Let's Criticize Art I Love!: The Wire

The Wire is one of my favorite shows of all time.

I first started it in high school. We didn’t have premium cable for a while because my stepfather was stubborn and cheap, but this wasn’t really an issue thanks to the then booming DVD market. As a result, I watched the first four seasons on DVD and caught the fifth while it was airing.

I went through the same cycle I think most fans of The Wire go through. Or rather went through, as I think we’ve all grown accustomed to a post The Wire world where a lot of what it was doing that kept it as an underground show is more widely accepted. I liked season one but didn’t see what the big deal was. I liked season two less because it was such a departure from season one, but I still enjoyed it enough to keep going. Season three is when it clicked (and elevated the previous two seasons in my mind), season four is one of my favorite seasons of television ever made, and I was sad to see it go when season five aired despite the fact that it’s probably the weakest season. A year or two later, I rewatched the show and season two is now one of my favorites.

The Wire is foundational to who I am as an artist. It made me realize not only what television is capable of, but really filmed narrative art in general. My respect for it is boundless and I can’t begin to describe to you how much this show means to me. However, not realizing or acknowledging the flaws in the art you love hinders your growth and the evolution of your taste, it encourages the worst kind of fandom, and is just overall bad media literacy!

So, much like how we did with Kendrick last time, let’s point out some flaws with The Wire.

The Wire’s Approach to Developing Its Characters Calls Too Much Attention to Their Utility

TV, to me, is a character medium first.

The goal of a movie, at least from a structural standpoint, is to solve a character’s problems both in terms of the literal thing they want and the less tangible thing they need in order to achieve their version of growth. The goal of a TV show, however, is to intentionally not solve their problems so you can keep wringing stories out of them and exploring their depths. This doesn’t mean they can’t change or learn new tricks. It just means there’s a limit. If Dexter Morgan stopped wanting to kill, if Tony Soprano stepped away from the mob, you wouldn’t have a show anymore.

The good shows don’t “fix” their characters. They evolve them gracefully until it’s time to end the show. Pete Campbell started Mad Men as one of the most insufferable human beings ever, and by the end, even if you still didn’t like the guy, he had his priorities straight and he found peace. That kind of thing. They become the best versions of themselves in the context of the story that’s being told. Sometimes they’re fully “fixed,” and sometimes it’s about the small victories. 

In the case of The Wire, the characters have their flaws, but it’s really The System that compromises them, and some of the characters slowly evolve in its shadow. Sometimes, this happens naturally. Carver goes from an agro dickhead cop who just wants to beat up dealers to an effective leader who knows when to show restraint. Prezbo starts as an incompetent cop who found a gift for chasing paperwork and ends as a pillar in the public school he teaches at. Bubbles was the drug addict content to spend his life scraping by. At the end of the show, he’s finally on the right path.

Oftentimes, however, the character evolutions are there to make a point. Take Michael, Namond, Randy, and Duquan. The entire point of season four is to watch these four middle schoolers get swallowed up by The System. At the beginning of the season, Michael is the shy thoughtful one with a bit of an edge, Namond is the drug dealer’s son trying and failing to live under his father’s shadow, Randy is the charming charismatic kid with a good heart and a good nose for money making, and Duquan is the smart one trying to get by with drug addict parents. Then they’re all exposed to The System. The police. The streets. All of it. Namond makes it out, but Duquan leaves school, Randy’s stuck in a group home, and Michael’s a killer. 

It’s a beautiful and utterly heartbreaking season of television, and its themes continue into the next one where we watch Duquan and Michael sink deeper into The Game and Carcetti, the once shining new hope for Baltimore, become just another part of the problem. Again, the characters change. However, this approach can’t help but cast a spotlight on the characters that don’t get the same opportunity to evolve.

McNulty is, arguably, the protagonist of the show. He gets a moment of reprieve in season four, mainly because he sat most of it out. However, he starts an obnoxious womanizing alcoholic and that’s more or less how he ends. Freamon is a brilliant detective willing to put his career on the line to catch his target. That’s how he ends as well. The same can more or less be said for the majority of the police characters and those down in city hall. While there are some characters who aren’t allowed to evolve to make a point (Herc is a stupid asshole who basically packs it up and moves it down the road), most are kept in stasis.

On most other shows, that’s perfectly fine. Hell, it’s even fine on this one. But the show makes a distinction between those who get to evolve and those who don’t and it makes me too aware of the design. McNulty is a stubborn cop because the show needs a stubborn cop. The Bunk is there to be his foil. The kids exist to serve as a giant example of what can happen within a broken system that’s used only for personal gain. Thus there’s a race happening in my head between each character’s efficacy and their tangibility as human beings.

I still see the form, but I’m also more aware of the function than I want to be. This doesn’t stop me from loving the show, mind you. But it does sand off a little tiny bit of its edge.

A Lot of the Symbology Feels a Little Too Worked

This is more of an early show problem, but it still rears its head once and a while in the later seasons. 

As everyone knows at this point, The Wire is a show about the interconnectedness of compromised institutions. One part of the machine gets corrupted, and thus the whole apparatus fails and everyone suffers as a result. It’s dealing with a lot of complex structural issues that need explaining, and so it needs to not only address a lot of these dilemmas but demonstrate them as well. Some of those demonstrations are a little on the nose.

There’s a scene in the first season where the officers on the Avon Barksdale investigation are moving a desk. One side is pushing the desk in while the other is pushing out. Were these two sides working together, or at least not a cross purposes, everyone would get what they want, but instead both sides are stuck in stasis. I feel condescending just explaining that to you.

Another scene in season one: D’Angelo teaching Bodie and Wallace how to play chess. The pawns are soldiers who move to protect the king and they exist to be sacrificed, but if they make it to the end, they can move up. However, just doing that doesn’t mean victory.

There’s McNulty’s drunk driving crash in which he smashes his car into a bridge, then gets mad and tries to do the same thing again with the same result. There’s McNulty taking Bubbles to a suburban soccer game. (Though granted, that’s less of a metaphor.) There’s more you could point out if you wanted to. 

Your level of tolerance may differ. Personally, watching these scenes now in 2023, I can’t help but think, “Yes show, I get it.”

This may not seem like a big deal, and in the vast majority of cases, it isn’t. However, it can lead to broader problems. Personally, I’d argue that one of the reasons season five is the weakest is because it’s basically a giant on-the-nose metaphor. Everyone from the police to city hall to the Baltimore Sun is operating on a lie. Insert think piece. (I’m being a little snide, but hopefully, you get where I’m coming from.)

It’s one thing to naturally stumble upon a metaphor. It’s another to go out of your way to make one.

The Wire is Limited in What It Can Do Visually

Note that I did not say that The Wire looks bad. I think for the stories it’s trying to tell and the tone it wants to set, The Wire looks damn near perfect.

In fact, I would even go one step further and say that there are times when the show looks outright beautiful. Or more specifically, it knows that the areas of the city it’s covering aren’t the prettiest, but the show films those areas with the craft and visual language that make them look just as cinematic as any grand sweeping Hollywood set. The smooth crane shots of the row houses. The menace of the shadows on the more dangerous corners. The lights on the Patapsco and the claustrophobia of the city offices. It frequently looks stunning.

What I said was that it’s limited. Meaning that at a certain point, it can’t flex too much muscle in the aesthetics department.

A lot of shows, particularly The Wire’s contemporaries on HBO, go out of their way to set themselves up for success in their cinematography by giving themselves ample room in the visual language they use. Most of the time, this goes hand in hand with the stories they tell. The Sopranos is a show about the mafia, but it’s equally a show about the psyche of the man who sits at the top. As a result, it can be a little more surreal as we enter his headspace and it can make bold creative choices that don’t break the reality or the language of what’s been established. Six Feet Under goes even further in that direction while historical shows like Deadwood and Rome embrace the lushness and the scale of their settings. 

The Wire doesn’t have any of those luxuries. Its conflicts aren’t internal, or at least they’re not in the way that the others show are. This is a show about cold and naked reality, and as a result, it’s aesthetics take a backseat to verisimilitude. It’s the best way to shoot a show like this. However, the visual presentation is not the first thing you think of when you think of The Wire, and the few times it does try to do something out of the ordinary, it sticks out like a sore thumb.

Again, these attempts don’t look “bad.” Personally, I think the footage from the earlier seasons shot from the perspective of security cameras looks kind of cool in a vacuum. But for a show like The Wire, they just felt wrong, and I personally don’t like being put in a position as a viewer where I want to deny visual experimentation from a show when I think said experimentation looks good.

(The only time I can think of when The Wire did something that looked outright bad was the CGI used to show the towers being demolished at the beginning of season three. But all CGI has a shelf life, and it doesn’t really bother me. In fact, some shows that had a more ranged visual language did worse. Looking at you, Livia’s CGI head in the episode where she dies in The Sopranos.)

Filmmaking is a visual medium, and The Wire is intentionally stripped back. This may not do too much to affect your enjoyment, but a wise man once said that all the pieces matter. The Wire chose a path where it couldn’t always get into the emotionality of its story and its characters with its visual language. I can live with it, but I’ll always notice it.

It Could’ve Gone Further in Its Criticism of Police

Let’s give some credit where credit is due: The Wire is more critical of policing in America than the vast majority of shows that came before, during, and after it aired.

I rewatched the show before writing this article, and there are some seasons and storylines that are outright brutal to the cops, particularly season four where we watch Herc singlehandedly destroy multiple children’s lives through his own incompetence. Which is to say nothing of Officer Walker and the walking hard-on that is Officer Colicchio. Sometimes, the show puts a spotlight on just how far even the most minor of police offenses can travel.

And let’s be honest with ourselves: This is a show that started in 2002 and ended in 2008. It was made during a time when we had a much different relationship with not only the police department but the very idea of policing itself. It was never going to and can never be as thorough a critique as we want it to be.

That said, sometimes the show can get a little too friendly with cops. Herc stupidly pulls over and essentially brutalizes a minister. Daniels, a character we know and trust, thinks the brutality complaint is a stretch. The idiot cops of the western district beat the crap out of some corner kids and the show writes it off like it’s nothing. Hamsterdam is a giant hypothetical scenario about a safer and more effective way of policing drugs, yet in order to set it up, a lot of cops had to violate a lot of people’s civil rights. There are plenty of other examples.

Moreover, while race is a heavy theme of the show, The Wire is more interested in the broken structure that leads to the administrative and policy issues of the police department. I think the show is aware of the racial fissure between the community and the police, but rarely does it address those issues as part of the larger problem. This isn’t to say that it’s wrong to focus on one area of said problem and not the other, but race is an awfully large part of the equation to push to the side.

Sometimes it’s hard to tell what the show thinks of these events. Sometimes it thinks they’re funny. Other times, it understands that it’s showing the cops doing something morally reprehensible. Sometimes it’s something in between.

For what it’s worth, I think David Simon and his collaborators agree with me on some level, hence the existence of We Own This City, which is easily the most critical of policing a David Simon show has ever been. 

But these are the ACAB days, and sometimes, The Wire doesn’t meet our standards. That doesn’t diminish the show’s power, and again, it’s one of the most potent critiques of the system we have in modern fictional media. But when it comes to pointing out the flaws of such a broken system, is there really such a thing as going too far?