All the Pieces Matter: The Inside Story of The Wire

by Jonathan Abrams

We’re not coming after you because you know Baltimore through and through. You know people. That’s why we want you.”

The takeaway there was: Don’t cut corners, even if it’s a lot harder not to. Taught me more about how to write good TV than just about any lesson I can think of.

On The Wire, it took about two to three days to break an episode. We would get together for two or three days.

You can’t value your own voice until people you respect question it. And you should always have at least one person around you, creatively speaking, who feels comfy speaking truth to power.

I could play the music, but I couldn’t compose it. So, I just waited to hear the tempo and ran with what I was given.

“He made his points after everyone else in the room had already had their say. Bob could back you into a better idea and convince you that it was probably your own. And he was forever pathfinding through the forest of overgrown ego that flourishes on any movie set.”

He loved his work and was passionate about the process. That was intoxicating, because it just made you feel part of this bigger process.

We’re just colleagues, but every time I dealt with him, he made me feel like a better human being.

It was in the string of almost every conversation I had with him, where he was thinking about me as opposed to himself.

Having the distraction and the focus of the work was really important to me.

colloquially

But in The Wire, there were all different types of characters and different types of human variables, and it was fabulous to play.

That’s where a lot of people know it from. But it makes people smile. At first, I didn’t quite get what the big deal was. I said, “I always thought everyone says that.” A friend of mine says, “Everybody does say it, but it’s the way you say it that makes it special.” I’m glad people are happy with it.

Anytime a character can inform me in that way, then I think it’s been a very successful role for me to play.

When Clay Davis shows up, you know he’s there for some reason or some purpose. You have to take notice.

It put me on my quest. That was the beginning of my enlightenment, when I started realizing that I can be of service through the gift that I’ve been given to express myself through art and the story that I tell through art. It became something other for me than just about my career.

You watch it and you think—particularly, I think—in the street scenes, that a lot of it must be improvised, but I think I’m right in saying that none of it was ever improvised, and no one ever went off the script. It just shows you what great writing it is. He has an incredible ear for the way people speak and the way different people speak differently.

He was very exact about the dialogue.

Ed was a young police officer and he was a younger man. Despite prison, despite all the wreckage caused by the two forces going against each other, there was no hate between them. I thought that was kind of fascinating, that relationship between the law and its opposition. They didn’t oppose the police. They were just trying to get around them.

Our thing was: don’t ever write a boring scene, even if the material is boring.

I hated the political stuff. I hated writing those scenes, because it’s just people talking in a room, but we would always say in the writers’ room that every scene counts. Don’t ever throw away a scene, because then it’s going to be the scene where somebody gets up to take a piss or goes to the refrigerator to get a beer and we don’t want them to leave their seat.

You know, when you just look at somebody and you just know that, damn, they’re supposed to be in your fucking life? They’re supposed to be in your life. She was one of those people. I took one look at her and I knew that she was supposed to be in my life. I was right. I was right. I love her.

The next scene was the next episode. She’s supposed to kill somebody. Let me tell you, there wasn’t anybody better than she was. She was awesome. I mean awesome. I was complimenting her. I’m like, “You really know how to do this. God, you’re amazing.” Then it clicked for us. We became extremely good friends during the shoot. She had the most amazing look of hers. She had this angelic face, but with these eyes that had seen too much in her lifetime. It was this overall kind of sadness on one side, but hope on the other.

I just liked the idea of you just panning that camera across that barroom scene and just catching him like that and keep right on going. Hit Rewind. And if we were given more seasons, it’s something that you could work with. Daniels would find out about it; he could use it. I mean, you plant little things that way, so that the characters have someplace to go that you can use.

A lot of TV shows are behind a clock, and they rush through. Nothing really felt rushed on The Wire. It felt like you were making a movie every week.

When you know a series is going to be over and done, for a character to get killed, it’s a good thing. Moving forward, all the fans know that you won’t be seeing that character anymore. It’s a good period to put on the end of a character’s life.

We crafted the relationships in such a way that just as he was trying to get out, the wall will close down upon him and he would have this death, which I think was a big shock to Idris. I don’t think it’s fair for a character to go beyond a high mark of his journey, just stretch the arc out for the sake of keeping the character there.

He was becoming not only a gangster, but a very smart businessman. I suspect The Wire must have saw this in me and killed his character or it becomes the show.

mythos

In order to make a story matter, you can’t just kill the people, you can’t disappear the people, the characters that people want to disappear. The audience is a child. If you ask the audience what they want, they’ll want dessert. They’ll say they want ice cream. They’ll want cake. You ask them what they want the next minute, they’ll say more ice cream, more cake. You show them that they like something else. “You like fried chicken? Here, taste my fried chicken.” Then the next ten things they order will be the fried chicken. “You like Omar?” “Yeah, I love Omar. Give me more of Omar.” No, I want to tell you a story, and the characters are going to do what they’re supposed to do in the story, and that’s the job of the writer. That’s the writer’s job. That’s the storyteller’s job. You don’t write for anybody but the story, for yourself and for your idea of what the story is. The moment you start thinking about the audience and the audience’s expectation, you’re lost. You’re just lost. So, you’ve got to just put it out of your mind and tell the story that you think you’re there to tell.

That’s what I love about the show. It always foiled expectations. Just when you thought you were gonna get an uplifting story, you got smacked in the face.

“Let’s not be afraid to celebrate us.”

We can’t be afraid to celebrate ourselves.

grousing

“You know, Dominic, in about ten years’ time, twenty years’ time, you’re going to be sitting in some bar, in one of our horrible, wet, rainy London bars, and you’re going to be sitting at the bar stool, and it’s going to be late in the day, and you’re going to say to the barman, or anyone who will listen, you’ll say, ‘I was once in a show called The Wire. I dunno if you ever heard of it, but I was the lead actor.’ And that barman is going to look at you and go, ‘I think it’s time you went home now, sir.’ ”

Desperate Housewives is pretty. I’m not about pretty.”

Again, sometimes a story’s got to eat its vegetables.

I know a guy who did three episodes on The Sopranos. They were shooting seventeen days an episode. We were shooting eleven.

They’re not going to catch on until we’re gone. This is the type of show that they’re going to pick up when we’re off the show, like a book, and rewatch it over and over again.” I remember my first response in my head was, What an arrogant white boy. What the fuck is he talking about?

They can stick with a story even though there’s forty characters. They appreciate being treated like they’re intelligent. All of a sudden, The Wire became that show where there was a hierarchy. If you say you like The Wire, that means you like reading books. That means you give a fuck about the human race. It made you feel like you bettered yourself in the crowd when you say, “My favorite show is The Wire.” All of a sudden, people look at you differently. It became a badge of honor to tell somebody, “Did you hear about The Wire? You got to watch The Wire.”

“Opportunity is what these kids lack,” Burns said. “The path is the corner or the stoop. We’re talking about these kids here on the corner. They don’t have advocates…Corner kids, there’s nobody rooting for them. You have to change that world, and where you have to start is ages zero to three. That’s the most formative years of your life, and you’re not even in charge of it. You got to go back and you got to create institutions that give that child the dignity, the self-respect, the love that he or she needs to go out into the world.”

Besides, I taught in middle school. You go with what you know.

To have a show that looks like us and feels like us and speaks in the same language as us, and you get to see both sides—you see [that] the cops aren’t always good guys and the bad guys aren’t necessarily quote-unquote bad guys. It was an amazing juxtaposition to always watch, and kept us on our toes just being able to see what was going on in the quote-unquote real life that The Wire was portraying.

“Less is more. Remember that for the rest of your life. Anything that you apply. With Michael, especially this character, less is always more. The less you do, the more everybody will feel it. Because we’re so prone to seeing so much. With acting, with life, whatever. We’re so prone to seeing so much more. But when there’s less, the mystery behind it, it leaves people guessing. It feels so much more. So, just remember that when you’re going back into this room and you’re reading those lines. Less is more.”

No, we’re going to let things go south. We’re going to show you life, because sometimes life doesn’t save the kids, and they don’t [get saved] in Baltimore all the time.

Here’s the secret to teaching, [as] with anything else: If you blame yourself for the mistakes, you can only get better. If you blame the outside world, the kid, the person you’re working with, if you blame them, you’ll never get better. So, you’re, Why did I fuck that up? What can I do better? If that’s the driving energy, you come to the next day revved up and ready to go, Let’s see if this works.

bifurcating

Sometimes it’s the piece that makes you that also breaks you.

John Allen Muhammad

Lee Boyd Malvo,