All the Pieces Matter: The Inside Story of The Wire

by Jonathan Abrams

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.