.” as they walk through his home streets in Brooklyn.
On 1/25/2019, Roger Stone, a consultant to the 2016 campaign of President Donald Trump, was indicted by the Special Prosecutor and arrested by the FBI. Adam Serwer noted in The Atlantic: “Trump’s Inner Circle Keeps Violating the Stringer Bell Rule - Roger Stone is the latest of the president’s associates to ignore the most important rule in a conspiracy: Don’t take notes. If Donald Trump’s advisers had only watched The Wire, many of the president’s aides and associates might have saved themselves a great deal of legal trouble. A scene from the HBO crime drama shows a character named Stringer Bell trying to broker peace between rival drug dealers, and trying to get them to abide by Robert’s Rules of Order. When the meeting adjourns, Bell walks up to a subordinate, who is busy scribbling on a legal pad. ‘Motherfucker, what is that?’ Bell asks. ‘The Robert Rules say we gotta have minutes for a meeting. These the minutes,’ he replies. Astonished, Bell snatches the paper out of his hand. ‘Nigga, is you takin’ notes on a criminal fuckin’ conspiracy? What the fuck is you thinking, man?’… Trump surrogates’ extensive documentation of their activities… is the kind of thing Stringer Bell was worried about. If you’re going to engage in a criminal conspiracy, it’s a bad idea to take notes. Just before the end of the meeting in The Wire, one of the other distributors, Proposition Joe, expresses satisfaction at the outcome of the gathering. ‘For a cold-ass crew of gangsters, y’all carried it like Republicans and shit.’”
While Dan Brooks in The Outline, 1/29/2019, identified David Simon as key to “The Rise of the Swear Nerds”, he neglected to refer to The Wire episode that consisted of variations of the “F” word, years before Simon used “fuckbonnet” as an insult.
On Brooklyn-Nine-Nine, S 6, E 6, “The Crime Scene”, written by Vanessa Ramos, “Jake Peralta” (played by Andy Samberg) has a discussion with a CSI guy at a crime scene. He names a couple of cops-related TV series that the CSI guy would probably know. But The Wire is the only one that he responds: Sounds dope. (Thanks to Arjan Beens.)
David Simon’s Twitter feed doesn’t usually mention The Wire, but there were two references in early 2019: “2:36 AM - 21 Jan 2019 - I thought that if I never had to look at another Wire GIF in my feed, I might almost bear the rest of Twitter. And then Wendell drops this. @WendellPierce” [Shaking his head at the NFL.] He later surprisingly responded to a fan: “@SaraESamora Feb 4; I'm rewatching the final season of #TheWire, and it's the journalism season. It's also the season that frustrates me the most because of Templeton. @AoDespair: there has to be a follow-up on his ending.” “Feb 4 David Simon: Replying to @SaraESamora: He is currently a full professor teaching ethics at the School of Journalism at the University of Maryland’s flagship campus in College Park. You are welcome.”
Ditto about his wife writer Laura Lippman’s Twitter feed, but on 3/9/2019 she joked about a 2018 Vulture piece on The Wire: “Checks to make sure I am not once again singled out as emblematic of what people disliked about Season 5. OK, carry on.”
Idris Elba hosted Saturday Night Live for the first time, on 3/9/2019. He made two references to The Wire in his opening monologue, one a joke that it was the last “comedy” he’d done (not true of course), and a more factual anecdote about how he auditioned and got the role in “the small indie” The Wire just before he was about to give up trying to be an actor in the U.S. and return to England.
3/15/2019 - @WendellPierce posted on Twitter in response to an article about HBO committing to a The Sopranos prequel: “Remember, David Simon, when we discussed this for the world you created in THE WIRE? It’s still possible. And not the piece-of-shit idea you may think @AoDespair @WireFans” @AoDespair responded: “Tremé prequel, Antoine. Tremé prequel."
Last Week Tonight with John Oliver, 4/14/2019, featured different white actors, including from Breaking Bad, reading from Richard Sackler’s deposition on the role of the Purdue drug company and the Sackler family in encouraging oxycontin addiction. Then Oliver introduced: “But this is HBO; we have access to another iconic drug dealer on TV drama. So brace yourself everyone because: ‘Omar comin’”.
On BET’s Finding Justice docu-series, the final episode “The Lead Paint Crisis”, first shown Spring 2019, featured Michael K. Williams guiding the audience to information: “My dreams came true in Baltimore in a show called The Wire.” So he delves into the environmental racism in the city during National Lead Paint Poisoning Prevention Week. I think his celebrity was supposed to attract Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development Ben Carson to meet as just the producers weren’t enough. Nope.
In Scientific American blog post 5/17/2019, Zeynep Tufekci, associate professor at the University of North Carolina School of Information and Library Science, disfavorably compared the last season of Game of Thrones: “Another example of sociological TV drama with a similarly enthusiastic fan following is David Simon’s The Wire…That show, too, killed off its main characters regularly, without losing its audience. Interestingly, the star of each season was an institution more than a person....Luckily for The Wire, creative control never shifted to the standard Hollywood narrative writers who would have given us individuals to root for or hate without being able to fully understand the circumstances that shape them. One thing that’s striking about The Wire is how one could understand all the characters, not just the good ones (and in fact, none of them were just good or bad). When that’s the case, you know you’re watching a sociological story.”
I don’t catch all of David Simon’s Tweets, but here’s one he re-tweeted from his wife, crime novelist Laura Lippman, though I didn’t catch what she was reacting to: “May 24, 2019 - By the way, almost nobody watched The Wire when it was on HBO, the show was cancelled TWICE, the Season1 premiere party was me, [Simon] and Steve Earle sitting on the sofa, watching it in real time while eating carry-out sushi.”
In interview with Idris Elba in Variety, by Dano Nissan, 5/31/2019: “Belle maman, starring Catherine Deneuve…expanded his acting chops, leading three years later to what he calls his most pivotal portrayal — as Stringer Bell in HBO’s The Wire.”
On Elementary, the CBS series that envisions a modern day Sherlock Holmes consulting for the NYPD, in the opening of the “From Russia With Drugs” episode, written by Sean Bennett, first broadcast 7/4/2019, a murder victim steals from drug dealers. The medical examiner “Dr. Eugane Hewes” (played by Jordan Gelber): He’s an Omar! The detectives look blank. He describes what Michael K. Williams lookd like on The Wire – they still look blank.
Lawrence Ware, in The New York Times July 12, 2019, on a German series streaming on Netflix: “Want to Go Deeper? Dare Ya… Dark uses the plot to explore and deepen its characters and themes…But in its second season, the show’s ambitions are closer to those of The Wire, as it builds out its world and uses its genre trappings — primarily time-travel, in this case — less as plot gimmicks than as ways to deepen the characters and explore their decision making… As Season 2, released last month, delved deeper into the mood and aesthetic established by Season 1, The Wire began to seem like the more apt comparison. Introduced as a cops-and-dealers drama, David Simon’s ambitious saga was soon revealed to be an astute examination of politics and crime in Baltimore that unpacked how each decision made by its characters impacts others — the crime is connected to the police which is connected to city government which dictates what happens in the schools, and so on. Dark is just as incremental in its world building; every character introduced is meticulously and intricately woven into the time-travel narrative. Dark isn’t an easy watch — also like The Wire, the pacing is deliberate and plot threads introduced early on are sometimes not paid off until episodes later. But those who are able to binge the first two seasons will likely find it worth it.”
On 7/27/2019, President Donald Trump on Twitter attacked Representative Elijah Cummings, for his criticism of conditions at border migrant detention centers, and the district he represents in Baltimore, based on Fox and Friends coverage on Fox News. While David Simon responded with his usual vitriol and profanity about the President and his policies, he received a lot of nasty Tweets claiming that The Wire supported those negative descriptions. Here’s a sample of his relevant responses the next day: “1) The issue is not whether Baltimore has problems (It very much does.) not is really issue that some try to address or chronicle those problems as journalists or storytellers (Honorable enough work when done with some care), the point is that a shitbag grifter. 2) ...in order to satisfy his own racist impulses and attack a black political opponent would so moronically simplify those problems as to ignore all the profound and historic causes of the problems — US housing redlines, deindustrialization, drug warring and mass incarceration. And massive white flight to suburban counties following Brown — so as to pretend that any single black officeholder, particularly one in office only since the mid-1990s when the writing was all on the wall, is remotely responsible for what US urban policy had delivered. That’s racist shit talk from an ignorant, self-absorbed cretin who has no more understanding of the last American century than a goddamn lizard. And further, it’s a narrative that could only excite a collection of bots, trolls and morons who could watch something like The Wire and. ....think that it was speaking uniquely to Baltimore rather than the forces arrayed against and within every American city. Trump’s venal take on Cummings is pathetic and empty, especially given the fundamental that so little municipal governance is vested in any congressman. But what is more pathetic, astonishing even, is how many rubes are washing up here with the belief that there is any inconsistency between chronicling a city’s problems and criticizing an assholic demagogue for misusing that reality not to assist in any real address of Baltimore’s or any other city’s problems. But simply to launch a moronic assault on whichever rando opponent has him butthurt. He gives no fuck for Baltimore or anyone other than his himself. He’s a piece of shit. And only those similarly fecal can be fooled.”
Simon Tweeted a more anodyne Wire reference on September 3, 2019, with a photo from the set: “Five seasons of The Wire and six of Bosch have to get committed to film before these two guys have a scene together. Congrats to Lance [Reddick] and Jamie [Hector] on waiting out the inevitable.”
In Hollywood Reporter, 8/29/2019, extensive interview with Brian Davids, Lance Reddick detailed his several auditions, until his agent let him know: “’The Wire —you got it.’ I said, ‘Which role?’ and he said, ‘Daniels’ I said, ‘Daniels?’ and he said, ‘Yeah.’ I was like, ‘Oh …’ It was surreal. It may have happened one other time, but it was the first time where something happened in my life where I was hoping I wasn’t dreaming. Obviously, it changed my career and my life. I didn’t even know Daniels was the second lead until I got on set and saw my number on the call sheet. That was the first day of the pilot.”
Sub-Headlines in Arts section New York Times, 10/27/2019: “Known for ‘The Wire’, an actor takes on ‘the American Hamlet’…’Death of a Salesman’ whets the appetite of Wendell Pierce.”
On January 21, David Simon @AoDespair was busy responding to critics of his politics who cited The Wire on Twitter:
Q @HeadLeins: “I don’t understand how you don’t support @AndrewYang with the automation of the Balmer docks.”
Response: “Well, the plethora of supporters insisting “they can’t understand” the political choices of others while citing shards of a television drama I actually wrote as some sort of ubertext — that might be off-putting as fuck.”
Q @EricLudy: “I’ve watched the Wire all the way through twice. How you are not a Sanders supporter is beyond me.”
Response: “Warren’s positions largely comparable, better history on gun control. If you really watched The Wire you’d surmise gun issues might matter a great deal to me. That said, Bernie is my strong No. 2. So maybe consider allowing people their choices with more equanimity.”
On Super Tuesday Primary Election Day 3/3/2020, Simon was still at it vs the Bernie Bro’s who referenced The Wire: “This is a tweet floating on the internet about Elizabeth Warren. Not Rockefeller or Carnegie or Adam Smith or the Austrians, but Elizabeth fucking Warren. I am torn between the usual block and a follow, on the premise that whatever foaming hyperbole follows will be even funnier.” Replying to: “Simon Simps for the woman who helped create unfettered capitalism and corrupt institutions The Wire was alleged to explore.”
Here’s David Simon’s Tweeted response on 3/28/2020: “Contrary motherfuckers. Now you wanna watch the show about institutional drift and our inability to address actual problems? I suppose in 2028, when sea level reaches the Poconos, you'll jump on the miniseries [The Plot Against America] about our susceptibility to fascist demagogues.” to this headline in Vanity Fair March 25, 2020: “Coronavirus Hits, and Finally Everyone Is Watching The Wire - HBO says viewership of the acclaimed drama has skyrocketed in the last week” by Yohana Desta, who adds “(I have never seen The Wire.)” This article was based on Variety 3/24/2020 reporting by Todd Spangler that cited: “HBO is seeing a burst of viewing as millions of Americans are shut indoors during the coronavirus pandemic…Among library titles, David Simon’s The Wire nearly tripled its audience in the last week.”
Simon followed up with a Maureen Ryan interview in Vanity Fair on April 17, 2020:
“Q. Are more people reaching out to you about The Wire right now? A. Yeah. There seems to be a little bit of [that]...I’m happy it’s had the shelf life it’s had. I’m a little bit amused at the contrariness of the fact that I have a miniseries running now [The Plot Against America] that I spent the last three years working on. So the idea that that thing’s in its first run—and people are watching The Wire now, or talking about watching The Wire now—is a little bit contrary. I have to laugh at that. I mean, five years from now or 10 years from now, they’ll be looking at The Plot Against America. If I’m still making TV then, they won’t be watching what I’m putting on the air then. That’s the standard vibe I have, which is, nobody watches the stuff when it’s actually broadcast.
“Q. Have the things that people bring up to you when they talk about The Wire changed a lot over time? A. Not really. People seem to respond to the same things. They’re acquiring it at different moments in their lives. I’d say the thing [that’s different is] people are not experiencing it while it’s being broadcast, they’re basically binge-watching it on their own terms. So there’s a lot less of the, “Oh, I hated season two; there were too many white people. Oh, I hated season five.” [When it was on,] these things were debated on a weekly basis without anybody being able to stand back and look at the whole. To us, it was always a whole. Yeah, there were separate seasons and they each had a theme, but it was structured as a whole, as 60 hours. Now it’s being experienced as that…. They may like it, they may not like it, but at least they’re taking it as the whole meal. That’s probably a little bit better.”
Q. It’s not that TV had never been serialized before, but around that time, there was a new approach in the sophistication of serialized drama. The Wire helped people get familiar with an approach to storytelling that we are now much more used to. A. When we tried that, we knew it was different and we knew there was some fundamental risk, because what if [viewers] miss two weeks and they’re lost? You’re carrying so much story forward, and TV’s not really made for everybody catching every hour. We basically threw out [the dominant model] and said, ‘Nah, let’s just write a book. Let’s write the best possible story we can and let’s treat these things as chapters.’ We did it only on the strength of HBO showing episodes four or five times a week on the regular broadcast platform. When we did it, we weren’t thinking about the DVD market for television, which really was not a gleam in anybody’s eye at that point. In fact, they didn’t come out with the DVDs for seasons one and two of The Wire until season three was being broadcast. Q. I’d forgotten that. A. We didn’t anticipate DVDs, and of course we didn’t conceive of streaming. We were actually launching it into a world that wasn’t yet ready for the presumption of what we were doing. But the world got there, and got there fast. At the time we felt like we were sort of sticking our necks out a little bit, but that doesn’t count to anybody picking it up now. Who gives a shit? Now it’s just a story. And it’s fine. I’m glad the TV universe changed, because that’s all I know how to do. I haven’t worked on an episodic show since Homicide, and I probably won’t work on one again.
Q. When it comes to the kinds of structural critiques of capitalism the show engaged in, when it comes to the ideas The Wire explored, do you feel like the dialogue around those issues has evolved since it premiered? A. I think we did some damage to the drug war. I think there were a lot of people critiquing the drug war in a lot of different mediums, and rightly so. I’m not suggesting The Wire is in any way paramount among those, but we did kick in our share of early and dramatic arguments against the drug prohibition, and what it’s done to inner-city neighborhoods and to racial inequality—the things that the drug war was destroying and continues to destroy. Did we make a dent in unrelenting and brutalizing capitalism? No. We knew why we were writing certain seasons and we knew why they were necessary. The vast majority of viewers will argue that season two was much less fun, because it was much less “cops and robbers.” It was more about the death of work, and what was happening with automation and the decline of the working class, and the loss of union collective bargaining power. But there are a lot of people who experience it as, ‘I want to see some more bang-bang. Give me more Omar. Give me some more ‘Barksdale versus the world.’’ I get that. We were trading in that. We knew we had to make the story entertaining. But our reasons for doing it were so that we could sustain a sociopolitical argument. That was why we got up in the morning. Did the world get better? You’re absolutely right to say we seem to be struggling with a lot of the same things and not making much progress. I didn’t anticipate the complete collapse of mainstream media as fast as we’ve seen it happen and the absolute disappearance of [that] revenue stream. [Media companies] were listening to Wall Street. They weren’t thinking about the existential meaning of journalism. I’m glad we ended on that note, but for people [whose reaction was], ‘Ah, I don’t give a fuck about the reporters. Couldn’t we have had a big gunfight with Omar and Marlo?’ It’s like, I know what we were selling and I know we had to deliver on some of that, but at the end of the day, I’m more proud of the fact that we were arguing with the world.”
Q. “From things you’ve said over the years, it sounds like you are grateful for the show’s continued resonance, but it’s also clear that there are reactions to The Wire that make you think that some people missed the point. A Well, always. You win some, you lose some. Every now and then, I get drawn into critiquing one of these [reactions] and it’s never good…. One time somebody said to me—they were discussing which of the four kids in season four should have had a better future, and they were like, “No, Namond was a snitch. He should have been got.” I actually violated my [own policy]. I said, “Namond was a fucking 15-year-old kid. Fuck you.” He was a 15-year-old. He was 14 when we met him, and he was 15 when we left him, and you think he has to be “got.” I’ve got nothing for you.”
New York Times headline 4/29/2020 re: streaming old TV shows during the pandemic restrictions: “Cop Shows That Aren’t The Wire”, includes The Shield.
Early May 2020 Simon felt he had to keep tamping down a reaction to a French publication’s mistranslation of a George Pelecanos interview that made it sound like they were working on a Wire reunion: “Memo from the Department of Bud-Nipping: Something got lost in translation. George apparently told you that some Wire writers are working on a miniseries that would be based in Baltimore. True. And that story has exactly nothing to do with The Wire or any of its actors…Pardon, but George Pelecanos DID NOT tell you the cast -- the ACTORS -- of The Wire were being reunited for any sequel. You misapprehended the fact that some WRITERS returned to a new project NOT involving Wire characters or actors. You fucked up. Own it. Don't walk sideways… Please stop RTing. There is no cast reunion planned. The project, while Baltimore-based, is a different narrative. The French outlet butchered the translation of a reply… Three news cycles in and the stumblefucks who now regurgitate “news” still can’t get it right. I’m not contradicting Pelecanos, I’m contradicting the hash that a French publication made translating Pelecanos and that they’ve now, finally, admitted. Christ.”
Amid the protests against police brutality after the May 25, 2020 murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis were criticisms of cop shows on TV. I’m sure I could find more commentary; in an overview, Amanda Hess in The New York Times on 6/10/2020: “After Inkoo Kang, a critic for The Hollywood Reporter [on 6/4/2020 – in response to Daniel Fienberg “asking how the events of the real world have affected your rewatching of The Wire. And the inverse: Has a fresh look at the show shaped how you're absorbing the grim news these days?” with even more detailed criticisms] described The Wire as painting police with a “heroic gloss,” Wendell Pierce, who played “Detective Bunk Moreland” on the show, pushed back [on Twitter]. “How can anyone watch ‘The Wire’ and the dysfunction of the police & the war on drugs and say that we were depicted as heroic. We demonstrated moral ambiguities and the pathology that leads to the abuses.’”
On July 19, 2020, David Simon again struck back at a Twittering Wire critic who posted: “Hi David. I just finished season 1 of The Wire. My first viewing. It's almost funny how obvious it is that the mind behind this series is riddled with right-wing Hillary-respecting brain-worms. Your corporate neoliberal shill twitter account makes so much more sense to me now.” With: “Ah fuck. And we wrote it specifically for pouty shitbirds who rush to strain narrative, character and theme through their chosen ideologies. In the end, we lost every last one of those guys and had to settle for the rest of the audience.”
In “‘Small Axe’ Film or TV? It Shouldn’t Matter, but Here’s When It Does” Ben Travers in Indiewire on 12/12/2020 compared Steve McQueen’s anthology Small Axe (streaming on Amazon as five “episodes”: “Mangrove”, “Lovers Rock”, “Red, White and Blue”, “Alex Wheatle”, and “Education”) within this context: “Who wants to see a “small screen experiment” when you can have the “big screen experience”? Such opinions supposedly changed during the second Golden Age of Television (and that it took two such eras to induce perceptible change is telling enough on its own), when shows like “The Sopranos,” The Wire, “Mad Men,” “Breaking Bad,” “The Leftovers,” “Orange Is the New Black,” “Sex and the City,” “Girls,” “Atlanta,” “The Office,” and plenty more respected, challenging, and award-winning series elevated the medium beyond the “boob tube.” Opinions certainly changed. TV is indisputably more respected post-“Halt and Catch Fire” than before. And film did come first, so it makes sense for some of our adopted terminology to be tailored to that medium. But can TV ever really be on the same level as film when the highest compliments paid to television compare it to movies?... It’s even considered complimentary to call TV creators, producers, and writers who work exclusively on television “filmmakers,” rather than designate a new term or just be specific. (“Showrunners” have yet to be given the auteur status of “directors.”)… In addition to the striking visuals, the quality of Golden Age TV got tied up in how effectively shows could tell a continuous story over multiple seasons. Technology allowed viewers to keep up and watch at their own pace, and TV creators responded by crafting intricate, rewarding, long-term arcs. “Prestige TV” became synonymous with serialized storytelling… But TV is not serialized. TV is ongoing. The difference may seem negligible, but it’s not. Serialized narratives continue the same story. Ongoing narratives continue the same premise. It’s the difference between getting a seventh season of “The Sopranos” and a 33rd of “The Simpsons.” One led up to a sudden, definitive ending. One may never end at all. But they’re both television, and so is “Small Axe.”… If you want to say “Small Axe” blurs the line between film and television, go ahead. I disagree,…For too long, we’ve seen one as better, and — among so many more important topics — the conversation around “Small Axe” can help smash that prejudice into oblivion.”
On the infamous January 6, 2021, Daniel Fienberg, writing in Hollywood Reporter: “With Capitol Building Attack, Trump's America Hits New Low on Live TV…Boring parliamentary procedure is America. Heck, Robert's Rules of Order got to be a plot point on The Wire in an arc that mocked the idea of something as televisually enticing as the drug game being conducted with formalized rules and a meticulous agenda…But…fairly soon after the process began [of Electoral College certification] with speeches seemingly limited to five minutes apiece — … demonstrators outside decided they couldn't wait any longer and began bursting through the doors of the Capitol. They charged at the Capitol police, aggressively forcing themselves past armed officers.”
On January 7, 2021, Chris Kornelis in The Wall Street Journal noted what I’m sure many other reviews of the docu-series History of Swear Words on Netflix: “In one episode the critic Elvis Mitchell notes that ‘s--t for Isaiah Whitlock is what f--k is for Samuel L. Jackson.’ ‘I’m from South Bend, Indiana. My family’s from Tennessee,’ says Mr. Whitlock, best known for his creative articulaton of the SH word in The Wire. “So, we have the south, and we have the Midwest. So, I blend the two to come up with: sheeeeeeeeit.’ ”
On February 28, 2021, John Oliver in his news commentary HBO show Last Week introduced a segment on police raids with a clip from the 1990 musical drama series Cop Rock, which he described as “Think of Pitch Perfect crashed into The Wire and there were absolutely no survivors.”
In March 26, 2021 New York Times lengthy “opinion piece “The County Where Cops Call the Shots” by Farah Stockman on police corruption: “Establishment Democrats avoided [Rob] Trotta [“a cranky Republican county legislator on Long Island who worked as a cop for 25 years”], but the socialists were intrigued. He reminded them of Jimmy McNulty, the quirky detective from the TV show The Wire ‘He made me realize it was even worse than I’d thought,” one of the Democratic Socialists…told me.’”
On Indiewire, April 6, 2021, Zack Scharf caught: “Piers Morgan Criticized ‘The Wire’ and Got Eviscerated by Creator David Simon: ‘You Empty Parasite’ Morgan hit back at Simon: "Aaron [Sorkin's] a better writer and a great guy. Be more like Aaron…. Piers Morgan and “The Wire creator David Simon got into a Twitter feud this week following the ex-“Good Morning Britain” host’s appearance on Tucker Carlson’s Fox Nation series. Morgan spoke to the Fox host about the comments he made about Duchess Meghan Markle that led to his recent “Good Morning Britain” departure, to which Simon responded: “In an ocean of talking-head sewage, what are the chances that the two most pouty and puckered assholes in broadcast television would ever swim through the brown, find each other, and discuss the events of the day?” Simon’s comment got the attention of Morgan, who accused the television writer of acting like a “sycophantic chap rash” during an interview they had in the past. Morgan said Simon now spends his days “playing the vicious, horrible, illiberal liberal to appease [his] vile woke base.”
In Breeders (a British series, shown in U.S. on FX/Hulu) “No Excuses” S2 Ep 7, shown first in the U.S. on 4/25/2021, written by Rebecca Callard, was making a late audience point. Grandmother “Jackie” (Joanna Bacon) and Grandfather “Jim” (Allun Armstrong) are babysitting middle-school age grandson who, for complicated reasons, is staying home from school. They report their activities: We watched the first series of The Wire. His anxious Mother “Ally” (Daisy Haggard): Not with [your grandson]? Grandfather: Is he off school again tomorrow? Mother: Then you can start in on Series 2. But when they arrive at the house next morning, the grandson is going. Grandmother: We’ll just have to catch up on The Wire some other time.
Spring 2021, PBS Independent Lens’s Emmy promotion for the excellent docu-series that followed the progressive District Attorney Larry Krasner Philly D.A. with a quote from the Los Angeles Times comparing it to TheWire:
On July 23, the HBO Shop sent out: “JUST IN: New Arrivals from The Wire”: ”Shop the Collection” - “Read Between the Lines” and “Fan Favs”.
The sudden death of Michael K. Williams on September 6, 2021, over the Labor Day holiday weekend, led to an outpouring of social media and print reactions. Almost all the obituaries, appreciations, and posts focused on his portrayal of “Omar Little” in The Wire, with just references to his several Emmy nominations for other roles. Co-Star Wendell Pierce’s heartfelt, heartbroken Tweets were the most quoted. My desk is piled high with many other eulogies and references, almost all focused on “Omar”. RIP
On PBS NewsHour, the first week of January 2022, a political commentator chuckled at his Wire metaphor: “Nobody wants to be a ‘corner boy’; everyone wants to be ‘Stinger Bell’” – but I forgot to note the speaker and specific context.
January 22 was the opening of Chaz Guest’s gallery show “Memories of Warriors”, including paintings that Michael K. Williams had posed for the artist in various Buffalo Soldier guises, such that one portrait is entitled “Michael K. Soldier”. Coverage of the exhibit with images of the eight works at the Vito Schnabel Gallery through March 19: Hollywood Reporter, artspeak ny, and The New York Times, with Guest’s concluding quote about Williams’ context: “he had a war with drugs.”
On February 2, all the news outlets reported the arrests of four men charged in selling to Michael K. Williams the fentanyl-laced heroin that killed him – with surveillance video as evidence. U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Damian Williams released a statement: "This is a public health crisis. And it has to stop. Deadly opioids like fentanyl and heroin don't care about who you are or what you've accomplished. They just feed addiction and lead to tragedy."
On March 22, 2022, Russian political opposition leader Alexey Navalny Tweeted about the Putin government’s latest addition to his prison sentence on trumped up charges: “9 years: Well, as the characters of my favorite TV series “The Wire” used to say: ‘You only do two days. That's the day you go in and the day you come out’. I even had a T-shirt with this slogan, but the prison authorities confiscated it, considering the print extremist.”
Verne Gay in Newsday, 4/22/2022 re: HBO’s We Own This City, adapted from the 2021 book by former Baltimore Sun reporter Justin Fenton: “reunites three star writers from The Wire (Simon, Pelecanos, Burns), so comparisons with their long-ago classic are inevitable. Same city, same streets, same grit, same dysfunction. By adding Simon's other landmark series, Homicide: Life on the Streeet to this list, their portrait of Baltimore is now the TV equivalent of Picasso's portrait of Guernica. The horror is permanently affixed, or fixed as long as there are TVs around and reruns to see them on…Like most Simon-Burns-Pelecanos heroes, those of We Own This City end up bitterly disillusioned, or worse. If you want to find out what happened to…the Gun Trace squad, then watch the HBO Max documentary Slow Hustle”, directed by Wire actress-turned-filmmaker Sonja Sohn.
20th Anniversary Debut Tributes on and around on June 2, 2022:
On June 10, HBO sent out emails to its HBO Shop List: “Celebrate 20 Years of The Wire! Shop “The Wire” Collection - Fan favorites”
Op Ed headline in Boston Globe 6/19/2022: “My advice to graduates is just one show: ‘The Wire’: Take it from a philosophy professor: The greatest series in TV history trades in ideas that your classes failed to convey.” @EvanSelinger, Prof of Philosophy at RIT.
The New York Times published Gioncarlo Valentine’s photo essay: online, posted 6/13/2022, with the title “They Conflated ‘The Wire’ With Reality”, and in print on 6/21/2022, as “Life in the Shadow of ‘The Wire”, with the sub-head: “A Baltimore photographer considers the HBO drama’s impact on the city where he was raised, 20 years after the show’s debut”, that begins: “I was born and raised in Baltimore. I was in middle school when “The Wire” was made — it filmed near McCulloh Homes and also sometimes near Harlem Park, where my school was located…I was curious about how the community felt. Who liked it, and why? What has it been like for you 20 years after the show was filmed in your neighborhood? What did “The Wire” do — or not do — for Baltimore? I know what I think, but I wanted to know what other people thought.”
Chris Kornelis interviewed Idris Elba for The Wall Street Journal’s “20 Odd Questions”, 8/20-21/2022: I still live with: Stringer Bell. I’m asked about my character from The Wire a lot, so I talk about him quite a bit. He’s such a polarizing character. He was loved, for sure, and admired. But at the same time, he was not a good guy. He wasn’t, like, this savior. He’s a drug dealer. But an incredible character to play.”
In The New York Times August 21, 2022, in print as “An Actor’s Unfinished Business In Brooklyn”, and online August 19, 2022 as “The True Legacy of Michael K. Williams”, by Saki Knato: “Mr. Williams had an intimate understanding of the kind of violence that results from a lack of resources. Before the world knew him as Omar, the gay stickup artist with a strict moral code from the TV series The Wire, he was just a kid from the Vanderveer Estates, a complex of 59 buildings spanning 30 acres of East Flatbush, a largely Caribbean neighborhood deep in Brooklyn. In his memoir, Scenes From My Life (Crown, release 8/23/2022), which will be published this month, he recalls “The Veer” as a vibrant place where block parties had “the air of family cookouts,” but also as a setting of deprivation and pain. During the so-called crack epidemic, police officers called a local intersection “the front page” because of all the murders that drew reporters to those corners. When Mr. Williams was a teenager, he watched a friend die of a bullet wound right in front of him.
On September 27, 2022, David Simon cogently tweeted replies to misunderstanding fans of The Wire on issues of gun violence, mass incarceration, and policing.
On HBO’s Last Week with John Oliver, first shown on 10/2/2022, he started an extensive piece on stolen antiquities: You might go to a museum and find a sculpture that seems overwhelmingly white, or what is known as Season 2 of ‘The Wire’.
On 10/7/2022, PBS NewsHour’s Jeffrey Brown, as part of the ”Canvas” arts and culture series, looked at Wendell Pierce’s career, including his role in The Wire, to his lead in the current acclaimed production of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. There are probably many such articles and interviews that I could add.
On 10/18/2022, Brent D. Griffiths reported in Business Insider that New York Times reporter Robert Draper's just released book Weapons of Mass Delusion: When the Republican Party Lost Its Mind (Penguin Press) recounts a political incident with a Wire reference: Republican Representative Patrick McHenry of North Carolina's 10th congressional district, who hopes to chair the House Financial Services Committee, gave House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, Republican of California, an ornate silver bowl as preparation for his effort to be voted in as Speaker of the House in the 118th Congress in January 2023. However, while McHenry is a fan of The Wire, the very conservative McCarthy has never watched the series so did not get the reference to a scene where the former mayor “Young Tony” (played by Sam Coppola) explains why he didn’t run for reelection – a Sèvres silver bowl of shit he received from unions - That's what it is. You're sitting, eating shit all day long, day after day, year after year. McHenry sent the would-be Speaker You Tube clips of the scene, evidently to no effect. Jake Tapper on CNN brought up this reference on January 3, 2023 as McCarthy kept losing Speaker ballots.
On October 26, author Laura Lippman [David Simon’s wife] Tweeted: “Bartender just asked me, upon learning I’m a former Sun reporter, if Season 5 of The Wire is accurate. WHERE DO I START?”
While David Simon announced he was leaving Twitter due to Elon Musk’s brutal take over, Laura Lippman is still on. On November 26, she noted an association after a celebrity death: “Put on Fame for the kid tonight, because of Irene Cara, only to be reminded that we have a specific connection to the film: Bob Colesberry wrote the lyrics to "Hot Lunch Jam." So, yay, I'm crying on two levels. I try to avoid "Wire" stories, but I will always, ALWAYS, remember Bob Colesberry on the train, reading the strong reviews for the second season of The Wire and immediately worrying about Season 3. Which he didn't live to see.”
Announcement on February 6, 2023: “The Wire's Andre Royo to Lead Revival of Eric Bogosian's Drinking in America” at Minetta Lane Theater, beginning March 10 for a four-week run.
In the 2nd week of February 2023, WNYC Studio’s On The Media segment “Rereading the Russian Classics in a Time of War”, host Brooke Gladstone illustrated lack of awareness of cultural differences with The Wire sound clip: Russia, Ukraine, what’s the difference?
On March 17, all the obituaries for Lance Reddick (1962 – 2023) headlined his role in The Wire
On March 24, Stephen King Tweeted: “THE WIRE, Episode 8: Spotted Bunk reading a Laura Lippman novel. Yo, Bunk, good choice”
On March 24, Lippman Tweeted: “Kid just came downstairs saying, “Mom there is this show that everyone on social media is talking about we just have to watch it” – and that show is…SCANDAL….Imagining the day she comes down the stairs asking me if I’ve heard of The Wire.”
On May 10, 2023, Irina Ivanova for the CBS MoneyWatch reported: “HBO drops "The Wire" creator David Simon amid writers' strike”, with an article that included Simon’s Tweeted video of his time on the Writers Guild picket line: "On the day that HBO called to suspend my deal after 25 years of writing television for them, I was doing the write thing", among his several tweets supporting the strike. There have been other reports of studios and streaming services stopping many other projects by other showrunners as well.
Filmmaker Nika Belianina posted on FaceBook November 6, 2023: “Clark Johnson, photographed this summer in my studio. American-Canadian actor, director, most notably known for the series “The Wire” and “Homicide: Life on the street”. Who also happens to be the producer of a number of my films and my ex.
There is no way for me to describe his mark on my life in a few words. We spent nearly 10 years together nearly 9 years ago despite our whooping age difference. That’s a testament of its own.
Clark came to see my studio when I just opened it and I photographed him. I can’t believe he also let me photograph him for my personal photoseries that I am still making. In fact, we were both a bit in shocked after the shoot. But it was a deeply therapeutic process for me.
He remains one of the kindest people I’ve met in my life who continues to root for my success. For this, I am forever grateful.
I wanted to share photos as I catch myself enjoying photographing others. And Clark hates being photographed. Yet, he was very generous, during the whole 7 minutes that he gave me.” [I don’t know about her copyright issues, so I’m not replicating her photo here.]
Broadcast and posted November 16, 2023, on BBC’s interview program ”Influential with Katy Kay”, Wendell Pierce was asked quite a bit about choosing and performing in The Wire as his first major non-theater role. He answered that it was all about the writing.
In The New York Times Jan 13, 2024 “What Inspires Peter Capaldi? – My Ten” by Kathryn Shattuck, in an interview promoting the Scottish actor’s new Apple TV+ detective thriller Criminal Record: “8. The Wire - Season 4, which is about education, is one of the most moving crime shows I’ve ever seen. Ed Burns, one of the co-writers, had been a detective and then became a teacher. They are fabulously responsible jobs, when done properly.”
In The New York Times obituary on January 16, 2024 for Pulitzer Prize-winning, long-time Washington Post TV critic Tom Shales, Alex Williams highlights: “In a 2006 column, he wrote that David Simon’s gritty HBO crime drama The Wire ‘might be the most authentic epic ever seen on television…You go to The Wire not to escape, but to be immersed in a world where madness and sanity can seem interchangeable.’ ”
During February 2024, PBS stations featured a one-hour special A Symphony Celebration: The Blind Boys of Alabama with Dr. Henry Panion III that included their memories of being asked to record Tom Waits’ “Way Down in the Hole” for the first season of The Wire, and then performed here with a full orchestra featuring members of the Alabama Symphony Orchestra plus a 300-person combined choir from traditionally Black colleges.
Heard 3/22/2024 on NPR, on the program “Here and Now”, Tonya Mosley was interviewed about her new podcast Truth Be Told Presents: “She Has A Name”, about her sister in 1980’s Detroit. In a clip of an interview with a retired Detroit policeman, he marvels repeatedly how accurate The Wire was in portraying urban crime and law enforcement in those years.
Heard 6/6/2024 on WNYC’s All of It, the creators of a Northern Ireland TV series Blue Lights, Declan Lawn and Adam Patterson, described extensively how they were inspired by The Wire. It is only available in the U.S. on BritBox, to which I don’t subscribe nor get press access, though a free trial is available.
Off topic, but around 7/22/2024, Variety reported that Homicide: Life on the Street has finally cleared the rights for re-mastering and all the original music to being streaming on Peacock in August. Simon commented on X: “I did nothing on this. It Was Gail Mutrux lobbying folks at NBC, with follow-up by Tom and Barry…Nickels [in residuals] Some of the battles in the last strike were about the parsimony of the networks in terms of streaming residuals and any gains will not be retrofitted to earlier material of course…I was a writer, story editor and junior producer on that project, not a showrunner. I am not involved in the presentation on streaming. I thank god every day Tom and Barry hired me and ruined my newspaper career…I haven't viewed the end result and will see it as any other viewer when aired. So I can't say. But generally, I do prefer viewing in all original formats.” As to future projects, he bemoaned “Would that I could get another green light from HBO on something.”
On 7/24/2024, Jason Zingman wrote in “On Comedy: When Stand-Up Feels a Lot More Like ‘The Wire’ [about] The Domino Effect, a genre-defying autobiographical epic on YouTube by the comic Ali Siddiq.”…This feels like the start of a prestige crime drama, and his riveting project, spanning more than six hours and four chapters and completed last month, resembles a solo version of “The Wire” more than any stand-up special. With cheerful charisma, Siddiq, 50, describes entering the drug trade as a boy, being shuttled through the justice system and spending six years behind bars. In between comic scenes and farcical act-outs, there are gun battles, a prison riot, drug deals gone wrong… Describing the criminal world in white-collar workplace jargon is part of his humor. Siddiq doesn’t like to say he went to prison because he was a drug dealer. He prefers the term “street pharmaceutical rep.” Using corporate jargon is one way Siddiq makes comedy out of his subject matter. He deflates the romance of crime and makes it relatable. At one point, he laments: “There’s no H.R. for crack dealing.” He also finds unexpectedly moving comedy in dangerous dramas, like a drug dealer who becomes suddenly paternal only after Siddiq pulls a gun on him…“I’m a very violent man,” he says. “I had to be. I was in a place with all savages and I became one of the top savages.”…Siddiq is an entertainer, but he’s also one giving us a self-portrait, warts and all. Is he a hero or antihero? You can decide.”
On 8/12/2024, David Simon posted on X/Twitter: “Laura Schweigman, a friend and colleague essential to The Wire, Generation Kill and especially, Treme, has left us. The Blown Deadline family knows how much she did and how she did it and all of us are keeping so many memories as blessings now. A Baltimore girl, she fell in love with New Orleans as some people must and that city adored her right back. She deserved more than 44 years, but in two cities, she wasted no time or love, and few of us fight so hard for life or savor it so well. Mighty kootie fiyo, darlin.” Here’s her formal obituary. RIP – May her memory be for a blessing.
On 8/14/2024, Saul Austerlitz in The New York Times interviewed The Leftovers showrunners Damon Lindelof and Tom Perotta (who also wrote the original novel) about the series that began June 2014. When asked about the geography change in Season 2, Lindelof explained: “I was like, let’s do a thing that shows like The Wire did, which is completely and totally change the location and the main cast of the show. What if we did almost a new pilot for the second season…?”
In S1 Ep7 “Unplugged” of Grotesquerie, first broadcast on FX October 16, 2024, written by co-creators Ryan Murphy, Jon Robin Baitz, and Joe Baken”, “Merrit Tryon” (played by Raven Goodwin) has changed from a reality TV obsessive who wants to be a competition contestant into a serious academic who claims The only television I watch is “The Wire”.
If You’re Jonesing for Something To Watch Like The Wire
Nora Lee Mandel is a member of New York Film Critics Online. Her reviews are counted in the Rotten Tomatoes TomatoMeter:
Searching for Amani (at 2024 Tribeca Film Festival) – This documentary reveals a parallel situation in rural Kenya – private nature reserves property owned by rich Whites, and their middle-class employees, are threatened by armed tribal pastoralists displaced by desertified grazing lands who run their livestock through for water and grass, killing whoever is in their way. The story is told over several years by the teenage journalist son of a victim.
BS High (at 2023 Tribeca Film Festival/ HBO Max) – The manipulation of teenage African-American boys by an African-American con man to play football for a fake high school is as cruel as how the education system and the drug dealers treated them in The Wire.
The Gravity (La Gravité) (at 2023 Rendez-Vous with French Cinema of Film at Lincoln Center) Writer/Director Cédric Ido takes a creative approach to portraying drug-dealing in project-like towers. This intriguing suspenser crosses Afro-Futurism with revenge and generational conflict among gangsters showing vivid visual representation. (at 2023 Rendez-Vous with French Cinema of Film at Lincoln Center/
(2/27/2023)
The Night of the 12th (La Nuit du 12) - Director/co-writer Dominik Moll’s policier, an investigation into a gruesome attack on a young woman, is based on 30 pages of Pauline Guéna’s book 18.3 - une année à la PJ (18.3 - A Year With the Crime Squad), that is not yet available in English. The book and the film are inspired by David Simon’s non-fiction Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets and fictionalized TV series Homicide. Though set in the Alpine city of Grenoble where snow-capped mountains constantly loom, the cop duo partnership of young, systematic “Yohan” (Bastien Bouillon) and his older, at-the-end-of-his-tether “Marceau” (Bouli Lanners) adds to the tension as much as what goes on between “Bunk” and “McNulty”. With the insights of the years since, Moll and co-writer Gilles Marchand add women’s bitter perspectives on the irony of mostly men following up on violent crimes that are mostly what men perpetuate onto women. (at 2023 Rendez-Vous with French Cinema of Film at Lincoln Center/ Film Movement) (2/26/2023)
61st Street (Season 1 on AMC, 8 episodes shown Spring 2022; Season 2 was broadcast and streamed on The CW as of July 2024) Set in the Woodlawn neighborhood of Chicago, series creator/former police officer Peter Moffat does an engrossing effort to extend from “corner boys”, their mothers, and their drug dealing bosses on the street and in prison, to levels of police, with producer Courtney Vance starring as terminally ill defense attorney “Franklin Roberts”, with a wife in local “Black Lives Matter” politics, who is able to cross community lines in his effort to free client “Moses Johnson” (played by Tosin Cole), as a college track star with an imprisoned gangster father, set up by corrupt cops. (updated 7/24/2024)
The Zone (Faritra) (2021)
(Courtesy of Africamadavibe Production)
If the kids in Baltimore lived in Madagascar, they would be a lot like these teen-age boys in the juvenile section of the Central Prison of Antananarivo. While the directors teach them documentary-making skills of character, theme, and taking responsibility: “Faritra is an urban poem where human misery coexists with a world of hope and future for Malagasy youth. In the tradition of [Frederick] Wiseman's films, [Jean] Rouch and [Raymond] Depardon, we, Tovoniaina Rasoanaivo and Luck Razanajaona, wanted to show humanity in its genuineness and capture these unique moments of life in film.” The moving self-told portraits of poverty as the young men recall their lives is familiar to The Wire - parents felled by alcoholism, inadequate health care, bad housing, lack of legitimate employment, and the peer pressure of older boys who indoctrinated them into robbery, burglary, and pickpocketing, then pushed them into violence. And they have to deal with the older organizers who’ve turned incarceration into a profitable business. (at 2022 First Look Festival at Museum of the Moving Image)
A Choice of Weapons: Inspired by Gordon Parks (at 2021 DOC NYC Festival/ HBO/ at 2022 Cinematters: Social Justice Film Festival)
Slow Hustle
David Makes Man
Concrete Cowboy (2021)
This poster shows much of the parallels to The Wire: Idris Elba stars; the setting is a neighborhood of Philadelphia row houses, much like those in Baltimore; the story, whose script by director Ricky Staub and Dan Walser was inspired by Greg Neri’s 2011 young adult novel Ghetto Cowboy, revolves around a pugnacious Detroit teen boy “Cole” (played by Caleb McLaughlin) about to be expelled from school, so his despairing single mother in frustration dumps him for the summer on his father “Harp” (Elba), who he barely knows. “Harp” rehabilitates horses for inner city cowboys at the Fletcher Street Urban Riding Club. (Oddly, none of the coverage has referenced the documentary Fire on the Hill: The Cowboys of South Central LA, that I saw at 2018 DOC NYC Festival, about a similar but literally more stable group in California.) The tensions continue between his father’s efforts at providing stability for him vs. the local drug dealers who (fatally) attract his teen cousin “Smush” (Jharrel Jerome), with the added pressure of gentrification. (on Netflix)
Les Misérables
Piranhas (La paranza dei bambini)
Yardie
Excellent fiction films released in NYC in 2018 about urban black, white and Latino kids/young adults that sees the scourges of poverty, drugs and incarceration in the context of police antagonism and #BlackLivesMatter, and sees the tensions for black cops:
(Photo credit Nick Hannes/Hollandse Hoogte/Redux)