Some Serious Series: The Wire (2002-2008)

created by: David Simon
directed by: Joe Chappelle, Clark Johnson and others
written by: David Simon, Ed Burns and others
cast: Dominic West, Wendell Pierce, Lance Reddick, Michael Kenneth Williams
imdb

The Wire often appears as one of the best in every all time series lists. That's one of the reasons why every series fan will eventually give it a shot.

Allow me being absolutely sincere at this moment. My first thought after watching the first episode of The Wire was 'Is this it? Is this supossed to be the best series of the last twenty years?'. The first thing you see is a cop talking to a kid while a corpse lies in the middle of the street. Also the image has a kind of VHS quality and the photography seems from a TV movie of the nineties (the first episode dates back from 2002).

But this first impression couldn't be more wrong: The Wire is as good as they say, and even more...

Season 2 Opening Titles

The first season establishes the foundations on which the series is going to build this great social painting, because it begins focusing on the poorest streets of Baltimore (the city where the series takes place); this season tells the duel between an special police squad and a gang of drug dealers (the Barksdales), everything with a realistic approach, both in the writing as well as in the shooting, that visually may be describred as 'Hill Street Blues enters the ghetto'. The most important is that there you won't find heroes or villains here, but men and women who try to find their way throught the jungle that the streets are.

Little by little, the plot robustness, the achievement of the script, the great performances, as well as a solid  but artisanal (shrillnessless) directing, keep gripping the viewer.

The Wire s01e06 The Wire

The Wire s01e01 The Target	The Wire s01e03 The Buys
The Wire s01e06 The Wire	The Wire s01e05 The Pager

The second season drifts away from the Barksdale (although we keep getting news from them) and focuses on the port of Baltimore, and how smuggling is entered in the USA, white they portrait the life of the polish community of the city.

The Wire s02	The Wire s02e04 Hard Cases
The Wire s02e09	The Wire s02e11 Bad Dreams

The third season goest back to the Barksdale, and shows how the liutenant of the boss, Stringer Bell, tries to get control of the family. At the same time, another drugdealer, Marlo Stansfield, is slowly taking control of the whole city.

The Wire s03e02 All Due Respect	The Wire s03e06 Homecoming
The Wire s03e4 Hamsterdam	The Wire s03e08 Moral Midgetry
5	6

In this season we look up at the city council, and the secrets of the politics. This shows the differences between the real street police work and the stats that police chiefs work with, and how all this ends in the wonderful experiment of Hamsterdam.

The Wire s03e12 Mission Accomplished

The fourth season gives the definitive leap that makes The Wire become "the great american novel of the XXI century", both in ambition and quality, as well as in social portrait and truthfulness.

Why is it "the great american novel of the XXI century"? There are several reason: first, it portraits different communities (criminal, police, justice, education, politics, etc.) that would represent the whole life of an american city, and all this with a great accuracy.

Its ambition, quality, emotion, veracity, etc. make The Wire a referencial work, and not only in television.

The Wire s04e01 Boys of summer

The Wire s05e04 Transitions	The Wire s05e06 The Dickension Aspect
The Wire s05e10 -30-	The Wire s05e10 -30-
5	6

The fifth season doesn't follow the increasing realistic path of its predecessors, specially with its psychopath plot, although it approaches the world of journalism and some of its problems, which brings to the series "the fourth power", which helps support the claim of The Wire being a timeless classic.

The Wire is an absolute must-see.

The Wire - Complete Series