The Wire

I’m ending my blog series with one of America’s most iconic TV shows, The Wire. To give some context, although it started as a struggling show on HBO for a very niche audience, The Wire reached ridiculous popularity after it ended. Former President Obama and Eminem have declared it their favorite show, it launched the careers of Idris Elba and Michael B. Jordan, and it’s been called one of the best shows of all time. I’ve only watched the first season, so I can’t comment on all of its complexities, but I do want to mention some of the reasons it is so good, and why I think it’s worth watching despite it ending ten years ago.

For one, the unique perspective of the series. The Wire was originally pitched as a cop show, where some rebel policemen launch a cutting edge investigation intending to take down the largest drug dealing organization in West Baltimore. However, The Wire doesn’t follow the regular script of heroic police officers catching evil criminals through their intelligence and bravery. The writers of the show, Simon, who was formerly a police reporter for The Baltimore Sun, and Burns, who was a homicide detective for the Baltimore Police Department and public school teacher, use their experience with the institutions of Baltimore to portray the conditions that led the drug dealers to their criminal activity.

The audience sees the day-to-day operations of inner Baltimore, including both the cruelty and kindness of the drug dealers in the low-rises (small apartment complexes, where most of the action takes place). D’Angelo Barksdale, the nephew of the head West Baltimore’s drug dealing industry, is a particularly example of these contrasts. In the first episode of season 1, he murders a man, but in subsequent episodes, we see him become a father figure of sorts to the teen boys who are at the lowest rungs of his organization. He encourages one of the boys, Wallace, to abandon drug dealing and go back to high school, telling him that he is smart and has a good heart. When he sees the boys playing checkers, and hears them admit that they don’t know how to play chess, he sits down and teaches them.

As The Wire develops, D’Angelo’s frustration with the violence of drug dealing becomes increasingly clear. In a conversation with the boys, he says, “Yeah, but the game [drug dealing] ain't gotta be played like that, yo. You can't tell me this shit can't get done without people beatin' on each other, killing each other, doing each other like dogs. And without all that, you ain't got 5-0 [police] down here on our backs every five minutes. Throwing us around and shit.” At the end of season one, he tells the police that he is willing to be a witness in a trial against his family, as long as he is sent far away from West Baltimore, so that he can start a life devoid of any crime. However, he never does give up his family, knowing that, by doing so, he would be condemning them (including his one year old son) to the same poverty of everyone else in the inner Baltimore.

Characters like D’Angelo, who are three dimensional and complex despite their being labeled “bad” by general society, makes The Wire special. It also lets the series demonstrate how their living conditions force them to make brutal choices. Normally, we would say that D’Angelo is a horrible person - he murdered someone, deals drugs, and refuses to give up the people who destroyed his community. However, the sacrifice of his doing the “right thing” is immense: he gives up the cohesiveness and success of his family. His mother even says that if it weren’t for the drug trade, he probably would not know his uncle and other relatives - they’d be casualties of living in brutal poverty. Further, as is shown later, D’Angelo has no guarantee that giving up his family would actually solve anything - the justice system would take them, and others would spring up to replace their position in West Baltimore.

As The Wire trudges on, the waste of human potential caused by the disintegrating inner city becomes increasingly obvious. Stringer Bell, the second hand man in the drug organization the police are trying to take down, has a scene where he is shown taking an economics class at a Baltimore community college. Why? Because he wanted to expand and optimize his organization. A brilliant businessman is funneled into the drug trade because of the conditions he was born into.

Obviously, because it is ultimately advertised as a cop show, The Wire focuses on the police, and, interestingly, the politics of the police force. The central investigation of the first season is incredibly unpopular with the superiors of the Baltimore Police Department, both because it advertises how they managed to let a witness get killed and because it follows the money of the drug dealers, which, in some cases, connected to political figures of the city. Although normal cases of individual murder and drug dealing have much less impact then cutting of the head of the snake, they are preferred because they expose less systemic issues. Thus, the policemen conducting the investigation are forced to thread carefully, play politics, and work with subpar resources.

I’m not going to go a lot into the strategic moves of the team leading the investigation, mainly because that’s a good percentage of The Wire’s premise, and part of the beauty of the show is watching and processing each move. I will give on example though, because I feel that it is representative of the situations we as the audience get to grapple with. Frustrated with the slow pace of the investigation and the condescending attitude of their better qualified colleagues, three of the policemen on the team drive into West Baltimore at 2 AM. These policemen have a history of being overly aggressive and rash; in fact, they were assigned to the investigation by superiors of the Baltimore Police Department as a way to inhibit the work of the good policemen. They begin to harass random pedestrians, and then, in a horrible incident of police brutality, one of the policemen blinds a 14 year old kid in one eye after the kid gives him attitude. This incites a minor riot, the leader of the investigation is called in. If he lets the policeman who committed the incident get indicted, the investigation gets thrown out, and the lose the chance to get rid of an organization that heavily contributed to the destruction of West Baltimore. If he doesn’t indict the policeman, that incident of police brutality goes unpunished.

Choices and moves like these are what makes The Wire interesting, but they also end up serving the greater purpose the show’s creators, which was to expose the broken systems of cities like Baltimore. One source described The Wire as “tearing the cover off a city and showing the American Dream is dead.” I can’t really say that that statement is true, I still need to watch the remaining seasons, but I do believe that The Wire is an enormous artistic achievement, using complex characters to show how institutions push people into lose-lose situations. It’s a cynical show, true, but if you have time during winter break, I would highly recommend watching it.