Alex looks at The Wire again four years later, because he couldn’t wait the customary five.<\/em><\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n It has been accepted as fact that we are currently living in a golden age of television. Nobody really talks about Dallas anymore, except to say that if that J.Lo movie version ever gets made, it is surely going to suck. The past decade has seen a number of shows that have been called some of the best television ever produced, and if you ask somebody what their favourite television show is, there are more recent options than ever before that won\u2019t instantly make you think, \u201cThis is a person who probably thinks LMFAO is interesting and vital.\u201d That there is probably only one acceptable pre-HBO choice<\/a> left shows how massive the medium\u2019s overhaul has been. But if you ask somebody what they think the best show that has ever aired on television is, there are two answers: either the person you\u2019re talking to says \u201cIt\u2019s obviously The Wire,\u201d or they say something else, because they haven\u2019t watched The Wire.<\/p>\n Since its series finale in March 2008, people tend to watch The Wire like they have a limited amount of time to finish it before their DVDs spontaneously combust. I haven\u2019t been to a movie theatre in three and a half weeks and it\u2019s all McNulty\u2019s fault. Similarly, I haven\u2019t shaved since the day before I started watching The Wire for the third time a few Sundays ago. I have a beard now, and it is purely because in the time it takes to shave, I can watch a Bunny Colvin monologue instead. The first time I watched the show in 2008, it dominated my life in a way few other media products have. I would wake up, watch a few episodes, and go to work at a video store where I would recommend The Wire to any customer that would listen. Then I would go home and watch some more, or I would play some video games with a fellow fan while we debated Tommy Carcetti\u2019s law enforcement platform. I didn\u2019t have the internet, and I didn\u2019t have cable. Sometimes I would go out with friends, but I would always spend most of that time trying to talk to somebody about The Wire. These were more or less the only activities I partook in for a month, and judging by how often James has been texting me lines as he watches the show for the first time now, this is still the way the show is consumed by most people.<\/p>\n It has become clear to me that, as a result of the obsessive style of consumption The Wire seems to demand, I have possibly spent more of my adult life discussing The Wire than anything else. If you find out that somebody you are talking to has seen the show in its entirety, it becomes clear pretty much instantly that this conversation will go on for at least the length of time it takes to watch an episode of the series. While there are some aspects of the show everybody enjoys (Omar and Stringer Bell, mostly), there is so much in the show to like that invariably somebody will say something new. One might say they hate Brother Mouzone because of how unrealistic he feels, or perhaps somebody will say they like that character because it is one of the few times the show\u2019s writers actively acknowledges that what they\u2019ve produced is fiction. Maybe this person likes to posit a theory about how J.D. Williams and Reg E. Cathey\u2019s pre-Wire roles in Pootie Tang have something to do with fellow awkward abbreviation fan Louis CK\u2019s rise to prominence. And while most people who love The Wire do so because it is remarkably entertaining and manages to keep the viewer engaged pretty much constantly, the most common aspect to bring up is how the show always feels important.<\/p>\n One can\u2019t read or talk about the show without discussing the elements of realism present in the show, or a feeling of import that generally comes with something that is both realistic, about social issues, and really fucking good. In a discussion with writer Nick Hornby, The Wire creator David Simon described that, \u201cWhile [the producers] hope the show is entertaining enough, none of us think of ourselves as providing entertainment. The impulse is, again, either journalistic or literary.\u201d In that same discussion, Simon also likens his show to Greek myths, which seems to be something David Simon does in most discussions. \u201cWe\u2019re stealing from an earlier, less-traveled construct \u2013 the Greeks \u2013 lifting our thematic stance wholesale from Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides to create doomed and fated protagonists who confront a rigged game with their own mortality. [\u2026] But instead of the old gods, The Wire is a Greek tragedy in which the postmodern institutions are the Olympian forces.\u201d Every character on The Wire is a product of seemingly immovable institutions, institutions that trap citizens and systematically continue Baltimore\u2019s cycle of despair… Michel Foucault would have loved this shit.<\/p>\n <\/a><\/p>\n Simon\u2019s background as a journalist is certainly present in the show, as is the police background of his creative partner Ed \u201cnot the guy from The Brothers McMullan\u201d Burns. Simon says of the writing in the show that, \u201cI\u2019m the kind of person who, when I\u2019m writing, cares above all about whether the people I\u2019m writing about will recognize themselves. I\u2019m not thinking about the general reader. My greatest fear is that the people in the world I\u2019m writing about will read it and say, \u2018Nah, there\u2019s nothing there.\u2019\u201d This quote more or less sums up the attempted feel of the show: perceived realism and basis in fact, as the show goes to great lengths to use what would be deemed authentic slang and that the police department reacts to a murder in a way that an actual police department would act. However, the show is obviously fiction. Chris Partlow doesn\u2019t exist, as proven by the fact that Gbenga Akinnagbe appears to be possibly the happiest, most non-terrifying person ever interviewed<\/a>. Omar can\u2019t even whistle; a middle-aged woman did it in post-production. Former Baltimore Sun journalist and Wire writer William F. Zorzi has written that, \u201cStory was always paramount, and that meant that no storyline was ever twisted or bent in order to squeeze in a \u2018real\u2019 character. If anything, it was the other way around.\u201d While the show was meticulously researched and more often than not based around true stories and figures in Baltimore crime history, The Wire compressed somewhere between 40-50 years of stories into 60 episodes of scripted television; the line is blurred, but as Zorzi states, the story always mattered most. Fact was even changed in order to give a character a happier ending than their real life counterpart; the confidential informant that Bubbles is based on died of AIDS in 1992, as opposed to defeating his struggles with addiction in season five. Your favourite moment on The Wire was probably somehow based in reality, but it was still fiction.<\/p>\n Everybody has their favourite season of the show, with seasons three and four being the consensus favourites, and The Wire\u2019s version of a \u201cJohn Lennon vs. Paul McCartney\u201d debate. If you like When I\u2019m Sixty Four a lot, your favourite season of The Wire is probably the fourth, because you are a more emotional person who might cry while watching Ty Pennington build a house. Season three of The Wire, on the other hand, is the most abstractly polemic and interesting of the show, kind of like John Lennon rage fucking a stranger after Richard Nixon was re-elected in 1972<\/a>. The drug free zone, or Hamsterdam, set up by discouraged Baltimore po-lice Major Bunny Colvin represents the difficulty one faces when trying to change the world they are in, a theme that continues throughout pretty much every plot line of the season. From Stringer Bell trying to move Avon away from his war with Marlo toward real estate, to McNulty\u2019s vocalized confusion of \u201cWhat the fuck did I do?\u201d becoming a more internal dialogue of \u201cWhat the fuck am I doing?\u201d pretty much everything in the season is about the difficulty one faces when they try to make enact sizeable change. Hamsterdam shows this pursuit on a larger scale, furthering the show\u2019s point that the war on drugs is doing more harm to society than good. And despite being the second most ludicrous thing the show ever did, the reason viewers bought into the idea of the free zone was because the arguments always seemed kind of sound. We know nobody would actually attempt to create Hamsterdam in real life, but Simon and company make it seem like something that maybe somebody should try. Season four is a remarkably interesting, ballsy and emotionally compelling entry into the show as well, but its more literal examination of the problems in the school system make it slightly less interesting (albeit debatably more engaging).<\/p>\n