The Wire: The Complete Series

Review By: Brian DePasquale
BrianDePasquale @TheCinemaSource.com

In writing school they tell you to write what you know or learn to write what you want to know. If you focus on something with which you have a strong connection than a deeply personal story will inevitably unfold. This is how many writers gain their voice. Virtually all of Woody Allen’s films can be boiled down to comic meditations on failed relationships or his morbid fascination with death. Working at a convenience store helped Kevin Smith develop the idea for Clerks. When a writer stays true to his own expertise, a rare truth is exhibited on the screen.

Ed Burns and David Simon, the co-creators and chief creative backbones of HBO’s acclaimed series The Wire, use their expertise in extraordinary ways. Burns, a former police officer and schoolteacher and Simon, a journalist team up to pen an ambitious tragedy about the inner workings of their beloved city of Baltimore. Their experiences on the street, on the beat, and in the classroom have left them frustrated and disheartened. The Wire is a carefully orchestrated documentation of their anger. The result is one of the most vibrant and entertaining social commentaries in television history.

Part of what makes the show so essential is its delicate mix of large, overarching themes with painstaking attention to detail. The content is largely based on the day-to-day procedural elements of various wings of the Baltimore lifeblood, each showcasing similar failures of a fractured metropolis. In Season one, the focus squares mostly on drug dealers in the crime-laden streets of West Baltimore and the murder police trying to stop them. In Season two, the writers move to the docks where unionized stevedores import and export illegal goods for an international narcotics organization. In Season three, politics get added to the mix as an ambitious city councilman inches toward a run for Mayor. Season four takes us through his political campaign. It also introduces us to a schoolteacher who attempts to influence the future of a young crew of potential hoppers (Baltimore slang for a street drug dealer). Finally, Season five introduces us to the world of newspapers where the lines between journalistic integrity and fiction are blurred.

These are, of course, highly generalized explanations of over sixty hours of content. An analysis of specific plot points could span the pages of an entire anthology of writing. The Wire, simply put, is the most complex show ever on television. The constantly weaving web of storylines and character arcs demands a lot from its audience and part of the reason the show never caught a major mainstream following is because the show expects too much of you. While this notion proves troublesome for a week-to-week casual viewer, it provides endless enrichment on DVD.

The Wire is never afraid to point fingers and never shies ...