The Cultural Significance of “The Wire”, Essay Example

When premium-cable network HBO launched the series The Sopranos in 1999, few could have predicted the impact it would have on the medium of television. In an era dominated by sitcoms such as Friends and Seinfeld, and dramas such as ER and Law & Order, The Sopranos stood out in stark contrast. While ER has been recognized –and appropriately so- for pushing the genre of television dramas beyond its typical limitations, the show was, for the most part, little more than a primetime soap opera with better-than-average production values. Set against the backdrop of television programming in which shows such as Seinfeld were considered edgy and even groundbreaking, The Sopranos was something entirely unique: a complex, layered portrait of the life of modern-day Mafiosos. The impact of The Sopranos cannot be overstated in terms of how it strayed from the conventions of television dramas, even for subscription-based HBO. In the decade-plus since the show debuted, a new era of antihero-centric shows achieved enormous popularity, changing the landscape of television and paving the way for challenging, thought-provoking, and occasionally even disturbing themes to be presented in a medium that once ceded such storytelling to the world of cinema. Of all the shows that appeared on television in the wake of The Sopranos, one towers above the rest: HBO’s The Wire. By tackling themes related to poverty, racism, class warfare, economic inequality, politics, and education, The Wire served as an example that the greatest artistic accomplishments are those that challenge audiences to confront and consider truths that were sometimes painful but entirely real.

Background and Overview

In order to make a case for the assertion that The Wire is one of the best and most culturally significant television shows in the history of the medium, it is helpful –and perhaps even necessary- to consider it in the context of other shows that have received and achieved equal or greater critical acclaim and commercial success. The Wire was not the first show to tackle challenging social and cultural themes; there were several notable shows in the 1970s, for example, that pushed beyond the typical limitations of network television. Among these were shows such as M*A*S*H, which was ostensibly a comedy but often featured dramatic and (for the time) realistic characters and storylines. M*A*S*H –an acronym for “mobile army surgical hospital”- was set in Korea during the U.S. conflict in that nation in the early 1950s, though it was clear that it served as a thinly-veiled allegory for the Vietnam War (Norton, 2001). The television version of M*A*S*H was based on the 1970 film of the same name, and both the film and the television series offered characters and storylines that reflected the social and cultural upheaval in the U.S. during the Vietnam era (Norton). While it may have been impossible for Hollywood to address such themes directly, it was possible to address them indirectly by setting them in an earlier time.

Another 1970s comedy that tackled relatively serious themes was All in the Family, a show that focused on the interpersonal dynamics of a middle-aged blue-collar married couple and their daughter and son-in-law who all lived under the same roof. The lead character Archie Bunker was used both to give voice to and to satirize a generation of Americans who were trying to maintain a grip on values and traditions that were becoming increasingly untenable in the face of the cultural and social upheaval of the time (O’Brien, 2009). Archie routinely argued with the son-in-law he called “Meathead;” this son-in-law represented the voice of the younger generation that questioned Archie’s views on the war, politics, race, and gender roles (O’Brien). Although All in the Family was a groundbreaking show in its time, it still had to lighten its drama with comedy, and often skirted the edges of serious topics rather than face them head on.

This approach of playing serious issues and topics for laughs as a means of making them palatable for television viewers (and network censors) was also used in shows such as The Mary Tyler Moore Show, a sitcom centered on the exploits of a young, single working woman in the 1970s; Maude, a spinoff of All in the Family that once featured an episode where the main character underwent an abortion; and even Three’s Company, which was one of the first shows on television to discuss homosexuality, even if the main character was only pretending to be gay to fool his landlord into allowing him to cohabitate with two female roommates (O’Brein). For every show that discussed formerly-taboo subjects, however, there were dozens more, from Fantasy Island to Charlie’s Angels to Mork& Mindy that played it safe and made no effort to challenge the sensitivities of viewers. This trend continued into the 1980s and 1990s; as a few shows such as Roseanne presented a somewhat-realistic portrayal of life in a working-class family, many more continued to present situations and settings that were relatively tame and non-threatening. Then, as now, much of television programming was designed to keep people tuned in between commercial breaks, rather than to challenge or upset them. Television networks did not want to give viewers a reason to change the channel, so they produced programs that were safe and, to a great extent, mind-numbingly simple.

The real turning point for the medium came with the advent of cable television, where viewers paid subscription fees for the privilege of watching programming that was not as beholden to the whims and limitations of the traditional networks. While most cable channels then and now still rely on advertising revenue to supplement subscription-based revenue, these networks had less pressure to offer programs with mass appeal, instead relying on niche programming to appeal to specific audience sectors. For those viewers willing to pay a larger premium, commercial-free networks such as HBO and Showtime offered viewers the opportunity to watch movies and shows that were not subject to the sort of censoring and editing typical of traditional networks. As HBO and other premium cable networks gained viewership and popularity, they began to develop original programming to supplement their main menu of movies. These subscription-based premium cable networks may have started off as little more than a novelty for those with the disposable income to afford them would soon grow into viable challengers to the primacy of traditional commercial networks.

It was in this historical and cultural context that HBO introduced The Sopranos, inadvertently setting the stage for a new golden age of television. Freed from the limitations imposed by network censors, and without the need to appeal to a mass audience, The Sopranos offered viewers an antihero named Tony Soprano, the leader of a group of modern-day group of Mafia gangsters. What made Tony Soprano so unique and so compelling was the way he was not portrayed as a typical “bad guy,” but was instead a rich, contradictory character who often lamented his role as a criminal (Polan, 2009). Tony Soprano even sought the support of a psychologist to counsel him on how to deal with the emotional demands of balancing fatherhood and family with his criminal and often murderous lifestyle as a Mafioso. The Sopranos achieved great critical and commercial acclaim, and opened the door for a slew of similar antiheroes.

Just as The Sopranos was nearing the end of its eight-year run on HBO, the commercial cable channel AMC debuted its now-famous character of Walter White in the show Breaking Bad. While The Sopranos set the bar very high in terms of presenting a potentially hateful character in a lead role, Breaking Bad sailed right over that bar by telling the story of how Water White gained his antihero status. Groundbreaking though it was, the character of Tony Soprano was already fully formed when viewers first met him.  There was no need to question why or how Tony Soprano became a bad guy; his role as a member of the Mafia was all the explanation that was offered or required. Walter White, by contrast, started off as a mild-mannered high school teacher who, over the course of five television seasons, evolved “from Mr. Chips to Scarface” (Snierson, 2014). When Walter learns that he has cancer, and is told he has only a few months to a few years left to live, he makes the decision to employ his skills in the chemistry lab to make and sell methamphetamine. From the moment Walter White cooks his first batch of meth, his fate is sealed. There was never any question in the minds of viewers if Walter White’s story would end badly; the only question was how quickly he would meet his doom. Breaking Bad gave viewers the chance to follow Walter on his downward spiral, and to be both empathetic to and repulsed by the increasingly-horrible choices he made along the way. As Walter raced inexorably towards his destiny, Breaking Bad’s popularity and critical acclaim grew exponentially, and the show has been widely hailed as one of the greatest in television history (Snierson).

The Wire

Debuting in 2002, The Wire’s first season was set in modern-day Baltimore, and focused on the exploits of a group of young African Americans living in the projects and the police officers and detectives whose job it was to combat the drug dealing and the attendant violence that typified life in the inner city. The Wire was the brainchild of David Simon, a former reporter turned author who previously had his book “Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets” made into the NBC drama Homicide: Life on the Streets(Brown, 2013). Both Homicide and The Wire covered the same ground Simon had mined for his book, but it was The Wire that explored that material much more extensively (Brown). As a regular network show, Homicide was constrained by the same limitations as other shows that had come before it, and had to downplay the realism of its themes and storylines to meet the demands of network censors (Brown). As an HBO production, The Wire faced no such constraints, and the result was a series that had the sprawling, complex plotting and rich, fleshed-out characters of a great novel.

Over the course of five seasons, The Wire focused on a different set of characters and plot structures each time. After exploring the world of inner-city drug dealing and gang life in the first season, the show moved on to a variety of settings and characters, including a group of unionized dockworkers facing the challenges of a shrinking economy, a local politician whose campaign becomes mired in corruption and scandal, and a former-cop-turned teacher who takes a job at a failing high school and sees his idealism shattered by the harsh realities of trying to teach a group of kids whose lives are already shattered. In each season, Simon presents viewers with characters and stories that resonate with a gritty realism that was –and remains- unprecedented in the history of television. While a show like Breaking Bad was justifiably lauded for the Shakespearean scope of its dramatic storylines and characters, it was set in a world of heightened and even exaggerated reality. Breaking Bad relied on the strengths of its actors and writers to overcome the potential pitfalls of questionable coincidences and increasingly unlikely plot twists; in lesser hands the show could have been comically ridiculous. There is no question that shows such as Breaking Bad or The Sopranos earned their fame and success, but they did so in spite of, not because of, the ways in which they diverged from reality.

The Wire, by contrast, remains one of the most realistic portrayals of the worlds of crime and law enforcement ever offered in any medium, from books to television to film. While the lives of cops and criminals have been featured in innumerable films, for example, the limitations of movie-making mean that even the most realistic portrayals of such stories and characters are necessarily constrained by the need to wrap up a story in two hours or so. Novels, by contrast, have no such limitations, giving writers the luxury of developing characters with complex back stories and rich emotional lives and set them in plots that do not need to finish up in three acts. What Simon was able to do with The Wire was combine the best elements of film and literature; the visual elements of The Wire bring viewers right into the heart of the action (the first season was in fact filmed in and around a recently-closed Baltimore housing project) while the plotting of the show unfurled with the unhurried pace of a great novel.

In a medium where the lines between the good guys and the bad guys were historically drawn in stark, black-and-white terms, the characters in The Wire were all drawn in shades of gray. In the typical portrayal of an African American gang member, the only things the audience sees are when the character is buying or selling drugs, participating in a drive-by shooting, or committing some other crime. In The Wire, audiences see these same sorts of behaviors, but they also see these young men dealing with the harsh realities of poverty and the challenges such poverty imposes. One young man, for example, goes home after shooting someone to feed his younger brother breakfast before walking him to the school bus stop. For the older brother, it appears to be too late to escape the pull of gang life; he clearly hopes that his young sibling will avoid the same fate by getting an education and getting out of the ghetto. Simon does not give viewers any false hope, however; in later seasons the younger brother follows in the footsteps of his criminal older brother.

The police officers and detectives in The Wire are equally trapped between two worlds, precariously walking the line between good and bad. At first glance it appears that the cops are the good guys, doing the best they can within their limited budgets and legal restrictions to combat the scourge of drug dealing and violence plaguing the local neighborhoods. As Simon digs deeper into their stories, however, it becomes clear that many of these cops are deeply flawed, engaging in bribery, blackmail, and other forms of corruption. There are a handful of officers and detectives who seem committed to doing the right thing, but they stand in stark relief against the backdrop of a police force that is mired in corruption and criminality. There are few clearly-defined good guys in the world of The Wire; there are mostly just realistic human beings, doing their best to survive in a world that offers little hope that doing the right thing is even possible, let alone worthwhile.

A thorough discussion of the themes, plot structures, and characters in The Wire could easily fill a book, and as such is beyond the scope of this discussion. In short, The Wire serves as an example of how the medium of television can be used as a platform for the creation and presentation of truly great art. As a cultural artifact, The Wire represents a microcosm of the hopes, fears, and expectations of a generation of Americans living through the death of the American Dream. David Simon pulls no punches in The Wire, and refuses to allow audiences off the emotional hook by grafting an unrealistic happy ending to his spiraling, detailed story of life in contemporary Baltimore. The Wire has been compared favorably to the works of Charles Dickens, who painted vivid literary images of life in 19^th-century London (Steiner et al., 2012). Like Simon, Dickens did not shy away from showing his audience the dark underbelly of city life; like Dickens’ take on London, Simon’s portrayal of Baltimore reads like a plea to a lost lover and an ode to its former greatness.

While shows such as Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, and the recent True Detective demonstrate how the medium of television can be used to tell powerful and meaningful stories that both reflect and comment on the state of our contemporary culture, they also remain at a slight distance by exaggerating and heightening the details of character and plot. Though they may provide allegorical lenses through which we can collectively view ourselves and each other, they are, at their core, created more to entertain than enlighten. Where The Wire exceeds the greatness of these shows is in the way it refuses to maintain any distance from its themes and characters; Breaking Bad offers a magnetic and compelling lead character, but this character also skirts the edges of hyperbole, and borders on being cartoonish. In The Wire, the characters are drawn realistically; where Walter White is highly stylized, the characters in The Wire are photo-realistic. This is what sets The Wire apart from the rest of television, and what makes it among the best shows –if not the best show- in the history of the medium. Despite the dark themes explored in The Wire, its contribution to and place in contemporary culture is entirely positive. Cultures are both defined and shaped by the stories they tell, and The Wire allows us to look in the mirror and see the truth about ourselves.

References

Brown, J. (2013). Introduction to TV’s The Wire. Labor, 10(1), 9–10.

Norton, M. (2001). A people and a nation (1st ed.). Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co.

O’Brein, J. (2009). Encyclopedia of Gender and Society, Volume 2 (1st ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Polan, D. (2009). The Sopranos (1st ed.). Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.

Snierson, D. (2014). Vince Gilligan on the ‘Breaking Bad’ finale, the abandoned ‘Wild Bunch’ bloodbath ending, and the all-time best finale | EW.com. EW.com. Retrieved 19 June 2014, from http://insidetv.ew.com/2014/04/14/vince-gilligan-breaking-bad-finale-better-call-saul/

Sociology and The Wire. (2011). Critical Inquiry, 38(1).

Steiner, L., McCaffrey, R., Guo, J., & Hills, P. (2012). The Wire and repair of the journalistic paradigm.Journalism, 1464884912455901.