Premiering on 2 June 2002, and ending on 9 March 2008, Home Box Officeās (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 Wireās creator, David Simon, spoke of the realism inherent in his series: āI 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.ā1 In order to develop a sense of āthe realā, 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 Wireās 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 ārealā 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 āThe more ārealisticā a programme is thought to be, the more trusted, enjoyableāand therefore the more popularāit becomes.ā3 Further, The Wireās 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 Baltimoreās, and by proxy, Americaās, 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, āTelevisual 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 accuracyāa program is seen as realist when it feels authentic.ā5 A question arising from Mittellās statement is who should the realism feel authentic for? For Simon, one of the biggest motivations driving The Wireās multifarious authentic representations was his fear that he wouldnāt realistically capture the essence of the collective he was trying to depict: āIām the kind of person who, when Iām writing, cares above all about whether the people Iām writing about will recognize themselves. Iām not thinking about the general reader. My greatest fear is that the people in the world Iām writing about will read it and say, āNah thereās nothing there.āā6 As I explore later in this chapter, and the chapters to follow, Simonās 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 Wireās authenticity.
Indeed, an integral part of The Wireās realism can be linked to David Simonās time as a journalist at the Baltimore Sun (1982ā1995). While Simon has skirted the comparison between his realist fiction and journalistic past, it is easy to see how the conflation occurs.7 Simonās 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 Simonās journalism to show how closely The Wire adhered to real life. Yet, while the argument is that Simonās use of identifiable language, character, and location creates verisimilitude, I also highlight the curated nature of the realism on display. While all fiction is ācuratedā, by evoking the term (and its derivatives), I draw specific attention to David Simonās role in the development, production, and delivery of The Wireās realism. Evident throughout the following study is Simonās heavy hand in all aspects of the series; at times this heavy hand becomes apparent, hindering, rather than enhancing, the seriesā realism.
Throughout the following pages, I primarily refer to Simon as the driving force behind The Wire and the subsequent construction of realism. Although Simonās 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 Talbotās article in The New Yorker in October 2007, aptly titled āStealing Lifeā, quotes Simon who describes āhellaciousā arguments he had with Ed Burns, culminating in Simon finally setting the record straight: āIām not going to abdicateā, Simon told Burns, āI always have to trust my own ideas in the end. Iāll pick the ones out of your sixty ideas that I think are going to work, and Iāll leave the others on the table.ā9 Simonās cherry-picking from the collective ideas didnāt 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 āIn the end, the final word is Davidāsā, and that he was told by Simon that āāYouāre lucky when you get thirty per cent into a finished scriptā.ā10
The following study closely examines the nature of The Wireās 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, āWhile scholarship on the series has dealt with its realism, The Wire has mostly been studied in connection with the nineteenth-century novel.ā11 Of course, the seriesā 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 Simonās 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 RenĆ© Descartes, it is the eighteenth and nineteenth-century novelists who were utilising realism long before the mode found a home on television. Ian Wattās seminal text, The Rise of the Novel (1957), investigates what Watt calls āformal realismā, 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 ānovelistsā, such as Daniel Defoe (1660ā1731) and Samuel Richardson (1689ā1761), started writing at a time of major soc...