The Wire: Creator and cast on the making of a masterpiece.
Arriving without fanfare, and loved by a modest audience, David Simon’s The Wire should have vanished into obscurity. Instead, this stark portrayal of crime and poverty in inner-city Baltimore rose to be lauded as one of the greatest TV shows ever made
The Wire begins at a murder scene: blood splattered across granite, police lights painting the pavement red, white and blue. Across the street on a stoop sits Detective Mcnulty, played by Dominic West, chatting with a witness. The victim, we learn, was killed for pulling the same stunt he pulled almost every Friday night: trying to rob a dice game. “every time, snot boogie, he’d fade a few shooters, play it out till the pot deep, then snatch and run,” the witness explains. Usually, snot got away with just a beating. This time, not so lucky. “i gotta ask you,” says Mcnulty, turning to the witness. “if snot always stole the money, why’d you always let him play?” The witness sighs, the camera cuts. snot’s motionless body gazes lifelessly toward the camera from the floor. “got to. This is America, man.”
This line was the first clue that The Wire wasn’t like other television series — that creator David simon wanted his HBO police procedural to tell a story about their nation, not just the cops and criminals in it. it won no awards, and just 1.1 million people tuned into the show’s final episode in March 2008, capping five critically and commercially overlooked seasons. its creator didn’t watch TV — simon, in fact, pretty much hated the medium. And yet, over the last 10 years The Wire has somehow become recognised as one of the greatest and most important pieces of American pop culture of the millennium so far: a novelistic cross section of the Land of the Free, that revealed how drastically the American dream had curdled into a nightmare for many.
“We were attending to what was happening in urban America — the fault lines of a society that was no longer attending to, much less solving, its problems,” simon tells Pilot TV. First aired in 2002, the show — informed by his experience as a journalist reporting on policing and narcotics, and collaborator ed burns’ experiences as a local homicide detective — began as a tale about a phonetapping team of lawmakers trying to take down a drug ring. With each season, though, the series’ scope widened. by season five’s gripping finale, it had explored almost every layer of life in the faded industrial port of baltimore: its drug trade, its docks, its media, its politicians, its education system.
it was the cop show that was never really a cop show: sure, it had detectives in hot pursuit of nefarious lawbreakers, trying to bring order to the seedy underbelly of a city steeped in crime and chaos. it even had an iconic anti-hero in the shape of Michael K. Williams’ Omar Little, straddling the line between justice and injustice, another staple of the police-procedural genre. but The Wire was more interested in hard-boiled realism and allegories about America’s broken infrastructure than sticking to cop show conventions. The result was a powerful and unprecedented political parable, as ruthless and precise in its criticism of American inequality as Omar in a shootout.
“We said, this will become a critique of the entire drug war, which had effectively become a war against the poor,” says simon, recalling the pitch. “You go into it thinking it’s a cop show, in which you root for them to catch the bad guys. but you come out of it wondering what the fuck a bad guy is. You start to question the entire construct.”
Deconstructing the police-show genre, The Wire presented viewers with a show the likes of which they’d never seen before.
“The main character was baltimore. but that was a stand-in for any American city — and i’m guessing a lot of european ones too,” agrees Amy Ryan, who played Port Authority officer beadie Russell, attempting to explain its rabid fan bases in the UK and beyond in 2019. “if you’re a thinking person, you can’t help but see a critical analysis in the show and apply it to your own town,” adds Clarke Peters, who played Detective Lester Freamon. “baltimore is Washington. baltimore is London. baltimore is glasgow, barcelona, Paris.”
barack Obama has called it his favourite show. Classes based on the series have been taught at Harvard. Over a decade since The Wire fell silent, approaching two decades since the show started, it remains a huge part of our cultural conversation, referenced not just in lists debating the best series of all time but also frequently in articles discussing society’s widening poverty gaps and crumbling social services. All of which begs the question: how did a show that initially struggled to land an audience go on to become such a vital touchstone in our TV landscape? Where the hell did this TV sleeper hit to end all sleeper hits come from, and why does it remain so compelling? What exactly, if you’ll excuse the pun, did The Wire tap into? it’s a story that begins just like the show’s pilot: with blood splattered on granite, sirens screaming in the distance.
DAVID simon WAS eight years old when he watched his city burn. “i remember seeing the smoke coming up over 14th street and realising: man, there’s another America,” he recalls. it was April 4, 1968 and Martin Luther King Jr was dead — shot on a Memphis motel balcony by a lone gunman, some 800 miles from simon’s home in a middle-class suburb of Washington. As the news broke, citizens took to the streets, angry and disillusioned. Riots swept 110
cities. Washington got perhaps the worst of it. 7,600 were arrested and 13 people died in the capital after President Johnson sent 13,600 federal troops to combat the unrest. Four days of destruction totalling more than $25m in damages followed: a violent howl of grief from an oppressed American underclass who’d lost their leader in the most devastating way imaginable. For Simon, who recalls “driving downtown to visit my father’s office afterwards and peering out from the back seat into all these burned-out buildings,” it was an experience he wouldn’t forget. He learned something that day: “If you pay attention, there’s something hollow about some of the premises of what America claims to be.”
After that, Simon devoted his time to relentlessly highlighting that hollowness. In high school, he wrote for his school newspaper, before editing his college paper. By 1982, he’d landed a job at the Baltimore Sun, where he covered the city’s spiralling narcotics epidemic, and the cops doing their bit to tackle the problem. By 1991, he’d written his first book, Homicide: A Year On The Killing Streets, which was picked up by NBC and adapted into a series. Simon served as a producer and writer on the show, but clashed repeatedly with the network, who wanted to inject the series with optimism, heroism, happy endings. When it came to the screen rights for his next book, The Corner, in which he observed a street corner for a year as a microcosm for the city, Simon and co-writer Ed Burns approached HBO, hoping they wouldn’t try to replace the realism of this latest creation as much as NBC had.
“I knew what the television landscape was. But still... “Simon groans. The author had fallen into TV, despite rarely watching TV himself. It was the sugar-coated message of most shows he couldn’t stand — police shows especially. “Probably the most destructive show to American society in 20 or 30 years is the reality show Cops. It systematically dehumanised the poor, and especially poor people of colour,” he says. “So, we were launching into an environment where even the most beautifully rendered and intelligent police procedurals were told from the police’s point of view — the thin blue line holding the line against chaos. That paradigm of the police as absolute heroes... that was a lie. And it had spread to drama, to television, for generations.”
After HBO’S The Corner proved a critical smash, scoring three Emmys, Simon set his sights on creating a show that would act as a corrective — a show that could communicate some of the horrors and injustices he’d seen in 12 years on the beat.
The Wire would reveal the Baltimore beyond the junction of West Fayette and North Monroe that formed the focus of his first series. The Wire , he explained in an 80-page outline sent to HBO as a pitch, would be “a drama that offers multiple meanings and arguments.” On one hand, it would be “a police procedural set in the drug culture of an American rust-belt city”. But it would also tackle “larger, universal themes that have more to do with the human condition, the nature of the American city and indeed, the national culture”.
HBO weren’t sure, but agreed to produce a pilot. Simon enlisted a number of actors he’d worked with on The Corner for roles in this new show, Clarke Peters included. The role of no-nonsense lead Mcnulty went to Dominic West after John C. Reilly — yes,
Step Brothers’ John C. Reilly — dropped out (the actor, in the frame to star in the show, called Simon to discuss the role in 2001, but Simon, hilariously, was in a Halloween corn maze at the time, missed his call and the pair never reconnected).
“Ray Winstone was quite close to being cast too, I believe,” recalls West. “But I’m not sure how much either Ray Winstone or John C. Reilly would have wanted to live in Baltimore for five years,” he laughs. “It was quite a commitment.” (West only agreed to move his life to the Maryland city because his agent convinced him the show would surely only last one season.)
The rest of the cast assembled included some major Hollywood stars in waiting. As drug ring enforcer Stringer Bell, there was Idris Elba. As Wallace, there was a young Michael B. Jordan. Their characters were all based on actual Baltimoreans: Omar was inspired by a drug dealer stickup artist named Donnie Andrews, who wore a wire in one of Burns’ real life investigations. The loveable Bubbles, played by Andre Royo, was based on a real-life local legend named Possum. And Avon Barksdale, the kingpin of the Barksdale drug operation? This character, portrayed by Remember The Titans actor Wood Harris, was drawn from heroin trafficker Melvin Williams, who after 16 years in prison for two separate convictions, actually ended up acting on
The Wire alongside the character he inspired (Williams joined the cast as church figure The Deacon in season two.)
This sums up the authenticity Simon sought for The Wire. It was not some closed-off Hollywood production. Instead, the cast and crew were immersed in the city whose story The Wire was trying to tell. Real
life players in the local drug trade lingered around the set and sometimes became advisers on the show. West, Peters and co shadowed actual detectives for insight. And filming was carried out on locations where the word “shooting” usually carried a very different meaning. “I was really conscious that, while out filling my car with petrol, a stray bullet could take me out,” says Peters. “That was a reality I had to get used to. There were some days when we’d overhear a gunshot and realise, wait — that’s not from the set, that’s real.”
He recalls that once, while his family was visiting him on set, he came across a gardener who’d been hit by a stray bullet “just feet away from where my wife and son were”. There was tension from other sources, too. “For some cops, we could do no wrong. For others, they wanted to come down on us hard, because we were exposing their failings, the corruption in their system,” says Peters. “Not everyone dug it.” “The mayor of Baltimore was very upset with how we portrayed the city,” adds West.
It wasn’t all fraught, though. “There was a lot of fun too,” says Ryan. “We’d play games, and go out dancing in Baltimore a lot. Dominic West had some pretty interesting moves,” she laughs. But no amount of dancing could distract from the fact that, in Baltimore, one of America’s murder capitals with over 250 recorded homicides in the year The Wire began filming, danger really was lurking. Life was a lottery in Baltimore. Wendell Pierce, who played Bunk Moreland on the show, once reported encountering “a guy with a knife still in him” while making the show. On another occasion, he saw a cop trying to take a gunshot victim downtown for questioning instead of taking him to a hospital. “We were living in this world,” says Peters. “It wasn’t fucking make believe.”
“OH, Fuck. Fucking fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.” This — the opening dialogue from an infamous scene in season one where Bunk and Mcnulty discover a murder scene and converse exclusively in F-bombs for three minutes and 40 seconds — isn’t your typical cop show dialogue. But this was how real cops talked, so it was how Simon insisted they had to sound in the show, which cut no corners when it came to verisimilitude.
“There were definitely viewers who had trouble following the Baltimore vernacular and the vernacular of the drug corners and that whole culture. The way the cops talked, too. But we didn’t care. Our feeling was, this would make you lean in to the television set and pay more attention,” Simon explains. “We probably lost a lot of viewers because we didn’t make it particularly easy. Buti think that made the show much more gratifying for the people who did commit to it.”
He’s not wrong about those lost viewers. The initial ratings for The Wire were similar to The Sopranos, but gradually dwindled. The show’s pilot attracted 3.7m us viewers, but by its final season, viewing figures were regularly dipping below the 1m mark. Luckily, a changing TV ecosystem meant this didn’t matter much. “To HBO’S great credit, I didn’t have to fight for the show’s survival for the first three years. I remember saying: ‘hey, so the Nielsen numbers aren’t exactly huge.’ HBO laughed and said, ‘don’t you worry about numbers.’ Which really isn’t your usual network response. They were playing a long game, about staying with narrative, growing a franchise and using it to construct a brand.”
HBO were an emerging cable network who relied on subscribers, not advertisers, for funding. “This meant you could tell a different story – an adult story,” says Simon. “You didn’t have to gratify an audience before a commercial break to ensure they come back. You didn’t need the tension of a whodunnit or whatever to compel people to come back. You could write a grown-up story, a story based on what people need to hear instead of what they want to hear.”
“We and The Sopranos were pioneers of a new form of television that was treating
the viewers as adults and not trying to sell them things,” says West. “It was the start of this golden age in which writers and networks could now create longform drama. It was a revolution.”
HBO were happy for The Wire to be an under-the-radar series with a small but passionate audience. Which was the case for the show’s entire run, ending in March 2008. The cast and crew all moved on with their lives. Simon began planning Treme, a new drama delving into post-katrina New Orleans. What happened next took them all by surprise. “It was the DVD box sets,” says Simon. “We’d been off the air a couple of years by the time word of mouth had spread. All of a sudden we’re selling a million units of the DVDS every six months or so. That market just exploded and I realised something’s happening here, that people want to own this thing to watch it on their own terms.”
“It was like a long overdue guest finally turning up,” says Ryan. “When we were filming it, we as a cast shared a frustration that, our viewership, although very devoted to the show, was a small group. We were frustrated because we knew as actors, this was rare. You don’t get writing like this — writing that matters. So we were all like, where is everybody? When it happened after the fact, it was definitely satisfying.”
Success snowballed. Soon The Wire was must-see TV, the show’s box sets became Amazon best-sellers, and the cast found themselves hounded on the street by fans they didn’t know they had. Some were famous. “Eminem called me out of the blue one day to tell me he’d watched it four times. Four fucking times! That’s nearly 300 hours!” laughs West, who ended up, incredibly, appearing in a skit on the rapper’s next album.
It’s the real-life people who connected with the show that mean most to The Wire’s cast, however. “I was in Edinburgh in 2011 when two Scottish laddies jumped out of this taxi and started running at me,” remembers Peters. “I thought they were mugging me. Turns out they had just finished watching the series, and wanted to talk about how they had seen the same problems where they lived as you see in the show. Drugs, education, local government, industry, all of it. That’s what The Wire was about. It was a real confluence of all of these cultures: the drug culture, the political culture, the media culture, all coming together. For people, it was a confirmation of all the problems they had seen in these institutions, all their fears about how they might be failing.”
Those failings are still being felt today. By December 1, 2019, there had been 313 homicides in Baltimore, surpassing the 309 killings seen last year with a month still to go. The locations seen in the show have reportedly fallen into ever worse states of neglect and disarray (according to a 2018 report in The Guardian, at Greenmount
West, known as “Bodie’s corner” in the series, customers have to be buzzed in to a local convenience store, where Snickers bars and toothpaste are kept behind bulletproof glass “like an art installation”.) In Trump’s America, the fractures portrayed in The Wire have grown into chasms.
“It’s not a history piece, even though it’s ten years old. These are still issues impacting on our schools, our streets, our elected officials,” says Ryan. “These stories are still so current, the topics at the heart of the show still bubbling under the surface.”
This was all by design, adds Simon. “It wasn’t working then and it isn’t working now. It’s gotten worse. The dehumanisation of what was once the American working class continues daily. We’ve not responded to a world in which human beings become worth less with every economic cycle.”
All these things, Simon continues, “were true before The Wire and they’re true now. We picked targets that were permanent — or seemingly permanent, because they’re not being addressed and as a result have become systemic. So it doesn’t surprise me that some of the things we were arguing about then still require arguing over. The question is not why is there an angry critique of all this in
The Wire. The question is — why isn’t everyone angry?”
“The forgotten people of the American dream, the people losing out in this capitalist economy, they have it worse than ever. They’re also being vilified more than ever,” says West. “The Wire really understood the humanity of the people on the news every night being shot and arrested. We need shows like it now more than ever, I think. We need to help humanise these communities, instead of allowing them to be dismissed by people who own huge fucking golf courses.”
The Wire was, true to Simon’s promise, a drama that offered multiple meanings and arguments. It was a show about people trapped playing a game they can never win, about a broken system, and the ones working within that broken system to try to enforce positive change. Maybe it’s best summed up by the witness that mourned Snot Boogie in the show’s opening episode.
The Wire was America, man.