The Wire’ Stands Alone

 

"To appreciate what “The Wire” was, you first have to consider what it wasn’t. It was nothing like the half-century of police shows that came before it. Structurally, it didn’t offer a neatly solved case of the week; informed by the police experience of Simon’s collaborator Ed Burns, it was realistic and meticulously messy. Philosophically, it wasn’t convinced that it made much difference, in the grand scheme, if its cases got solved at all.

But it also wasn’t like cable dramas, such as “The Sopranos,” that were built around charismatic antiheroes whose exploits captivated the viewer and drove the plot. Oh, it had characters — dozens of lively creations, crackling with life and profane poetry. (In one tour de force sequence, two detectives scour a murder scene, speaking no dialogue except variations on the English language’s most versatile obscenity.) But whatever triumphs they had or bold choices they made, in the end their outcomes were fated by the systems they worked within

It wasn’t really a cop show — or rather, it used that genre as a crowbar to jimmy open doors other cop shows didn’t enter: labor, education, media criticism. It was its era’s richest show about civic politics."

read article by JAMES PONIEWOZIC