The Wire: David Simon's 5 Year "Love Letter" to Baltimore

If you spent any part of the last decade wasting your valuable entertainment time with The Sopranos, only to feel slighted and spit upon by the creators when the series finally wrapped while still embroiled in a sea of creative controversy and airing its final insulting episode on June 10th of 2007, I know a way you can almost recoup that time via a better series that never quite received as much attention, yet was more truthful and engaging to the discriminating viewer.

From 2002 through 2008, a time when the television airwaves were crammed full of sensationalized "Law & Order" franchises and a whole slew of also-ran cop dramas, writer/producer David Simon (The Angriest Man In Television) and writer/former Baltimore police detective, Ed Burns set the all-time high water mark for police dramas with HBO's The Wire. Set in the gritty reality of urban Baltimore, The Wire serves to embarrass all other police dramas with a series so unsettling and precise that it spoils the viewer for anything less. Never before has any series so perfectly depicted the stark brutality of the inner city and the social, political and economic tides that influence the actions of everyone involved, from cops and dealers to teachers and dockworkers, with such serious blunt force and careful aplomb.

Simon immediately does away with the wise-cracking homicide detectives that over inhabit network cop dramas and shows us a naked cross section of the inner workings of a flawed system, it's many heroes, villains and the dozens of personalities that span the gap between them and vacillate from one side to the other as the momentum of the city shifts from day to day. From the opening episode it becomes clear that Simon is emotionally attached to whatever outcome may unfold. He didn't paint this masterpiece for a paycheck and this can be felt throughout the methodical development of each character, each situation and each season. His would be heroes are deeply flawed and often act without forethought and even a hint of introspection. Yet his characters that most dramas would depict as one-sided thugs and criminals always seem to be thinking one or two moves ahead on the emotional chess board and viewers often finds themselves bouncing from one side to the other as each story line unfolds. In fact, the most consistently sympathetic and morally upright character in the program is a shotgun toting, bulletproof vest-wearing, Robin Hood-esque figure who robs drug dealers as a profession. Still, despite the obvious violence and risk of his chosen profession, he never utters a single curse word throughout and, as we find out as the series progresses, even takes his elderly mother to church every Sunday.

As would be expected with a work so deeply rooted in real life experiences, Simon draws a great number of his cast members from the streets of Baltimore and the surrounding cities, parlaying their streetwise personalities into the framework that helps to create the raw truth on which the program is based. Everything is so much more believable because Simon's characters are based on a level of truthfulness that a casting couch would be hard pressed to reveal. The rest of the ensemble cast is spectacular, each playing out their roles with a minimalist quality that allows them to develop and evolve as a single entity like blood pulsing through a living, breathing thing. And all the while, everyone's attention was on HBO's perennial favorite The Sopranos, a series whose arrested development was ignored by critics and apologists who just couldn't let go of something that used to be cutting edge entertainment, if not relevant in the greater context of society.


Since the original airing of The Wire, David Simon and Ed Burns have moved on to write and produce the acclaimed HBO mini-series Generation Kill. An equally dignified subject and an ever-deepening matter of contemporary concern, Generation Kill addresses the United States continued involvement in the war in Iraq and the human repercussions heaped upon the soldiers deployed there with the same intense acuity and unflinching purpose employed in prior work as a writer and former journalist. With each new step, Simon continues to pursue answers where none are forthcoming and unapologetically presses the viewer's faces up against the glass for a good, hard look. That is, if you're up to it.


For more information on David Simon and his motivation behind The Wire, click here to view his entire interview with Bill Moyers' from April of 2009.