All the Pieces Matter: The Inside Story of The Wire

by Jonathan Abrams

The critique of the drug war was everything can be replaced. Everything is endless. The dysfunction of this thing goes on.

DAVID SIMON (CREATOR): 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.

You see the same black actors in all the auditions. It’s a small circle. I see all my boys, and everybody’s auditioning for this guy. His name is Bubbles. Someone’s chewing bubble gum. I was like, “That’s so fucking juvenile.” I spat my gum out.

We really held each other accountable. If I wasn’t shooting that day and Sonja was shooting, I could either be at the bar, I could be spending my per diem, or I could be on set. Why not be on set watching my fellow actor? I would be there, and we would be looking at each other. That’s never really done, as far as I know, at any other show, where I can look at a fellow actor and go, “That was whack.” We were just really, really looking out for each other. We really brought into the situation. It was about the story and not about the egos.

ANDRE ROYO (REGINALD “BUBBLES” COUSINS): While we were doing the pilot, I had a conversation with Ed Burns. He came to me, and Ed Burns wasn’t really a talkative guy, but he fucks your head up. You ask Ed Burns, “You watch the football game? I want to know who won.” He’ll be like, “Is that what you do with your life? You want to watch a game? The world is being destroyed and you just want to watch a football game?” He just breaks it down.

remember for the first two or three years, I wasn’t aware that anyone was watching it. Not many people were watching it, and whenever I went home, people back in England said, “What are you doing at the moment?” I said, “I’m doing this little show that you wouldn’t have heard of,” and sure enough, they hadn’t.

ANDRE ROYO (REGINALD “BUBBLES” COUSINS): Nobody wanted to let HBO down. We wanted to be a hit show. We wanted to be big. We assumed we were going to be big because it was HBO. Everything they do is big. We were happy and even shocked that this is a big fucking cast. It’s a lot of black people. We haven’t seen this many black people on-screen since A Different World. This is awesome. We also were like, “This is really slow.”

Everybody in TV world, in La La Land, they know Law & Order. You catch the bad guy at the end. It’s all wrapped up. This is some slow-talking shit. They’re going to hate this

where McNulty shows up and they wind up having sex. We were filming that sex scene in a house that had been picked to be Rhonda Pearlman’s home location. It was Season One, so nobody had certainly seen the show, and we were on the second floor, in the bedroom of this house that these people had rented to this HBO TV show. Unfortunately, the people were still there on the third floor, with their little child. They had just decided to stay on the top floor and let the crew have their bottom two floors. We were shooting the scene, and we had a Hungarian director who was very, very vocal and screaming things like, “Louder! Louder!” Then, he, many times, screamed really loud, “Climax, now!” Then, you have to wait a little after he is done talking to actually do it, so that they can actually cut the sound in. Anyway, this went on, and these people were listening to this. Apparently, they decided that night that their house was no longer available as a location for this trash show because they thought we were shooting porn. Everybody got such a kick out of it that the crew, as a wrap gift, made tee shirts that said, “The Wire, Season One: Climax Now! Louder!”

Lol

LANCE REDDICK (LT. CEDRIC DANIELS): Somehow, I was alone with David, and we just got to talking. I asked him something. I remember him saying organizations can’t be reformed, but people can.

DAVID SIMON (CREATOR): I had told him it was much harder to reform a system. 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 you have collective bargaining in America and it became powerful is that workers were pushed to the starvation point. 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.

By the way, that’s the core DNA of what made The Wire what it was, was Ed arguing.

ANDRE ROYO (REGINALD “BUBBLES” COUSINS): We didn’t see David Simon after the first season. He was in the room, the think tank. Ed Burns you saw every once in a while. He’ll come to set, but you didn’t really talk to him, because he was scary. He just didn’t talk. When he talked, you felt like an idiot.

Pinky would come in there with this duck with the diamond necklace, and he’d give it vodka. One time they kept saying, “Get this duck out of here. Get this duck out of here.” The duck drank too much vodka, fell off the bar, and died. The bartender’s like, “You need to clean up this dead duck.” He’s like, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. That’s not mine.” Pinky left, and then he came back, because the duck had this diamond necklace, got the diamond necklace back, and then gave [someone] fifty bucks: “Go bury that duck in the backyard.”

STEVE SHILL (DIRECTOR): The biggest dilemma for me as a white British man trying to interact with Method Man—I was like, what do I call him? Do I call him Mr. Man? Method? Or Method Man?

Haha

Bird’s lawyer, Maurice Levy, describes Omar as “a parasite who leaches off the culture of drugs.” “Just like you, man,” Omar interrupts. “I got the shotgun. You got the briefcase. It’s all in the game though, right?”

ROBERT WISDOM (HOWARD “BUNNY” COLVIN): Not one word in The Wire, not one single word, was ever improvised. Every “fuck,” every “shit,” every whatever term—everything was written. And it was performed.

Every piece is important. All the pieces fit. “All the pieces matter.” That was the mantra. He was very exact about the dialogue.

MICHAEL K. WILLIAMS (OMAR LITTLE): My most proudest moment of having anything to do with The Wire is knowing that I met her five days out of prison for fucking manslaughter, for murder, and was able to have something to do with changing the trajectory of her life. She could have made some other decisions coming out of prison, you know what I mean? I had something to do with her not doing the same thing that got her in the first place. That will be the greatest reward I will ever have from The Wire.

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.”

ED BURNS (CO-CREATOR): In high school, the game is already over. The dropout rate in Baltimore for the high schools in the inner city was approaching sixty, seventy percent.

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.

I went over to the City College, which is a high school. That’s where I saw the greatest tragedy, because all the kids coming into City College and Poly, the two magnet schools in Baltimore city—Poly is the math/science, and City is the humanities—the kids coming into City College, from kindergarten all the way through eighth grade, were straight-A students. When they walked in my classroom, they couldn’t write. They didn’t comprehend what they were reading, but they were very, very quiet, and they went through eight years of middle school and elementary school being the good kids.

And remember that the quality of heroin that Bubbles was shooting, which would be heroin from the eighties and seventies, at the most, would be twelve percent heroin. Today, what they’re shooting is ninety or one hundred percent. It’s in that ballpark.

Then, I think it was 60 Minutes or Charlie Rose, when they asked Hillary Clinton what she watched on her downtime, and she said American Idol. Then they asked Obama, and he goes, The Wire. “I watch The Wire.” That was validation, and it blew our heads back. We all felt great. We also recognized that that’s the type of show we were.

ED BURNS (CO-CREATOR): I don’t know what kind of life it’s taken on. The day it was over, it was over for me. I’m an introvert. I feel uncomfortable when people say it’s a great show and stuff like that, because that’s their decision. That’s their call. I never looked at all these Wire blogs and stuff like that. One of the main reasons I left Baltimore was because of The Wire. It didn’t change anything.

The city of Baltimore, I fell in love with. It became like a second home, and I can honestly tell you that some of the best days of my life, I look back on it, I was at my best, doing some of my best work, had so much joy in my life, being with the people doing that TV show. I would look forward to that six-month period every year.