On Re-Watching The Wire

The first season of David Simon’s ground-breaking, landmark police drama The Wire aired on HBO in the summer of 2002. I first saw it on a DVD box set – that short-lived technological victim of streaming services – a few years later when I was working on my PhD (on Virginia Woolf) in Edinburgh. I had more time than money, and a box set rental from Vogue Video on Clerk Street (long may it be remembered) cost a lot less, and lasted a lot longer than a night in the pub. 

It never occurred to me at the time that my academic focus would gradually expand from the high modernist poetics of a writer like Woolf to include various forms of crime writing, or that I would eventually include film and television (and even, once, a video game – not an experiment to be repeated) in my critical purview. But even then, like the characters in Zadie Smith’s masterpiece NW, I knew that I was watching something special, taking part in “an ecstatic communal televisual experience” – even if in my case it was a rather belated community of two. I wasn’t interested in Simon’s show as crime drama, but simply as good drama; I hadn’t known that TV could be that good – or frankly, any good – that gripping, that sharp, that patient. By the time I left Edinburgh in 2010, my wife and I had watched (more accurately, binge-watched) all five seasons.

The years that followed brought, as we all know, a ton of quality television to our screens. I watched, like pretty much everyone else, too much of it, and came over a decade or so to harbour some pretty serious doubts about the quality part of that description. Like almost everything else about internet, streaming, which seemed so promising (no more commercials! No more things to ship around the world for the next move!) soured, with over-production and over-consumption chasing each other in a widening gyre. I’m not saying there isn’t good stuff out there – and a lot of it is good crime drama – but the gold-to-dross ratio is not encouraging.

So it was with some interest that I went back to The Wire this semester. I’d assigned it to a class at City University of Hong Kong to round out a unit on the police procedural – I wanted, more than anything, to give the students a chance to talk about a medium they are at least in theory more comfortable and familiar with than fiction, and to see if the concepts and patterns they’d studied in relation to novels and short stories applied to a TV series as well. But I was also curious about how well the show would have stood up to the years. How likely was it that a technology-driven police drama – the show is about a wire-tap, after all – would still work after almost two decades? How would that post 9/11, pre-2008 world look from the midst of a once in a century (we hope) crisis and the very different world it is shaping?

The answer, and I’m going to keep this short, is incredibly well. Watching The Wire now (it turns out I’m too old to binge, so this was a stately, measured re-watch) as a student of crime fiction, I realise how deftly Simons and the writing team (which included crime novelists George Pelecanos, Richard Price, and Dennis Lehane) manipulated, combined and extended the conventions of a number of different sub-genres, even genres, into a seamless whole. The acting is superb across the board, and the show is visually riveting without being mannered or overwrought. It builds characters of genuine depth and resonance – many of them strike me now as icons as much as characters – and kills them ruthlessly in order to advance the story as a whole. And the politics can only be described as prescient: the world we live now was lurking in the shadows of those Baltimore alleyways, armed to the teeth and spoiling for a fight. If only someone had been paying a little more attention.