SUNDAY MARKED THE END of an era on American television. HBO’s brilliant series The Wire concluded its five-season run with a 93-minute finale. Over the past several months, the show’s devotees in the media lavished the show with praise. The most common assessment? “Best TV show ever.”
The Wire is only the most recent groundbreaking HBO series to bid farewell in the past year. The Sopranos, Deadwood, and Rome also ended in the past 12 months. Together, these shows pioneered a new art form–serial television dramas with the depth and texture of the finest novels.
Perhaps because it was the last of the great HBO dramas to have its famous final scene, The Wire was the subject of some of the most extraordinary praise that any television show has ever received. Even The Sopranos in its heyday didn’t receive the same level of respect and analysis as The Wire. In the show’s final days, writers for publications as diverse as Slate, New York Magazine, and The American Prospect studied The Wire with the rigor of Talmudic scholarship.
And it was all deserved. The Wire was a dazzling work.
What made The Wire so good? The fictional show documented the war between Baltimore’s dysfunctional police department and the city’s much more highly functioning drug dealers. At the time of its 2002 debut, the characterization of the dealers was compared to that of The Godfather movies. The Wire‘s credible depiction of urban drug dealers as fully human characters was bracing–and never-before seen in broad American culture.
Conversations about The Wire tend to quickly turn to the show’s legendary verisimilitude. David Simon, a former journalist at the Baltimore Sun, is the show’s auteur. His principal partner-in-crime, Ed Burns, spent decades as a Baltimore homicide detective and school teacher. Thus, although few HBO subscribers (including this one) are likely familiar with dysfunctional urban police departments or the wily criminals they pursue, fans found The Wire unmistakably realistic.
Like David Chase’s The Sopranos, The Wire had literally dozens of recognizable characters with vivid personalities and stories. By the end of its run, The Wire had countless concurrent plots. The show was ridiculously ambitious. In retrospect, it’s somewhat incredible that the show worked at all, let alone so well.
As The Wire neared its end, the elegies came fast and furious. The most recklessly tossed-about adjective was “Dickensian,” which, although it was meant as praise, actually sold the series short. Those who used this label meant to flatter the series’ depiction of modern Baltimore’s depressing cityscape by comparing it with Charles Dickens’s depiction of 19th-century London. But if I correctly recall the Dickens class I mostly napped through in college, Dickens’s greatest shortcoming was his inattention to plot detail. Yes, he created an indelible portrait of London and his characters were unforgettable, but his indifference to plot–along with his thirst for popular approval–adversely affected his art.
In both regards, David Simon could hardly be more different. The way The Wire effortlessly maintained narrative thrust for countless plots calls to mind the plate-twirling guys on The Ed Sullivan Show. And rather than seek a broad audience, Simon made his show so inaccessible that only the most committed viewers could enjoy it. You’d have better luck opening Great Expectations to a random page and understanding the next chapter than following a random episode of The Wire without studying those before it.
Besides, Simon bears greater resemblance to a different 19th-century novelist: Honoré de Balzac, who wrote several novels in the 1830s and 1840s set in Paris and its surrounding environs. The novels weren’t serial, but the setting united recurring characters. A protagonist in one book would likely show up for a cameo in the next.
The city of Baltimore similarly united Simon’s sprawling ensemble cast though five seasons. The Wire began with a nominal protagonist, Dominic West’s rebellious Detective Jimmy McNulty, but by the end of its run, the show had no character even resembling a protagonist. Characters would take a turn as the lead, and then recede into the background. It is a measure of the show’s massive scope that Detective McNulty could practically disappear during Season Four and go unmissed, and yet return seamlessly to the fore in Season Five.
THERE WAS A DOWNSIDE to all of The Wire‘s media attention. As analysts pored over David Simon’s political motives and deconstructed each episode as if it were a freshly found Dead Sea Scroll, something occasionally got lost–The Wire was first and foremost a grand piece of entertainment. It was exciting, involving, moving, challenging, and fun. It was everything art should be and can be.
In the 1940s, curmudgeons didn’t think Gone With the Wind or Casablanca would have the same staying power as the great novels or classical concertos that preceded these films. But the curmudgeons were wrong. Similarly, when the history of this era’s art is written, the long-form television show will get the respect it deserves. And The Wire will be universally regarded as one of this era’s brilliant artistic achievements.
Dean Barnett is a staff writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
