Examining The Wire

Authenticity and Curated Realism

Ryan Twomey

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9783030459918
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030459925
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

This book examines The Wire's authenticity and its establishment of the series realism. Along with tracing creator David Simon's onscreen critique of numerous failed American institutions, the book focuses on the connection between authenticity and realism in three distinct areas: language, character, and location. While it is shown that The Wire is indeed authentic, the study examines occasions where the language, characters, and even the location are 'curated'. Yet, while we can witness these moments of curation, it is The Wire's unflinching focus on authentic dialogue, authentic characterisation, and an authentic location that makes the series the most realistic, and arguably the best, television show of all time.   

© The Author(s) 2020

R. TwomeyExamining The Wirehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-45992-5_1

Begin Abstract

1. Curated Realism: The Wire’s Authenticity

Ryan Twomey¹

(1)

Department of English, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW, Australia

Ryan Twomey

Email: [email protected]

Abstract

This chapter explores The Wire’s construction of authenticity and its connection with realism. Beginning with definitions for the key terms used throughout the book, namely, ‘authenticity’, ‘realism’, and ‘curated realism’, this preliminary examination details the three key spheres of authenticity on display across The Wire: authentic language, authentic characters, and authentic location. The chapter also examines who the series is authentic for and the relationship between realism, The Wire, and ‘Complex Television’.

Keywords

Complex televisionAuthenticityRealismCurated realism

End Abstract

Premiering on 2 June 2002, and ending on 9 March 2008, Home Box Office’s (HBO) The Wire would come to be regarded as one of the most realistic and critically acclaimed works of early twenty-first-century television. In a 2018 interview with Claudia Dreifus of the New York Review of Books, The Wire’s creator, David Simon, spoke of the realism inherent in his series: ‘I write about people, time, moments, and places. I try to capture them as they existed, as best I can. What I do is rooted in the real, in an attempt to capture a shard of the real.’¹ In order to develop a sense of ‘the real’, Simon focused on three key areas when producing The Wire: an adherence to authentic dialogue, authentic characterisation, and an authentic representation of the city of Baltimore. Indeed, The Wire’s realism has become as much a defining aspect of the series as claiming that it is, probably, the greatest TV show ever produced.² In fact, these two claims are often synonymous: that it is so ‘real’ is one of the often-mentioned reasons why many consider The Wire their favourite television series. There is some academic basis for this assertion: John Fiske has stated that ‘The more “realistic” a programme is thought to be, the more trusted, enjoyable—and therefore the more popular—it becomes.’³ Further, The Wire’s realism can be seen as part of the complex television revolution, a turn towards intricate serialised narratives that afforded writers and producers a creative freedom yet to be seen on the small screen.

While realism is clearly the dominant mode of the series, and arguably the most appropriate for the kind of socio-political arguments being made, it is easy to overlook how it is constructed. Indeed, much of the critical writing, both academic and journalistic, takes for granted that realism is the best choice for representing the systemic failures of many of Baltimore’s, and by proxy, America’s, trusted institutions.⁴ While even the most cursory glance at the published material on The Wire will return scholarship on gender, race, education, politics, and the economy, the majority rarely provide a sustained case examining the role of authenticity in the development of realism. As Jason Mittell argues in Complex TV, ‘Televisual realism is not a marker of accurate representation of the real world, but rather is an attempt to render a fictional world that creates the representational illusion of accuracy—a program is seen as realist when it feels authentic.’⁵ A question arising from Mittell’s statement is who should the realism feel authentic for? For Simon, one of the biggest motivations driving The Wire’s multifarious authentic representations was his fear that he wouldn’t realistically capture the essence of the collective he was trying to depict: ‘I’m the kind of person who, when I’m writing, cares above all about whether the people I’m writing about will recognize themselves. I’m not thinking about the general reader. My greatest fear is that the people in the world I’m writing about will read it and say, “Nah there’s nothing there.”’⁶ As I explore later in this chapter, and the chapters to follow, Simon’s lack of interest in placating a generalist audience, and a fear of not accurately rendering the world he is depicting, is at the heart of The Wire’s authenticity.

Indeed, an integral part of The Wire’s realism can be linked to David Simon’s time as a journalist at the Baltimore Sun (1982–1995). While Simon has skirted the comparison between his realist fiction and journalistic past, it is easy to see how the conflation occurs.⁷ Simon’s time covering the police beat in Baltimore furnished The Wire with many of its storylines, characters, and even moments of dialogue, and throughout this book I turn to Simon’s journalism to show how closely The Wire adhered to real life. Yet, while the argument is that Simon’s use of identifiable language, character, and location creates verisimilitude, I also highlight the curated nature of the realism on display. While all fiction is ‘curated’, by evoking the term (and its derivatives), I draw specific attention to David Simon’s role in the development, production, and delivery of The Wire’s realism. Evident throughout the following study is Simon’s heavy hand in all aspects of the series; at times this heavy hand becomes apparent, hindering, rather than enhancing, the series’ realism.

Throughout the following pages, I primarily refer to Simon as the driving force behind The Wire and the subsequent construction of realism. Although Simon’s long-time friend and co-creator of the series, Ed Burns, clearly influenced the direction of the narrative (along with many other individuals across the five seasons of The Wire), it was Simon who was lead showrunner-auteur.⁸ Anyone remotely familiar with Simon speaks of his dogged determination when presenting his point view, employing eloquence and force in equal measure in order to persuade people to his way of thinking. Margaret Talbot’s article in The New Yorker in October 2007, aptly titled ‘Stealing Life’, quotes Simon who describes ‘hellacious’ arguments he had with Ed Burns, culminating in Simon finally setting the record straight: ‘I’m not going to abdicate’, Simon told Burns, ‘I always have to trust my own ideas in the end. I’ll pick the ones out of your sixty ideas that I think are going to work, and I’ll leave the others on the table.’⁹ Simon’s cherry-picking from the collective ideas didn’t end there; he craftily brought novelists on board to script episodes, such as Richard Price, George Pelecanos, and Dennis Lehane, only to regularly re-write their work. George Pelecanos has stated of the scripts that ‘In the end, the final word is David’s’, and that he was told by Simon that ‘“You’re lucky when you get thirty per cent into a finished script”.’¹⁰

The following study closely examines the nature of The Wire’s authenticity and its subsequent establishment of realism. Rarely is authenticity and realism broadly examined in the extant scholarship on the series, and is yet to be as broadly and consistently examined as it is in the following study. Indeed, certain sites of analysis have taken precedence; as Galen Wilson has written, ‘While scholarship on the series has dealt with its realism, The Wire has mostly been studied in connection with the nineteenth-century novel.’¹¹ Of course, the series’ intersection with political and social issues, from race, to gender, to inequality has also been highly researched areas. The following study engages with these areas of scholarship, tracing Simon’s critique of the failed American institutions, and the post-industrial collapse of the American city, while charting the three prominent areas of realism in The Wire: language, character, and location.

Authenticity and Realism

While the representation of reality in fiction can be traced to the influence of philosophers such as John Locke and René Descartes, it is the eighteenth and nineteenth-century novelists who were utilising realism long before the mode found a home on television. Ian Watt’s seminal text, The Rise of the Novel (1957), investigates what Watt calls ‘formal realism’, which he states is:

a full and authentic report of human experience, and is therefore under an obligation to satisfy its reader with such details of the story as the individuality of the actors concerned, the particulars of the times and places of their actions, details which are presented through a more largely referential use of language than is common in other literary forms.¹²

The development of the novel throughout the eighteenth century coincided with a changing focus from traditional narratives to more realistic literary portrayals. Previously, the plots of classical and renaissance epics, generally based on history or fable, were the accepted models for literature.¹³ The first ‘novelists’, such as Daniel Defoe (1660–1731) and Samuel Richardson (1689–1761), started writing at a time of major soc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Curated Realism: The Wire’s Authenticity
• 2. ‘Listen Carefully’: The Authentic Language of The Wire
• 3. Superheros, Dickens, and Uncertain Endings: The Wire’s Authentic Characters
• 4. ‘Dante’s Hell’: The Wire and the Authentic Representation of Baltimore
• 5. The Wire: The Legacy of Onscreen Authenticity
• Back Matter