I lost count of how many times the two lead actors of The Wire use the word “fuck” in one of the greatest scenes in television history. For nearly four minutes, Detectives Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West) and Bunk (Wendell Pierce) walk around a murder scene, reconstructing what happened when a gunman shot a woman through a kitchen window.
It’s really good television and a prime reason why The Wire is rated by most critics as the best TV show of all time. If you haven’t watched it yet, you are in for a great treat.
Set across five seasons of 12 or 13 episodes (10 in the fifth), it follows a group of detectives as they combat crime in the drug-ravaged communities in West Baltimore. You get to know McNulty, Bunk, Greggs (a solid performance from Sonja Sohn in a butch environment) and their boss Lieutenant Daniels (the first of many cop boss roles for the always-great Lance Reddick). On the other side are the gang lords – including the famous first major role for Idris Elba as Stringer Bell – and their families and teenage drug dealers.
Drugs are the organising principle of these devasted communities, where they destroy lives but seem to provide the only employment for young men. It’s an incestuous scenario that spirals from one bad situation to another, as happens whenever drugs and criminals are involved.
What makes The Wire so good, and so believable, is the excellent writing by former journalist David Simon, whose career as a reporter covering Baltimore gave him such insight into the culture.
You see this in the characters he has created, who are real people who you get to know over the seasons. Greggs has a soft spot for an informer called Bubbles (Andre Royo), while working with the older, wiser Detective Freamon (Clarke Peters). “He’s real po-lees” as McNulty says.
The interplay between the various departments is considered true to life and a microcosm of the clashes in American culture between the people who run things and the people who do things. Or the government and its various agencies. In the first season, it’s essentially how law enforcement works in one city. The cops on the street try to fight crime; while their bosses fight with their bosses; who are engaged in low-grade conflict with the police chief; who is himself playing a power game with the mayor; and so on.
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Arguably the best character – and certainly the meanest – is Omar (played with icy cold menace by the brilliant Michael Kenneth Williams), a thief who robs other thieves. Best of all, his brutal and remorseless character is anachronistically averse to swearing and is gay, upending a sexual role that is usually stereotyped as effeminate or ‘less macho’. Omar is a bad guy that you can’t help but love, especially because of his oft-said homespun truisms.
Like West (who played Prince Charles in The Crown and appeared in the Downton Abbey film), Williams will always be known for their roles in The Wire – which is richly deserved given how both men deliver tour de force performances across the 60-episode run.
Each season follows a specific theme, starting with learning how the drug trade operates in the first. Season two examines the Baltimore docks and the hard, sad life of the longshoremen – which is one of the reasons why The Wire has resonated so profoundly in America where it debuted in 2002.
Season three shows the dysfunction in local government and the breakdown of governance; while the fourth season is arguably the bleakest as it reveals how broken the school system has become. Season five, somewhat uncomfortably, looks at the US media industry and its struggles.
The central character that unites all of this is McNulty, the hard-drinking but honest cop who is like a dog with a bone. Thanks to him, many crimes are solved and criminal enterprises are brought down. There is an unavoidable sense of pathos, even despair, at the accuracy with which The Wire shows the decay of inner-city America. But even in this bleakness, the writers and actors still show that human goodness wins through, as characters like Jimmy McNulty show.