Why ‘The Wire’ Still Stands Alone After 20 Years

When critics get to assessing a classic TV show, we have a weird tendency to turn into evolutionary biologists. We pull out the old television family tree and gauge the series’s achievement by how many branches we can trace back to it — how many series modeled one or another aspect on it. “Dragnet,” “The Simpsons,” “Lost” — you shall know them by their copycats.

And sure, influence is one measure of greatness. But so is inimitability. There is the painter who leaves behind a school of disciples, but there is also the artist who sees a color that no one has envisioned before or since.

“The Wire” premiered on HBO on June 2, 2002. In the two decades since, its reputation has only grown, as has its audience. It is one of those series, like the original “Star Trek,” that future generations will refuse to believe struggled with low ratings during its entire run. (Let alone that it was nominated for an absurd two Emmys, and won exactly none.)

But has anyone made another “Wire” since? Who — besides the creator, David Simon, in his later series — has emulated its sprawl, its complexity, its bucking of TV’s easy-to-digest episodic structure? TV fans and makers praise the show as a landmark and inspiration. Yet 20 years later, “The Wire” — like the cheese in the tune whistled by the show’s notorious drug bandit, Omar Little (Michael K. Williams) — stands alone.

The clown stays the clown

To appreciate what “The Wire” was, you first have to consider what it wasn’t. It was nothing like the half-century of police shows that came before it. Structurally, it didn’t offer a neatly solved case of the week; informed by the police experience of Simon’s collaborator Ed Burns, it was realistic and meticulously messy. Philosophically, it wasn’t convinced that it made much difference, in the grand scheme, if its cases got solved at all.

But it also wasn’t like cable dramas, such as “The Sopranos,” that were built around charismatic antiheroes whose exploits captivated the viewer and drove the plot. Oh, it had characters — dozens of lively creations, crackling with life and profane poetry. (In one tour de force sequence, two detectives scour a murder scene, speaking no dialogue except variations on the English language’s most versatile obscenity.) But whatever triumphs they had or bold choices they made, in the end their outcomes were fated by the systems they worked within.

It wasn’t really a cop show — or rather, it used that genre as a crowbar to jimmy open doors other cop shows didn’t enter: labor, education, media criticism. It was its era’s richest show about civic politics, while being set only part-time at City Hall. It was a savvy and layered legal drama. At times — as when the shotgun-toting Omar teamed with the hired gun Brother Mouzone (Michael Potts) for vengeance on the drug lord Stringer Bell (Idris Elba) — it was one of TV’s finest westerns.

So what was “The Wire,” really? It gives away the game in the very first scene. Detective Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West) is at the murder scene of one Omar Isaiah Betts, a.k.a. “Snot Boogie.” A witness tells him that Snot had tried to steal the purse from a weekly craps game. Every Friday night the group gambled; every week Snot tried to grab the cash.

“Why’d you even let him in the game?” McNulty asks, puzzled.

“Got to,” the witness says. “This America, man.”

It’s America. And in the America of “The Wire,” messed up things happen over and over like clockwork, and no one ever does differently because it’s just how things are done. That one dry exchange captures the spirit — the fatalism, the gallows humor, the recognition that the system doesn’t work and the pride in sticking with it anyway — that drove the entire series.

The first, most traditionally crime-focused season laid the foundation. There was a painstaking investigation of a Baltimore drug gang, using electronic surveillance — the “wire” of the title. But it was complicated by conflict between the unit and the higher-ups who wanted faster “buy-and-bust” arrests.

“The Wire” was cast to look like Baltimore, which meant that it had a vast and varied ensemble of Black characters, just three years after the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People protested a fall broadcast schedule that didn’t have a single lead actor of color.

Here, Black actors would play the good guy, the bad guy and the morally conflicted guy, who were often the same guy in one. (I use “guy” advisedly. “The Wire” had memorable female characters — like Felicia Pearson, a.k.a. Snoop, playing a gravel-voiced gang enforcer under her own name — but it was predominantly male.)

Take Lt. Cedric Daniels (Lance Reddick), the head of the investigation unit, who was dedicated and principled but also torn by ambition and the pressures of department politics. In a scene that hits hard in a Black Lives Matter Era rewatch, he scolds a white officer who pistol-whipped a teenager — but also coaches him on how to beat the brutality charge. “He pissed me off,” the officer says. No, Daniels answers, “he made you fear for your safety.”

“The Wire” was determined not to be another story of hero cops and faceless perps. No group on “The Wire” would be less fully human than any other. Every element of the drug chain was richly drawn, from the kingpins to the low-level soldiers holding the corners to the junkies. “The Wire” didn’t just have a cast, it had an ecosystem.

It also had an ideology. The drug trade, the show recognized, was capitalism in its most raw, potent, uncut form, with a killer product, a captive market and a disposable work force. No character illustrates this better than the gangster economics student Stringer, whose business training makes him both more pragmatic and more brutal: He’ll avoid violence if it’s bad for profits, but when he does go to war, it’s with a machine-like coldness. After all, it’s just business.

In a famous early scene, the gang captain D’Angelo Barksdale (Lawrence Gilliard Jr.) teaches his corner boys chess, using drug-world analogies. The pawns — i.e., them — die early, advance rarely and win never. “The king stay the king.” But the parable that sticks with me comes when the young dealer Wallace (Michael B. Jordan), savoring a Chicken McNugget, says that the man who invented them must be rich. D’Angelo scoffs. Ronald McDonald is rich, he says. “Mr. Nugget,” he adds, is “still working in the basement for regular wage,” thinking of ways “to make the fries taste better.”

In the world of “The Wire,” everyone who’s not on top — police, drug dealer, bureaucrat — is in that basement, managing upward and hustling to find ways to keep Ronald McDonald happy. The clown stays the clown.

A tough sell

The first season spins a satisfying detective story. Then it asks: Did any of this matter? The gang keeps running, under new management. McNulty gets exiled to a police boat for ticking off his superiors. The money trail to local politicians is left hanging. The story you spent 13 gripping hours following is barely a Band-Aid on the city’s dysfunction.

The rest of the series broadens the scope. Season 2 turns to the decimation of the city’s docks, where blue-collar jobs have disappeared, leaving drugs to fill the gap. Season 3, with the rise and fall of an experimental drug-decriminalization zone, shows how city politics make reform impossible.

Season 4 — as moving and wrenching a run of television as has ever aired — follows four city students through a year of middle school, their options already starting to fall away one by one. Season 5 pulls in the depleted local media — Simon, a former Baltimore Sun reporter, settles some scores — to show why the years of drama we’ve watched barely rated a few column inches.

All this is a tough sell to viewers. We want to believe, as people, that individuals can make a difference. We are trained to expect, as viewers, characters who are masters of their own fate.

This might explain why the seemingly universal fan favorite is Omar, the stickup man. He’s insouciant and funny; he lives by a code; he may not be Robin Hood, but he limits himself to robbing hoods. He’s an outsider — an open, badass gay man in a homophobic environment.

Maybe most important, he’s a freelancer. He has no ladder to climb or bosses to answer to. He holds out hope that it’s possible for an individual to survive outside the system. So it hits hardest of all when he is finally taken out ignominiously, shot by a child in a convenience store.

In Jonathan Abrams’s history of “The Wire,” “All the Pieces Matter,” David Simon described his storytelling intent: “This is going to be a cruel world and nothing is going to get fixed that matters systematically.” But if things don’t change in this world, every once in a while, individuals can.

Thus Namond Brice (Julito McCullum), one of the four central middle schoolers in Season 4, appears to escape the gang life that sent his father to prison. And the addict Bubbles (Andre Royo), in many ways the emotional heart of the series, ends the finale climbing the stairs of his sister’s basement, where he had been confined while kicking the habit.

“The Sopranos” operated under the philosophy that people never change, even when the world does. In this small way, at least, “The Wire” is more optimistic.

Proof of concept

Actually, it’s not entirely true to say that nothing ever changes in the America of “The Wire.” Some things get worse.

Each generation of gang leaders is colder and more brutal than the one it kills off. The schools, the city departments and the press that holds them to account get more starved for funds. We don’t get “more with less,” in the words of the Season 5 premiere; we just get less.

It may be a bleak view, but it’s hard to say two decades of history have proven it wrong. Local news outlets are on life support, or worse. American democracy is in danger of becoming optional. The financial crisis and the pandemic showed the atrophy of our systems of protection and trust.

And Simon’s recent “We Own This City,” a kind of docudrama epilogue to “The Wire,” caught up with the corruption and brutality in Baltimore’s police force through and after the “rough ride” death of Freddie Gray, in 2015. You couldn’t expect “The Wire” to cure society, but it’s hard to dispute its diagnosis — if anything, “City” suggests, it could have been harsher.

As for changing TV, while we’ve gotten one variation after another on Tony Soprano and Walter White, there have been only occasional attempts (like ABC’s “American Crime”) to re-create or expand on “The Wire.”

It’s hard to pull off this kind of perspective-shifting, Balzacian sprawl without losing the audience. And it’s a rare feat to make drama out of a critique of systems without sounding like a textbook, or a tract. Maybe we don’t see more people emulate “The Wire” for the same reason more people don’t try to make Frederick Wiseman documentaries: The job is massive, and the commercial payoffs, historically, are not.

So what legacy does “The Wire” have? Its closest comparisons are Simon’s other urban-sprawling series, “Treme” (set in post-Katrina New Orleans) and “The Deuce” (Times Square in its high-sleaze era). Maybe you can see analogues, if you squint, in the anti-episodic long-game storytelling and realpolitik focus of “Game of Thrones,” though that series was based on a series of books that began before “The Wire” aired.

Superficially, “The Wire” was the precursor of many streaming dramas, which, assuming that audiences will binge them at a fast clip, dispense with traditional TV structure, following the “every season is an episode” philosophy. But let’s not get carried away; “The Wire” has little in common with the kind of algorithm-bait that drags itself out to boost a platform’s minutes-per-subscriber statistic. “The Wire” was big, yes, but it was packed as tight as a container ship.

Instead, the run of “The Wire” reminds me of a comment by Detective Leander Sydnor (Corey Parker Robinson) as the unit winds down the first-season investigation. “This is the best work I ever did,” he says. “I never did a case like this. But it’s not enough.” Just because you show the world how the job could be done differently doesn’t mean the world will start doing it that way.

But for “The Wire” not to change TV was not a failure. It was proof of concept. After all, the series was an argument that institutions resist change. For it to have spent five seasons showing how to use long-form TV to its fullest, then get its retirement papers and some kind words while the medium went on the way it always did — Jimmy McNulty would laugh. It’s the most “Wire” ending you could write.