The Wire: reading a city through its institutions

Calling The Wire a police drama is not wrong, but it is incomplete. The show has murders, operations and surveillance; its real subject, though, is the institutions that produce, direct and often distort them. Created by David Simon for HBO, set in Baltimore and aired from 2 June 2002 to 9 March 2008, it reads a city across five seasons and 60 episodes not as a police file but as a system. My thesis is that the true protagonist of The Wire is not any character but the institutions and what they do to people.

What follows describes the plots of the seasons.

Why institutional analysis rather than a crime story?

The show’s starting point lies in its creators’ biographies. David Simon was a reporter for The Baltimore Sun, and spent a year with a Baltimore homicide unit for his book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets. His writing partner, Ed Burns, served 20 years in the Baltimore Police Department and later taught at an inner-city school; according to Wikipedia, the show grew out of Burns’s experiences. So the series was written not from outside but by two people who had passed through the system.

That perspective moves the centre of the narrative. In a classic crime story the institution is background, and the detective breaks the rules to find the truth. In The Wire the rule-breaking detective is also part of the institution, and his efforts tend to meet bureaucratic reaction. Simon has described the show as cynical about institutions while humane towards its characters. In his account it is making an argument about what institutions do to individuals, and it is a somewhat angry show.

Five seasons, five institutions

The structure builds the thesis season by season. As Wikipedia puts it, each season focuses on a different institution.

Season one (2002, 13 episodes) takes the drug trade. After Detective Jimmy McNulty goes to a judge, a police detail is formed to investigate the Barksdale organisation; wiretaps, the technique that gives the show its name, are the instrument. By the end Avon Barksdale is arrested on a minor charge while Stringer Bell keeps running the empire. The gain is real, but small.

Season two (2003, 12 episodes) turns to the port, to the working class and the unions. Union leader Frank Sobotka turns to smuggling, and the discovery of 13 dead women in a shipping container leads the investigation to The Greek. Sobotka is killed and the Barksdale organisation carries on under Stringer. The season can be read as an institutional story of economic decline: when a sector falters, people are pushed towards illegal work.

Season three (2004, 12 episodes) takes up city government. As Tommy Carcetti prepares a mayoral run, Major Colvin’s “Hamsterdam” experiment, tolerating the drug trade in designated blocks, is exposed and shut down. Simon has said the season reflects on the nature of reform and reformers, and asks whether political processes can ease the forces arrayed against individuals. Stringer is killed and Avon is arrested.

Season four (2006, 13 episodes) moves to the schools. Its spine is four West Baltimore eighth-graders, Dukie, Randy, Michael and Namond, while Prez teaches math at their school. In the same season Marlo Stanfield’s gang dominates the west side and Carcetti wins the mayoral primary. This is where the show most clearly explains why it says “system”: the same children grow up where street, school and family overlap, in a gap that no single institution owns.

Season five (2008, 10 episodes) looks at the press, the Baltimore Sun newsroom and the media. McNulty fabricates a serial-killer story, which reporter Scott Templeton amplifies; Commissioner Burrell falsifies crime statistics and is fired, while Daniels resigns after refusing to falsify them himself. Simon’s criticism of his own former profession can be read as the show’s most personal season.

Form: music, cast and slow narrative

The form extends the argument. According to Wikipedia, the show mostly uses diegetic music, meaning music that comes from within the scene, rather than a score or songs laid over the picture. That choice is the sonic counterpart of the show’s refusal to decorate the world with commentary. The opening theme, “Way Down in the Hole,” changes every season, performed by The Blind Boys of Alabama, Tom Waits, The Neville Brothers, DoMaJe and Steve Earle. The same song in different voices echoes the same system being rebuilt in different institutions.

The cast follows the same principle. Wikipedia notes that it consisted largely of actors unknown to television audiences, with real Baltimore and Maryland figures in minor roles. Dominic West (Jimmy McNulty), Idris Elba (Stringer Bell), Wendell Pierce (Bunk Moreland), Lance Reddick (Cedric Daniels), Michael K. Williams (Omar Little), Sonja Sohn (Kima Greggs), Andre Royo (Bubbles), Aidan Gillen (Tommy Carcetti) and Clarke Peters (Lester Freamon) are some of the names. Williams’s Omar, a stick-up man who robs drug dealers, is a constant thorn in the Barksdale organisation’s side; Entertainment Weekly praised his performance.

Simon has used the metaphor of a visual novel, treating each episode as a chapter. It is more productive, then, to look at seasons than to demand a verdict from each episode: consequences spread across seasons, and the seasons echo one another.

Reception and limits

According to Wikipedia, the show failed to win any major television awards when first broadcast, received average ratings, and only later gained a cult following; it is now widely considered one of the greatest TV series of all time. It was praised for its scripting and its portrayal of society, politics and urban life.

This story of belated discovery bears out the show’s own thesis: institutions do not look for quick results, and neither does the series. It is unsurprising that a structure demanding patience found no broad audience at first; I think the show was built from the start for a long reading.

Of course the approach has limits. A series so focused on institutions may under-argue the individual’s free will: characters’ choices often seem determined by institutional conditions. Simon’s approach is deliberate, and by his own account the show is an argument about what institutions do to people. As an argument it is strong, but because it is an argument it can be one-sided. The price of that one-sidedness is the show’s coherence and clarity.

Conclusion: one city, five questions

In the end The Wire is less a police series than a panorama that shows a city’s whole machinery, the street, the port, city hall, the school and the newspaper, at once. In Simon’s phrasing, the show is about the American city and how we live together. The question running through all five seasons is this: how does an institution lose its purpose, and why do the people inside it keep trying to be honest anyway? The show gives no optimistic answer, but it does not leave the question open either: institutions rarely change, yet what people do inside them decides who they are.