[00:00] The Wire is a HBO American crime drama TV series created by author and former police
[00:13] reporter David Simon. It premiered in 2002 and ended in 2008, with 60 episodes spread over five seasons. I've heard a lot about the Wire. It's always been held to such a high
[00:27] standard. I'm not the most clued up when it comes to TV shows. I have seen some of the more big ones, like Game of Thrones, Boardwalk Empire, Deadwood, Resurrection Arotago, The First Season of Peaky Binders, The First Season of Westworld, The Dark Crystal, Stranger Things
[00:43] and a few others here and there. I'm a huge fan of HBO's The Supranos, as subscribers of my channel will know. And when you ask around about other shows similar to The Supranos that can match it in terms of quality, there is consistently one series that is always
[00:59] mentioned, The Wire. It's considered a modern day classic, one of the very best TV series of all time. So I finally sat down and watched The First Season of the show, a show that has
[01:11] had an unavoidable Titanic reputation. Set in Baltimore, Maryland, The Wire follows the gritty urban drug scene, with the novel structure of the series telling the story
[01:25] from the viewpoint of both the drug dealers, those guys in the game and the law enforcement out to get them and attempting to put them behind bars. This format seems difficult to pull off. After all, you as the creator of the series can find yourself in a place where audiences
[01:41] are more interested in the police side of things than the drug dealers or vice versa. Not to mention, filling suspense and tension because you're showing all sides of the drug scene, deals, murders, raids, investigations and court trials, it's a format that could easily go wrong,
[01:57] but The Wire pulls it off flawlessly. It's comparable to say the way we follow Tony Supranos home life in The Supranos, as well as his mob life. You don't find yourself when watching one wishing for the other to be shown out of boredom or something similar. But anyway, the
[02:13] way I've heard it, each season of The Wire focuses on a different institution of Baltimore and its relationship to law enforcement, while retaining characters and advancing storylines from previous seasons. Now that does sound like an interesting format, doesn't it? For this
[02:29] season, it's the illegal drug trade itself. In the next, it's supposed to be the port system, then the city government and bureaucracy, then education and schools, and finally the print
[02:41] news medium in the final season. Though it's a crime drama, Simon has said the show is really about the American city and about how we live together. It's about how institutions have an effect on individuals, whether one is a cop, a longshoreman, a drug data, a politician,
[02:58] a judge or a lawyer, all are ultimately compromised and must contend with whatever institution to which they are committed. So it's similar to The Supranos in that vein, sorry to bring that up again, but that's one way at face value, it's a mob drama, but in reality, when taking
[03:15] in the subtext, it's really so much more, and it's the same here. Right off the bat in the first episode, the show puts you in this world that feels so real, where even the most minor character
[03:27] seems to be fleshed out and has a backstory. And it's on you to keep up with both the police department and all of their politics and technical jargon, and the drug dealers and their hierarchy
[03:39] and streetslang. It really feels like a proper cold open, with you having been dropped into a living world that already started breathing long before you jumped in. So the basic setup of the story
[03:51] is that homicide detective Jimmy McNulty played by Dominic West, who is probably the closest thing to the main character in this ensemble piece, observes the murder trial of mid-level drug
[04:03] dealer, DeAngelo Barkstale, played by Lawrence Gilear Jr., in which the prosecutors' star witness recounts her testimony. McNulty sees drug kingpin Russell Stringer Bell, played by Idris Elber,
[04:17] in court, and he thinks Stringer has manipulated the proceedings. McNulty circumvents his chain of command and talks to the judge, saying that the Barkstale drug dealing organisation has gotten
[04:29] away with 10 murders in the last year. The judge contacts the powers that be in the police department who are forced to assign together a rag-tag team, many of whom are rejects from other departments, who the bosses were trying to offload, to investigate the cases. This is how we get our
[04:45] group of heroes, shall we say. McNulty being one of them in the team. It's headed by the cold and uptight Lieutenant Cedric Daniels, played by Lance Reddick. Others include Detective Kima Griggs, Thomas Huck-Hawk, Alice Carver and Nesta Freeman. McNulty and the gang are driven
[05:04] to bring down the Barkstale drug crew, but they constantly face difficulties from their own superiors who undermine proceedings. DeAngelo is welcomed home after the trial by his uncle Aivon, who is the real head of the operations, with Stringer as his number two, who allows DeAngelo to return
[05:21] to work, but he is demoted to working the game at a low-rise housing project known as The Pit. Shortly after he begins working, a homeless but lovable drug addict, known as Bubbles, played with such authenticity by Andrea Royo, has his friend unfortunately involved in a scam which
[05:38] gets him beaten up, and this leads to Bubbles to help the cop identify who's who in the Barkstale drug empire as an undercover informant. A character called Omar, played by the late Michael K Williams,
[05:51] is also introduced, a wild card rival to the Barkstale crew, who I believe goes on to become the series's most iconic and celebrated character. What I've heard about season one of the wire,
[06:03] is that it feels stiff and artificial, and you have to get through this one because it sets up the other seasons, and that's where it gets really good. Well that may be the case, but even so, I thoroughly enjoyed this first season, I thought it was brilliant. It was entertaining,
[06:17] it felt authentic, and real. The acting was great, the dialogue was on point, the characters were fantastic, and it's a show not afraid to get down and dirty. For example in one particular scene, a kid who's something like 16 years old, is cruelly shot by his own associates in a painfully
[06:34] drawn out scene. Other standout parts of the season include one where a dealer helps a kid with his homework, using a drug-deeding example, one where after so much work is done in finding out who A1 is and tracking him down, he gives the cops a slip, but intentionally drives back past them,
[06:51] wagging a finger to let them know, today won't be the day they catch him. And a classic where McNulty and his partner, Bunkmoreland, recreate a murder scene and the only dialogue for like five whole minutes is fuck, and it's variations. That's another thing about the show, it's funny,
[07:07] it has that real-life spontaneous sounding humour, and the ban to between various characters is fun to watch, like the dynamic duo of Herc and Carver, or the wholesome growing relationship between McNulty and Keema. This is my kind of show, it really is. I love police procedural dramas,
[07:25] like those old Sydney Lumet movies, and I like crime dramas, and this slaps the two together, and it garnishes it with about 50 different flavours and toppings to create something quietly majestic. It has a flow to it that you don't even realise, evidence has come about,
[07:41] cases are built, things come together, and it's only when they do, do you realise how much progress has been made after a couple of episodes, when it feels like nothing is actually happening. It also, at its core, is a human drama, it's got a sense of humanity that other cops show like.
[07:55] Of course, as many know, the show deals with institutions, bureaucracies, police brutality, racism, societal ills, the war on drugs, all that kind of stuff, but it never feels like it's lecturing you,
[08:07] it's so nuanced as well, especially in terms of the characterisation, I can't think of one main character that I can point to and say, this is a holy good guy, or this is a holy bad guy, it's a very complex show, complex characters, complex situations, like Omar, for example,
[08:22] working with the cops, to bring down the Barksdale crew, but Omar is also a criminal, and not acting out of some kind of sense of righteousness, but because he wants revenge for the murder of his partner, in another case, one of the more likable cops is in the interrogation room,
[08:37] with a perp trying to get him to flip, but resulting in the perp throwing hateful epithets her way, this is then met with a beat down by the cop and two others, now the perp deserves a
[08:49] beating, but you'd hope the cops were above giving a beat down, you'd expect them to get punished by the superiors to hide out how this behaviour is wrong, but the wire skips past the moral judgments and leaves that to the viewer, with scenes like this being commonplace, and they feel quite
[09:04] ordinary within the context of the show, you'd have one guy who sells drugs to vulnerable people, but it's the only life he knows and he lovingly takes care of practically a squadron of children, a cop will do his best to take down drugs and crime in the city, but he'll be regularly cheating on
[09:21] his wife, that kind of stuff is all over the wire, it'd be more weird to find a cartoonishly good or bad guy, the characters feel real and in some cases are actually based on real people. So yeah, overall I thought this was a great start to this show and I look forward to continuing it,
[09:37] if you don't want to miss out on my reviews for the following seasons, be sure to subscribe and hit the notification button down below and thanks for watching.