Quick Sketch: Why You Should Watch The Wire

 The Wire was an early 21st century HBO drama following the heroin market in the city of Baltimore, Maryland, USA. 

The 5 seasons gradually increase the scope of the problem of stamping out the heroin game in an environment as complicated as a city in the United States.

The first season illustrates in detail how complicated it is to bring down a criminal conspiracy, focused on a special police unit that wiretaps the Barksdale organization. Crime has evolved to survive in the police environment. One with civil liberties preserved. It is not as simple as finding a junkie, asking where they get their heroin and then going and arresting the person selling heroin. The first season will instill in you an appreciation for why a heroin epidemic can appear much more quickly in your neighbourhood than it can disappear.

The second season is considered one of the weaker, it moves to the wharf and the stevedore's union. The Barksdale organization fades into the background as the issue of importing heroin and the complex economic factors is introduced. It may not be instilled after watching season 2, that fixing the drug trade may be, in a complicated way interlinked with the problems of structural unemployment. 

The third season introduces local politics to the equation. I'll circle back on this, but it in many ways predicted the post Obama populist era in the character of Tommy Carcetti.

The fourth season many consider peak "The Wire" as it introduces the education system and schooling into the equation. By the time you finish the fourth season, you should appreciate just how fucking complicated the problem of drug trafficking is.

The fifth and final season, understandably many will see as a disappointing conclusion to a masterpiece. Nevertheless by introducing newsmedia, the press, if not a complete picture of how difficult it is to deal with crime, in many ways with an invented serial killer employed to garner public opinion to bring all the complicated variables together to bring down the successor to the Barksdale organisation, it is one of the least grounded of the series. Much like season 2, the additional element of the media has to take a back seat to the series concluding.

And the series conclusion, for something so grounded in reality and detached from romance I think needs to be consumed as symbolic rather than literal - Mike doesn't become Omar, Dukie doesn't become Bubbles etc. rather, the despite victories the root causes will keep generating the drug game.

The Wire is a show that made Breaking Bad quite hard for me to enjoy, because of its scale and scope. Avon Barksdale and Stringer Bell run a plausible drug empire, and relative to "The Greek" the heroin wholesaler in season 2, they are small players. Gus and Mike in Breaking Bad are just too condensed to be plausible after watching the Wire, even if they are in their own way compelling characters.

But don't watch it to ruin yourself for Breaking Bad, much of the technology is dated in terms of The Wire, even though it exists in a period of time that spans rapid tech advancement from payphone to smart phones and mms. Where it is positively ahead of times is the way in which it reveals the major two factions that generate most societal conflict historically and up to the present day.

Whether it is the police, the schools, the unions, the newspapers or government the major conflict is between people who want to do the actual work a job entails, and those that want career advancement.

The world of the wire is filled with protagonists who are trying to solve problems in regard to wider ideals. Whether it is McNulty who kicks off the whole series by complaining to a judge about the ineffective policing strategy, through to Carcetti who while a shrewd politician generally believes himself capable of reforming Baltimore politics before becoming corrupted by political survival. There is perhaps no clearer antagonist in the series as William Rawls, a careerist police executive that cuts off much potential good at the knees when it threatens to encroach on his career ambitions.

I don't think The Wire ever reaches us, as general members of the public, but it likely would have got their eventually. The general public are likely more careerist in nature than vocational. We do not want to understand, we merely want results.