The Wire
Who created The Wire?
How is The Wire different from other police shows?
What themes does The Wire explore?
How did The Wire gain popularity despite low initial ratings?
What is significant about the casting of The Wire?
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The Wire, American crime drama television series, created by David Simon and considered by critics as one of the best shows ever made because of its unique portrayal of systemic dysfunction in American civic institutions. HBO aired 60 episodes over five seasons, the first on June 2, 2002, and the last on March 9, 2008.
Background and creation
The Wire was created by Simon, who spent 12 years as a crime reporter for The Baltimore Sun and previously had his books adapted into two television series, Homicide: Life on the Street (1993–99) and The Corner (2000). With The Wire, Simon wanted to produce a police procedural based on the old drug trafficking cases of his friend Ed Burns, a Baltimore, Maryland, detective who would serve as one of the show’s producers. But in developing the series, Simon found himself influenced by not only Burns’s frustrations with the bureaucracy of the Baltimore Police Department (BPD) but also recent stories of major institutional failures, such as the Enron scandal.
“It was largely based on [Ed Burns’s] experiences and his frustrations in the [police] department. And then it was also based on my experiences at my newspaper, which became a sort of hellish, futile bureaucracy. And then while we were writing the scripts, Enron was happening. And the Catholic Church. It became more of a treatise about institutions and individuals than a straight cop show.”
—David Simon, speaking to Salon (2002)
Because of the bleak nature of the show’s content, Simon ran his idea past the mayor of Baltimore and received his approval for the show.
Storyline and plot structure
In its first season, The Wire immediately sets itself apart from other police shows on television by dividing its time almost equally between the separate worlds of its two main groups, the police and the drug dealers. In this sense, it is neither a show glorifying the police as fighters against crime nor a view into charming criminals with whom the audience falls in love. Both worlds are extensively fleshed out; viewers are introduced in the first season to each level of the two organizations, from BPD Commissioner Ervin Burrell (Frankie Faison) and drug kingpin Avon Barksdale (Wood Harris) down to their respective investigators and teenage lookouts. Each side of the law is depicted in a grounded and realistic fashion, offering a refreshingly unvarnished look at how both operate. The relatively simple act of setting up surveillance on the drug dealers—the titular “wire”—is complicated by police bureaucracy, infighting, and the criminals’ technological savvy. As a result, The Wire is more than a compelling drama—it is a thorough examination of the War on Drugs.
For all that, the show’s true ambition becomes more apparent in the following seasons. The Wire’s sizable cast continues to expand to include new sets of characters from other major civic institutions in Baltimore, thereby widening its critique of urban America. Season two deals with Baltimore’s white working class, specifically a drop in blue-collar jobs in the city’s dockyards. Season three looks at the city’s municipal government and the workings of the local political system. Season four focuses on the city’s schools, and season five, finally, examines the inner workings of the local media by focusing on a fictionalized version of Simon’s former newspaper, The Baltimore Sun. By the show’s conclusion, The Wire has woven together a rich tapestry of police, criminals, politicians, reporters, and everyday civilians, all of whom contribute to a larger commentary on human-made systems and their effects on people.
Notably, this mosaic of characters is played by a diverse assortment of actors that more or less accurately represents Baltimore, with the city comprising about 64 percent Black and 31 percent white people at the time of the 2000 U.S. Census. It is also a cast largely made up of then-unknowns; only Faison possessed a considerable filmography at the time. Several roles were not filled by conventionally trained actors but by formerly incarcerated people, such as Felicia (“Snoop”) Pearson and Melvin Williams. The result is a show populated by people who look and sound natural and who rarely remind audiences of other programs, making their stories more believable. The series’ casting choices also introduced many actors of color who would go on to impressive careers, particularly Michael B. Jordan and Idris Elba.
In addition to its themes, accuracy, and casting, The Wire distinguishes itself by its plot structure: Every season is laid out like a novel, each of its episodes a chapter. Simon achieved this different cadence by hiring crime novelists such as George Pelecanos and Richard Price to write episodes. Moreover, the writers patterned their stories after ancient Greek tragedies, wherein characters such as Oedipus attempt to defy their foreordained fate only to find its grasp impossible to escape. This structure is well suited for the themes of The Wire: Just as the gods frustrate men in the plays of Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles, so too do modern institutions thwart the hopes of the series’ characters. Simon has also been compared to British author Charles Dickens for making Baltimore as much a character in his work as London is in that of Dickens.
Reception and legacy
Despite receiving critical acclaim, The Wire was not a successful show while it aired. Indeed, ratings were so low that it was almost canceled. It did not win any major awards and was nominated only twice, for writing, at the Primetime Emmy Awards. Thanks to the advent of streaming media, however, as well as its continued championing by fans—including Barack Obama, who, while serving as U.S. president, interviewed Simon in 2015 and called the show “one of the greatest…pieces of art in the last couple of decades”—The Wire gained a greater audience over time and is now far better known than when it initially ran.
The Wire has been the focus of academic research, with several scholarly articles dedicated to its storyline, themes, and concepts. Several colleges, such as Johns Hopkins University, have included The Wire in courses on topics ranging from public policy to sociology to ethics.
Simon went on to create other series that focused on dysfunction in social structures, such as Treme (2010–13), set in New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, and The Deuce (2017–19), about sex work and the pornography industry in New York City during the 1970s and ’80s. Simon returned to covering Baltimore in the 2022 miniseries We Own This City, which focuses on corruption in the BPD.
Primary cast
- Dominic West as James (Jimmy) McNulty
- John Doman as William A. Rawls
- Deirdre Lovejoy as Rhonda Pearlman
- Wendell Pierce as William (“Bunk”) Moreland
- Lance Reddick as Cedric Daniels
- Sonja Sohn as Shakima (Kima) Greggs
- Seth Gilliam as Ellis Carver
- Domenick Lombardozzi as Thomas (“Herc”) Hauk
- Clarke Peters as Lester Freamon
- Michael Kenneth Williams as Omar Little
- Wood Harris as Avon Barksdale
- J.D. Williams as Preston (“Bodie”) Broadus
- Andre Royo as Reginald (“Bubbles”) Cousins
- Jamie Hector as Marlo Stanfield
- Idris Elba as Russell (“Stringer”) Bell
- Aidan Gillen as Thomas (Tommy) Carcetti