All the Pieces Matter: The Inside Story of The Wire

by Jonathan Abrams

I think that’s what struck a chord most with the cops that used to watch the show. They’d go, “This is exactly what cops think about all the time.” It’s, I suppose, what everyone thinks about all the time—is what an asshole their bosses are and how they could do the job so much better if only they didn’t have to answer to these idiots who are their superiors.

While we were filming at the strip club, the owner got charged federally with money laundering and was put in jail, and the FBI took over the strip club. So, for the next six months—because of course we weren’t finished with the season—we had to deal with the FBI as our landlords.

“Listen. I cannot tell a drug story. I cannot tell a story about the drug game and it be all about black people. That’s wrong. I feed into the stupid lying stereotype that the industry has been doing for years, in that drugs is a black problem. It’s not. It’s not. I need to tell this angle, because white people are involved in this shit, too. This is not a race problem. It’s a human problem. I don’t want this show to look at it and just be a drug game and a violence game and it be all black people.”

If we were chasing advertising dollars and tried to maximize the audience, the show does not survive. But HBO brought people into the tent to watch it for what it was. It didn’t bring everybody into the tent. More people came for The Sopranos. But as long as we added to the amount of people who subscribed or helped, we could be part of this little family and they’d leave us alone.

I said, “Well, what’s the good news?” He said, “I wrote an amazing death scene for you.” I’m like, “That doesn’t quite trump the bad news.”

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.

In one scene, the incumbent mayor, Clarence Royce, briefly ponders the morality of the de facto legalized drug markets created by Colvin and colloquially known as “Hamsterdam.” A health commissioner cautions him, “Better watch out, Clarence, or they’ll be calling you the most dangerous man in America.” Kurt Schmoke, a former Baltimore mayor, depicts the health commissioner. In reality, Schmoke’s mulling of decriminalizing drugs nearly ended his political career, with Rep. Charles Rangel labeling him America’s most dangerous man. In another scene, Robert L. Ehrlich Jr., Maryland’s governor at the time, plays a security guard who tells a waiting Carcetti that the governor cannot see him that evening. The scene mimics the circumstances in which Martin O’Malley, the former Baltimore mayor, sought an audience with Ehrlich.

Nine e’s. Yeah. I don’t know where I came up with nine e’s, but I said, “Okay, if I’m going to live with it, I’m gonna have to spell it.” I always tell people, “If you write it to me, use nine e’s. If you do any more than that, you’re not saying it right.”

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.”

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.

He really understood that the audience was starting to change and the audience was starting to appreciate not being treated like they’re stupid. Nothing has to be spelled out. They can stick with a story even though it’s slow. 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.”

The kids that you want to tell the story about, if you put them in high school, they wouldn’t be there. They had already dropped out. Middle school is where you see the biggest graduation ceremony. Kids get all dressed up and they arrive in limousines and all the family is there, because they all know that this is the last graduation they’re attending. Middle school, that’s where the heartbreak is.

ED BURNS (CO-CREATOR): 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.

They’re all seventh, eighth, ninth grade. They’re students, but some of them didn’t have basic reading fundamentals. It was so heartbreaking. I don’t think I’m completely naïve about the world and how fucked up it is in the inner city. At the same time, I was being confronted with kids that are thirteen, fourteen years old who couldn’t read language that was written basically like how they talked. It wasn’t big words. It was like, “Pass me this,” or something. I don’t remember the dialogue, but it was sad. It was like, “Okay, I got to cast the kid that can read the lines.” For me, it just really cemented how important it was for David and everybody to be telling this story.

I told the mom what I was trying to do. I said, “We’re trying to teach them about healthy choices, not getting involved so early with sex. These kids, they don’t know about healthy relationships, you know, we’ve got to hug our kids more.” She said, “I ain’t hugging her. I ain’t no lesbian.” This was the craziest, nastiest, ignorant—if I could have been De’Londa in real life, I would have smacked her ass. That’s where De’Londa came from.

We just hoped that people would know, and I think it’s a good strategy. Executives, the people that are funding these shows, they always want you to be more on the nose and explain things. That’s our most common battle with the execs, is let the audience figure it out. Trust them a little bit more, but you do, in the end, lose some people. But it’s cool. It’s fine.

ED BURNS (CO-CREATOR): You can rescue a child, but you can’t rescue the children, and that’s the difference. Opportunity is a much better word than hope. If a child sees the opportunity and you can direct the child toward the opportunity, then the kid’s okay. Hope is like a dream. That’s what I used to say to my kids. “Don’t believe in hope. Believe in yourself. You got to put the energy in to get the energy out.” Hope is just like something that the fairy godmother’s going to come down and sprinkle on you. That’s not the way it is for these kids. You got to work for it, then it’ll come to you, because you open yourself up.

RICHARD PRICE (WRITER): My personal story with the series DVD is that my girls were young-side teenagers when I started writing The Wire. It wasn’t until after Season Three when the DVDs came out. All of a sudden, everybody can watch this maddeningly complex show. They can shoot up twelve episodes, and so the thing exploded. People discovered it on DVD because they could mainline it. All of a sudden, overnight, my girls are coming back from their schools, they’re saying, “Dad, did you know you’re really cool?” I say, “What?” At that point, I did three or four episodes of The Wire compared to—I have movies, eight novels. All of a sudden it’s like, “My dad’s a writer.” That’s the power of television. For everybody who reads a book, one hundred people go to the movies; for every one hundred people that go to the movies, ten thousand watch a TV show. It’s a numbers game.

DAVID SIMON (CREATOR): Whatever season it had been, if I had five, six, seven seasons, the capstone was going to be the media, because the last critique I wanted to send was, “If all this is true, if this is what the drug war is, if this is what the city government is about, if this is what public education is about, where were we? What was our attention drawn to? What were we jerking off to where we couldn’t actually tend to our society?” That’s the last thing to say: we turn the camera back to the audience and go, “You’re complicit.”

Donnie [Andrews] was in the writers’ room with us, and he was the model for Omar. The funny thing about that scene where Omar jumps out of the apartment balcony, breaks his leg: Donnie did that, and some of the stuff on the Internet was, “Now they’ve jumped the shark. That could never happen.” We sort of laughed about that, because when Donnie jumped out of that balcony after a shootout, it was off of a floor higher than the one Omar jumps out of. Donnie broke his leg, but he walked on it to a waiting car, got in it, and sped away.

If you recall in that episode, after his death, you cut to the newsroom, and the paper comes across somebody’s desk, and they look at it and they throw it in the basket. Outside of his world, he’s nothing to anybody. In what we think of us as the proper society, and even in the newsroom, he’s nothing. “Throw him in the basket. Put him with all the other guys.” It’s like in DC, in The Washington Post, they change the name of it quite frequently. It’s been called “Around the Region” and “Crime,” but buried in the Metro section are the murders of blacks in the city, and they get a paragraph or maybe two paragraphs, if they’re lucky. But if a white person is killed on the other side of town, it makes the front page. What that does is subconsciously, it puts in the mind of people reading the newspaper, especially young people, is that black lives don’t in fact matter. That was our way of saying Omar wasn’t that big of a deal outside of his hood and the underworld that he ran with.

DEIRDRE “DEDE” LOVEJOY (ASST. STATE’S ATTY. RHONDA PEARLMAN): My favorite thing is that, years later, I ran into one of the DAs I had trailed, and he said, “You know, I read an article the other day that at ten every Sunday night in Baltimore, for three and a half years, the wiretaps would all go dead, and it is because all of the wiretapped people were watching The Wire.” I thought that was pretty fucking fantastic, right?

The reason we still are engaged with the show today is because it really expressed the most important role of art, which is the form where we reflect on what our values are, decide what they are and then act on them.

There’s this wonderful line from a theologian named Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who got it in his head—he was a German—to leave England in 1944 to come back to confront Hitler. He was [executed] two weeks before the end of the war. He has this line, he says, “If you get on the wrong train, running down the aisle backward is not a solution. You have to get off the train.” We created these programs, back in the sixties, seventies, eighties, nineties, that were the wrong programs. That’s our train, and we tinker with them, but the problem’s way back there and we’re not getting off the train. There’s this whole idea of the war on drugs. I mean, that is our longest war, and that war has more casualties than all other wars combined. We keep doing the same stupid things, and our great hope is that, now [that] white people are dying of heroin, [that] they might do something, which they won’t. That’s the thing. We’re not willing to get off of that train because we’re all experts on the train.

They would tell me, “People would rather believe that Bubbles is not acting. They would rather go, ‘Wow, look at Bubbles’s career now. Good for Bubs.’ ” They would rather believe that, than the actor played by Bubbles is now in other stuff. They don’t want that. That’s not a Hollywood narrative. A Hollywood narrative is, “Remember that junkie that they cast in The Wire? He’s now working.” I was like, “What’s wrong with you people?” It’s one of those backhanded compliments where people really thought, because David Simon was casting so many people from the neighborhood and giving people an opportunity, they just thought they found me. People were like, “Yo, I thought you were a real junkie they found and was now working.” Mark Wahlberg was the first person. I saw him at an HBO party sometime. He’s like, “You’re doing a good job. Don’t fuck up. Don’t fall back on that shit.” I’m like, “What are you talking about, man? I’m from the Bronx.” “Shit, my bad.”

J. D. WILLIAMS (PRESTON “BODIE” BROADUS): It’s that strange, cock-your-head-sideways look. People are like, “You look so familiar.” Police who don’t get it right away always think they’ve arrested me. I have to convince police all the time that they have not arrested me.