Chad Taylor

Cable


I am very late to The Wire. Partly from being a refusenik but also timing. I prefer to obsessively binge-watch one thing at a time.

It's great seeing it now when it's so old: 35mm screen ratio, Hill Street Blues production values. The drama is all in the writing. Season one was dense with ideas and directions: you didn't know which way it was going to go. Towards the end of that first run there was a perceptible budget bump and the show acquired a little more predictability... but, man: the writing.

Here is creator-writer-producer David Simon talking to Nick Hornby in 2007:
I think what you sense in The Wire is that it is violating a good many of the conventions and tropes of episodic television. It isn’t really structured as episodic television and it instead pursues the form of the modern, multi-POV novel. Why? Primarily because the creators and contributors are not by training or inclination television writers. 
Another reason the show may feel different than a lot of television: our model is not quite so Shakespearean as other high-end HBO fare.... We’re stealing instead from an earlier, less-traveled construct—the Greeks—lifting our thematic stance wholesale from Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides to create doomed and fated protagonists who confront a rigged game and their own mortality.
And talking to Meghan O'Rourke in Slate, 2006:
We realized that explaining that why the drug war doesn't work would get us only through the first season. So, we started looking at the rest of what was going on in the city of Baltimore. The big thematic heavy lifting was done in Seasons 1 and 2, when Ed and I were figuring out what we wanted to do: how many seasons, etc. We came up with five. We talked about many things; nothing seems substantial enough for a Season 6. When other writers came onto the show, George Pelecanos, Richard Price, we would throw it at them: This is what we came up with, five things. If there's anything else you have, any ideas for extending the series, say so. There was no general agreement on anything but the five.
And to Alan Sepinwall at The Star-Ledger in 2008:
To talk about symbolism, if people get it, they get it. if they don't, telling it to them ruins it. You know that.