Thoughts on The Wire: Season One

For the record, I don’t spoil anything. So don’t be scared.

Television procedurals often paint a wildly inaccurate picture of what police investigations are really like. Rare is the murder case that can be solved in 42-odd minutes of screen time. In reality, investigations are far more grueling. This is one of the many ideas that the first season of The Wire explores. Instead of the usual case-of-the-week format made popular on most network/basic cable police dramas, the entire first season of The Wire focuses on a single case. While that description may make the series seem limited in scope, the exact opposite is true: by slowly watching the same investigation over the course of the season, we feel wholly entrenched in the ever-expanding environment. The Wire is not paced slowly just because it can be; there’s a method to the madness. The show is like an extended pan-out shot, as it slowly reveals just how huge its universe is.

For years, The Wire has been one of those shows that everyone told me was great, but I never got around to it. Some even go so far as to call it the greatest television show of all time. I cannot make such grandiose statements at the moment—I’m only through 1.25 seasons—but I can imagine that once I see the finished product I may share these sentiments. Right now, I just know I’ve seen a great season of television. So, yes, I will now join the chorus of people telling you that you absolutely have to watch The Wire. What are you waiting for?

One can see just how influential this series has been on the modern television landscape, particularly on basic and pay cable. In many ways, it made heavily-serialized narratives a viable artistic option. Today’s critically-acclaimed shows like Breaking Bad and Boardwalk Empire—which look to tell a single, large story over many episodes—likely wouldn’t be picked up if it weren’t for this series. Yet The Wire is even more methodical than these shows, and while that may test the patience of some, I found the entire ride to be riveting. One can see how it didn’t get very good ratings in its initial run: a series like this had to seem entirely foreign to the average television viewer. If I were to pop in a DVD of a random episode, you wouldn’t know what you were watching. If you experience it from the beginning, the impact is much greater. (I suspect consuming the show on DVD—as I have—is the best way to go.)

In what I consider to be a masterstroke, David Simon (the show’s creator) made the wise decision to keep it seem relatively simple in the early going. At first, The Wire seems to be exclusively about Detective McNulty (Dominic West), a character who would be right at home in any old CBS procedural. (That is not a complaint, as McNulty provides a much-needed center as the show continues its aggressive expansion.) He’s a hard drinker, his marriage is in crisis, and he loves to challenge authority. Soon he is assigned the job of investigating the drug crew led by Avon Barksdale (Wood Harris). He becomes part of a diverse detail, and it is there the show begins to take its shape. We learn about each and every character—including the criminals—and we begin to sympathize with each and every one of them. We do not know them as heroes and villains. We know them as people with different occupations.

The show is so sneaky about its genius that you may not realize how mammoth an accomplishment it is until you reflect on it. I counted no less than 23 vital characters in the first season of The Wire, and I feel like I could write an entire blog post about each of them individually. Think about how insane that is. 90 percent of television shows focus on just a handful of characters, and we are simply asked to sit back and observe their adventures. The Wire challenges the audience by constantly adding more, but it never actually feels like a challenge. It is a joy to learn more about a character, not a burden.

One of the things the show most often gets right is the frustration law enforcement must feel whenever they are working a case, particularly one like the Barksdale crew. On the one hand, everyone involved knows exactly what the other side is up to, but they are constantly searching for proof. It isn’t an investigation into discovering the truth so much as it is a search for how to prove it. In the process, our heroes use various phone taps and wires (that’s it! The name of the show!) in order to get the evidence they need against Barksdale and company. What’s frustrating is that their bosses are always breathing down their neck and hoping to get a trial as soon as possible. Where McNulty and his crew are looking to do it right so that they get the maximum convictions possible, everyone else just wants a result.

Yet The Wire is not merely a series of dialogue scenes. There is a great deal of violence to be found here. It’s infrequent, but when it comes it is brutal. There are incidents closer to the end of the season which hit particularly hard, and that is because we’ve grown to know all these characters so well. When a supporting character is shot in this show, it holds more impact than if 24 ever decided to kill off Jack Bauer.

The most famous character on the show is undoubtedly Omar, as played by Michael K. Williams. In a way, he functions as the id of the Baltimore underworld; he is willing to do exactly what he needs to do without any fear of the consequences. Strictly speaking, this man is a criminal, and a brutal one at that. Yet every move he makes is so wonderfully orchestrated and unrestrained that the audience can’t help but rally behind him. Where the police have to delve through paperwork and restrictions just to get a wiretap going, Omar is willing to just grab his shotgun and serve up his special brand of justice the old-fashioned way. In a show known for its restraint, Omar is a much-needed wild card.

Considering how well The Wire wraps up its story at the end of season one, it’s a logical concern to think about how it could possibly continue. I will not go into detail on my thoughts with season two yet—I get the feeling you can’t judge a season of this show unless you’ve finished it—but I’m surprised at just how inelegant the transition feels. Where the first season introduced new characters in an engaging way, the early going of the second season wants us to care about new characters “just because.” I’m very early into it, and I anticipate the pieces will fall into place as it goes on. But right now, it feels like a collection of unrelated plots and characters that is only intermittently interesting.

But the greatest thing about watching the first season of The Wire is that I feel I am finally in on the not-very-well-kept secret. I had heard enough about how this show can apparently cure cancer, and now I’m finally beginning to get it. “It’s so huge in scope,” people have told me. It’s not that I didn’t believe them; I just wasn’t sure what they meant by that. But now I know. As I go on through the series, I will continue to post more thoughts here. (And they likely will include more spoilers in the future.) If I go through the rest of the show at pace similar to how I downed season one, it probably isn’t going to take very long at all. If you still have your doubts as to whether television can be art, these are the kinds of shows you need to start watching.