'The Wire' at 20: (Too) Often Imitated, Never Duplicated

"Twenty years ago tonight, the first episode of The Wire aired on HBO. The series premiere was, by the standards of television circa 2002, utterly inscrutable. Even viewed now, through the filter of the many shows influenced by it, the series can be a bit hard to follow if you haven’t recently watched that entire first season, if not the whole thing. Co-created by ex-reporter David Simon (who had previously written for Homicide: Life on the Street, which was adapted from one of his books) and ex-cop Ed Burns (who was loosely the inspiration for this show’s cocky lead detective, Dominic West’s Jimmy McNulty), The Wire was at first glance a cops-versus-crooks saga in which McNulty joined a Baltimore Police Department task force to bring down the organization of local kingpin Avon Barksdale (Wood Harris). But that pursuit of Barksdale — and, in later seasons, his calculating former lieutenant Stringer Bell (Idris Elba) and then the enigmatic Marlo Stanfield (Jamie Hector) — was really just the narrative carrot Simon and Burns used to pull viewers through a series of complex arguments about the moral failings of the War on Drugs, the reasons for the crumbling state of cities like Baltimore, and larger flaws in the foundation of America as a whole."

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'The Wire' at 20: (Too) Often Imitated, Never Duplicated - Rolling Stone