All the Pieces Matter: The Inside Story of The Wire

by Jonathan Abrams

No show has aged as gracefully. The Wire stood the test of time after only intermittently being acknowledged while on air. “How many shows are being taught?” said Darrell Britt-Gibson, who played Darius “O-Dog” Hill. “That’s its impact. It’s left a lasting impression on the culture, and hopefully it continues to do so with the next generation and the generation after that. It’s a timeless piece of art.”

It was Fontana who mentored Simon, telling him that a writer becomes a producer in order to protect his words.

“The journey through this one case will ultimately bring viewers from wondering, in cop-show expectation, whether the bad guys will get caught, to wondering instead who the bad guys are and whether catching them means anything at all,”

Everybody has an expectation that much of American television is about redemption and about affirmation. We were trying to make a show that was basically an argument of dissent. It was political dissent. It was saying our systems are not functioning. Our policies are incorrect. We’re not going to find a way out of this unless we stand back and take stock and turn one hundred eighty degrees from what we’ve been doing, particularly in regard to the drug war and inequality that we were depicting.

It was set up that Baltimore would become a character.

I remember him saying organizations can’t be reformed, but people can.

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.

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.

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

“What’s this season about?” He had some interesting things to say. His point of view, which I believe to be correct, he was like, “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.”

It’s not that the characters are white. It’s that the characters were at the point of importation of the drugs and the death of the working class. The union that you’re going to see under pressure is going to be multiracial. There’s going to be black stevedores. But it is important that it have a white presence, because the last thing I want to do is suggest that you can track the drug problem through America by following black people. That’s a very reductive thing that I’m not going to say. I’m going to say you can track the drug problem into America by following class, and that, in a very fundamental way, the working class, white and black, is being devoured, and the underclass is growing because of the industrialization. I said, “If we don’t suggest that the morality is permeable to all races at this point, we’re saying some ugly shit that I don’t believe in and we have no right to say.”

It is an utterly loving embrace of people at their most human; witnessing the dissolution of their best intentions in excruciating pain because there’s nothing they can do to stop the collapse of their lives.

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

People go like, “The White Season.” It’s always weird to me because it’s like, no. They’re just like, incrementally a little bit more financially well off than the drug dealers. 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. They hate to admit it to themselves. It’s too much to reconcile the fact that white people are enslaved to their own social class as much as poor black people.

ERNEST DICKERSON (DIRECTOR): The dealers hated us, because a lot of times we were shooting right down the street or a couple of doors down from a working crack house. That always interrupted their business.

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.

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.

“If you get on the wrong train, running down the aisle backward is not a solution. You have to get 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.

didn’t get the kind of acclaim that it deserved was like if you have two neighborhoods and they’re both the same socioeconomic levels. The houses are the same. The education and the people who live in the two neighborhoods are exactly the same. The only difference is seventy percent of one neighborhood is black and seventy percent of one neighborhood is white. The neighborhood with the seventy percent black is going to be thought to be inferior.