All the Pieces Matter: The Inside Story of The Wire

by Jonathan Abrams

A long time ago, David was like, “Do you want to be an okay television show or you want to be a classic television show? This is not Walt Disney. People have to die. It doesn’t matter if you kill one actor that’s in a couple of scenes. If the audience doesn’t care about the actor you’re killing, then you haven’t done your job. They got to care about this person.” We knew that was the theme.

gratuitous.

The Chekhovian model of character is people don’t say exactly what they mean. They say what they think other people want to hear or what they want to hear themselves.

They don’t say exactly what they’re thinking. They’re not blunt. They have a roundabout way of avoiding certain truths. Then they find themselves as contents under pressure. And then there are different outcomes. Sometimes that makes for the best moments in drama and also the most interesting moments in real life. People are contradictory. I felt like I was watching Bodie becoming a much more interesting character. You can see the dividends that got paid on it in Season Four. It’s a self-reflection on his life.

After that, unofficially—we never shook on it or anything like that—David always gave me the penultimate episode of the season. That happened to be the episode where people got killed. By the end of the run, people were wearing tee shirts on set. I don’t even know who made them. It said my name, Pelecanos, and it had a pen with blood dripping on it.

Even the actors got to the point where they sort of dreaded the script coming out that I was going to write because, by policy, we would never tell the actor that he or she was going to get killed. We didn’t want the performances to get telegraphed. If they knew in the beginning of the season that they were going to get killed in a certain episode, we felt like they might telegraph it. Think about it. When your character is killed in a TV show, it’s like somebody handing you a pink slip.

But I always got that penultimate episode, and it’s because of the Wallac...

That’s the magic of it all. That’s what you’re always striving for when you’re acting, when you’re on set, when you’re in front of that camera. You always want that magical moment where it’s really happening, until they say, “Cut.”

For me, that was probably the best scene that I had. As an actor, you don’t want to have a one-dimensional character, and things like that really make it worth doing. When you can show another side of the character, it makes it so much more interesting.

Toward the end of the season, the show started airing while we were still shooting, and it immediately became a hit in Baltimore. We were shooting around the low-rises set when a school bus passed by and all the kids yelled out the window, “Omar, we love you.” That was a satisfying moment, knowing that all the blood, sweat, and tears from all was being appreciated.

acquiesced

Later on, we lost locations because row houses simply would burn down. It was just all very, very real. You really immersed yourself into the culture. It was not always a very pleasant environment to be in. The houses that we would shoot in, where characters would shoot up in, you would step on syringes and vials and everything. It was there. Everything was just real.

edifying.

A healthy body. Mens sana in corpore sano. A healthy mind is a healthy body.

populace.

A woman comes out. She’s probably in her early twenties. I explained to her, “I’m doing this TV show. There’s this Russian and there’s a bunch of strippers, and we have to say these things. I need to know how to say it.” She knew it, but she was so embarrassed to tell me. She’s like, “Let’s just go over here.” We went into the corner of the bakery, and she’s pronouncing it for me, and I’m writing it phonetically. Sometimes, it was stuff like that that you had to figure out.

We probably finished four to five seasons with Ed feeling like we left stuff on the table that we couldn’t get to. Ed is a guy who if you present him with a scenario like, we’re going to have a story arc that goes here, he’ll come up with enough material for thirty-five episodes.

sanguine

We’d all sit there going like, “Shit. We just wasted a day yesterday. We’re back to square one.” That’s Ed. By the way, that’s the core DNA of what made The Wire what it was, was Ed arguing.

schmaltzy,

There’s that expression, David always uses it: “I’d agree with you, but then we’d both be wrong.”

You have to argue. The room has to be about argument. It has to be good academic arguing. It can get a little heated. You’re basically arguing a story.

grandiose

totalitarian

But long before I do that, you need to be open enough and benign enough to let the arguments lead you where they’re going to lead you. Those were the moments that made The Wire better than it might’ve been.

picayune

Peter Lorre

stevedores.

tangential.

And it’s because all of the characters were so multidimensional and so nonstereotypical. And that the show never spoke down to its audience, no matter what level you were dealing with in the structure of society that the characters dwelled in. Everyone was bright and everyone had a point of view and everyone had a dimension that was a human quality no matter how steeped in chaos and mire that they were.

Not every tool for every job.

People, they do not change. That’s reality. What you want and what happens in reality are two different things.

He was the eyes of the show. David was the ears of the show. A lot of that vision, that’s all Bob Colesberry.

“The audience doesn’t get to decide who lives and dies. The story does.”

Then, the beautiful thing that happened is that Elijah, my son, ended up playing our son on the show.

What’s delicious in particular to me about that scene is that he’s taken down by somebody that he would have dismissed as not intellectual and not capable of forming that valid argument. That’s what I loved about it. It hits him out of nowhere, because Omar is also a great strategist and also kind of brilliant. I think that’s what I love, is that [Levy is] shut down by the person that he thinks is just a stupid animal.

quintessential

Even talking about it right now, I still feel bad about it. I had to move my director’s chair out of their way so they could shuffle past in shackles. I feel like a piece of shit because of it.

It was tough to lose these characters, but you have to be true to the writing. People die or disappear.

I always want to be truthful to my characters.

When you do a show like this, you’re ready for good-quality writing and you’re performing on such a level, with everyone who’s at the top of their game. When you’re done with something like that and you move back into that Hollywood system, everything you read is crap. It took me a long time. I passed on a whole lot of stuff. It took me a long time to realize, Wait a minute. This crap is the norm. That’s what I’m going to get. I have to find my way back to this.

I didn’t realize that the bar had been accidentally set so high in terms of writing or storytelling.

It brought the conversation to a bigger perspective because, let’s be clear, white people were not watching this show the first season. Not the masses. I’m sure there were some, but when you see more than four black people on-screen, they’re like, “That’s not my story. That doesn’t have nothing to do with me, so I’m going to change the channel.”

You had two audiences who came together and started talking about this show and going, “This show is amazing. This show is not following TV standards. They can just go from any angle.”

So, to me, the takeaway from that is people go, “Season Two is always the worst.” The reason why I think people think that is because it’s too much to reconcile the fact of whites in the same terms of social mobility as a poor black person.

Trump has benefited completely from a system of debt, right? Borrowing against your perceived value. What he’s really tapping into is exactly what I’m talking about: is the delusion that you think because you are a certain sort of skin color that you are afforded more social mobility than other races or cultures.

The large size of the ensemble cast made it impossible for the actors to know every single cast member intimately. Al Brown recalled sitting at a table with Dominic West between takes in the final season. West finished telling a story and departed. Brown turned to the person sitting next to him and asked, “What the fuck was Dominic trying to talk like some Englishman for? Is he auditioning for Shakespeare?” Brown had not realized West was British, even though the pair had been with the show since its beginning.

I don’t think anybody plays drunk better than Dom West and Wendell Pierce.

We were drunk. Well, we got a lot of practice in.

There were always moments where we would have to check each other and reassure each other that we’re doing a good job.