Newsreel Essay: It Ain’t Beirut: Baltimore on The Wire

Nearly a year after its fifth and final season finished screening in the United States, you could find the first four seasons of the HBO-produced television series The Wire on DVD at the popular retail franchise JB HiFi for under fifteen dollars each; a thirteen-episode series for less than you’d pay for most thirty-minute CDs. If you went out and purchased the discounted discs you could then watch thirteen hours of Barack Obama’s favourite TV show. Obama admitted his love for the show early in the Democratic primaries (citing the gay criminal-with-a-code-of-ethics Omar Little as his favourite character). At the same time, Hilary Clinton gave her support to the sentimental medical soap Grey’s Anatomy. Obama made the wiser choice and in making it he wasn’t just courting the votes of Baltimore or wider Maryland, or that of The Wire’s co-creator David Simon, though he eventually won over all three.

The Wire is committed to dealing with the realities of living and working in a decaying American city. Whether Obama saw a little of himself in the characters is open to speculation; he may have identified with the calm authority of Lieutenant Cedric Daniels or with the political idealism of Democrat mayoral candidate Tommy Carcetti. Carcetti had his work cut out for him, as a white man running for mayor in a city with a majority black population. Carcetti is Obama inverted, but they were both striving for the same thing: a chance for real political change.

In her lecture ‘Speaking in Tongues’, delivered at the New York Public Library, Zadie Smith credited Obama with being not only able to speak for people, but also to speak them, mimicking their speech through an ‘enviable facility for dialogue’. Obama, according to Smith, can do the ‘black old lady from the South Side, white Harvard nerds, black Columbia nerds, activist women, churchmen, security guards’ and so on. This ability to enact a plurality and multiplicity of voices—put to good use in Obama’s memoir Dreams from My Father—is seen also in the writing of Wire co-creators, former crime reporter David Simon and ex-cop, ex-teacher Ed Burns. Language is central to the perceived authenticity of the show. Sydney Morning Herald TV critic Greg Hassall confessed to Simon that he had to watch the show with the subtitles on to keep up with the dialogue. British newspaper the Independent provided readers with a liftout Wire glossary when the series was screened for the first time on the BBC; essentials included Burner (disposable mobile phone), Mope (police term for a drug dealer) and the Package (consignment of drugs). This devotion to the naturalism of street-speak apparently comes from the journalistic background of many of The Wire’s writers. However, the show had only two recurring black writers—Joy Lusco and David Mills—who, between them, wrote only five individual episodes of the sixty episode run. By comparison, Simon and Burns contributed thirty episodes over the five seasons.

The first two seasons of The Wire did not deviate from the genre of police procedural—centring on a Major Crimes Unit and the drug dealers they are targeting—that Simon had already explored in his ‘nonfiction’ novel Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets and its television adaptation. In the third season of the show, however, Simon and Burns recruited more writers: the crime novelists Richard Price and Dennis Lehane, along with former Baltimore Sun editor and political reporter William F. Zorzi (playing veteran newspaperman Bill Zorzi, a version of himself, in the fifth season). This signalled the widening scope of the show. Location scouts went further out into Baltimore to find suitable backdrops to scenes; new, more elaborate sets were built. Police procedural extended to ‘urban procedural’. Characters such as Carcetti were introduced and their ambitions and machinations became as central to the show as the cops and criminals. The Wire was compared to the nineteenth-century novel; it was doing for Baltimore what Dickens did for the London of Bleak House. Richard Price described The Wire as the ‘Russian novel of an HBO series’. The Wire differs from network programming like CSI in not offering stand-alone episodes and leaving most of the plot open-ended. The episodes of each season serve the same function as chapters in a novel; telling one long narrative, one step at a time. This approach won much praise from critics, but the ratings remained low.

Whether it was the intention of co-creators Simon and Ed Burns or not, The Wire has become the go-to guide for Baltimore on film—and it was press the city could have done without. Simon talked about having outstayed his welcome with The Wire, coming after Homicide and another HBO book-to-television adaptation, The Corner. Baltimore native John Waters, a kitsch filmmaker known for offending locals with his depraved depictions of his hometown and a fan of The Wire, told a public radio broadcaster in April 2009 that the governor of Maryland had ‘really hated [The Wire], thought it made Baltimore look bad. I told him I’ve seen maps in Japan that people have of the worst corner in Baltimore.’ Simon felt Baltimore wasn’t that bad. As he put it to salon.com in 2002, talking about the dangers of researching on the streets of Baltimore, ‘it ain’t Beirut’. The graffito ‘Body-more, Muderland’ was grafted onto T-shirts as a slogan and sold for profit. Baltimore benefited from the production being based in the city. Former Republican governor Robert Ehrlich eventually appeared in a cameo in the show, along with a number of real-life Baltimore figures including former mayors and drug barons.

The Wire doesn’t speak only for Baltimore though. Halfway through watching the fourth season of the series, I had an hour-long meeting with my disability employment network officer. We talked about the series in relation to her work environment and clients. I outlined the focus of the fourth season. It is set in a state school, where both Roland ‘Prez’ Pryzblewski and Howard ‘Bunny’ Colvin—good police turned great teachers—come to grips with the education system. (Prez and Bunny are the characters easiest to warm to, partly thanks to the parental roles they adopt; in Colvin’s case thanks to the gentle performance by Robert Wisdom.) I summed up Colvin’s experience—he was recruited by an academic to test out a socialisation program for troubled students—by explaining that Colvin had stressed that he couldn’t reach kids over a certain age, that by sixteen their lives were already being lived in accordance with the rules of the game. In talking about The Wire, we were not talking about television, we weren’t talking characters or scripts, acting or direction, we were talking about issues and policy and our broader experiences. A conversation based on a television show can spin off into a social-welfare agenda; a friend who now works for Justice Health had watched all six seasons of prison drama OZ and partly credited the series with the insight needed for the job. It is a testament to The Wire that it provided similar insight for Barack Obama, Wire devotee cum President of the United States.