All the Pieces Matter: The Inside Story of The Wire

by Jonathan Abrams

remember him saying organizations can’t be reformed, but people can. I remember being struck by it when he said it, because I knew that I had never thought of it that way, and I knew that there was something profound in the insight. Then, over time, particularly when I watched the show, I realized how we see both on the criminal side and on the police side, you see people struggling to live up to the codes of the institutions that they’re a part of and seeing how it chips away at their humanity.

The things that reform systems are trauma. Great trauma. Nobody gives up status quo without being pushed to the wall. I believe that politically. The great reformations of society are the result of undue excess and undue cruelty.

The reason that you have the civil rights we do is that people were hanging from trees. That notion of the system [being] self-reforming without incredible outside pressure and without first [bringing] about incredible trauma through inhumanity or indifference—I find that to be really dubious. I’m arguing for reform. It’s not like I can say this and say we should throw up our hands and can’t try. Every day, you gotta get up. I’m saying this with the clarity of: there’s no choice but to try.

In an Entertainment Weekly column, Stephen King crowned Snoop “perhaps the most terrifying female villain to ever appear in a television series. When you think of Chris and Snoop, think of John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo, only smart. And with a nail gun.”

think you should do it. I can’t really

BENJAMIN BUSCH (OFF. ANTHONY COLICCHIO): The Wire really lived in Baltimore. It knew the alleys and cellars. It knew the lingo and the night shifts. It knew the children. It remembered the dead. It was like [Joseph] Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, like [Charles] Dickens writing about London, or [Herman] Melville about whales. Ed Burns and David Simon were not cosmetic surgeons. They studied terminal illness. They gave cancer a narrative for the first time. They kind of made it a character with sensibilities of its own, and I thought that was remarkable. I don’t know that any of us knew, in the cast anyway, at first what The Wire was doing, that we would become delegates, but I think every one of us became its fiercest fans.