‘I got the shotgun. You got the briefcase’ – how The Wire’s Omar changed TV
Playing stick-up man Omar Little on The Wire, Michael K Williams was tough, frightening and brutal – his face scarred, his smile wide, toting a shotgun and wearing a long trenchcoat. So viewers of David Simon’s intricate TV portrait of Baltimore’s streets, docks, schools and politics felt the rug pulled from under them when they first saw him kiss his boyfriend in episode four of season one.
It was a moment that subverted audience expectations and signalled the complexity, ambition and depth that The Wire – which is often placed at or near the top of lists of the all-time greatest TV shows – was aiming to achieve. This is not a character you’ve seen before, the show seemed to be saying. These aren’t your usual stereotypes and cliches. A similar moment saw Idris Elba’s drug chief Stringer Bell attend a business studies class.
Omar’s kiss had not been in the script. “I remember somebody immediately saying, ‘There go our ratings’,”
Ed Burns, co-creator of The Wire, told the New York Times. “That sort of intimacy was not shown much then, but Mike insisted, and it breathed life into the character.”
“Omar definitely helped soften the blow of homophobia in my community,” Williams – who died on Monday aged 54 – said in 2019 of the East Flatbush neighbourhood of Brooklyn where he grew up. “And it opened up a dialogue, definitely.”
Omar went on to become the moral centre of the programme – to the extent that Barack Obama famously felt able to describe this professional thief as his favourite character. “That’s not an endorsement,” the then-presidential candidate added prudently. “He’s not my favourite person but he’s a fascinating character.”
Indeed, as Omar would say. A Robin