The Wire won no major awards on air, then became a landmark
David Simon's Baltimore drama drew middling ratings and no major television prizes while it aired on HBO from 2002 to 2008. Its creator insisted it was never really a cop show but a study of how institutions grind down the people inside them, and viewers eventually came round to calling it one of the best series ever.
Simon, a former police reporter at The Baltimore Sun, built the series with Ed Burns, an ex-homicide detective who later taught in public schools. Burns had spent years on long surveillance investigations of drug crews and had been worn down by police bureaucracy, which echoed Simon's own experience on the crime beat. The pair had already collaborated on The Corner in 2000.
Simon took the idea to HBO partly to escape the fights he had at NBC, whose executives disliked the gloom of Homicide: Life on the Street, the earlier Baltimore show adapted from his 1991 book. HBO hesitated to add a police drama but paid for a pilot. Simon even warned the mayor that the portrait would be bleak and was still invited back to film. Across 60 episodes and five seasons, each year examined a different Baltimore institution while carrying characters forward: the drug trade, the docks, city hall, schools and finally the newspaper business.
The casting favoured unfamiliar faces over stars. Wendell Pierce, who played Bunk Moreland, was hired first. Dominic West won the lead role of Jimmy McNulty with a tape of himself acting out a scene alone, made the night before the deadline. Lance Reddick tried out for two other parts before landing Cedric Daniels, and Michael K. Williams became Omar Little after one audition. Real local figures turned up in small roles too, among them former Maryland governor Robert Ehrlich and former mayor Kurt Schmoke.
Simon described the show as a portrait of the American city, in which police, dock workers, dealers, politicians and lawyers are all compromised by the organisations they serve. Critics admired its writing and its unusually realistic treatment of urban politics. A devoted cult audience built up after it ended, and it now sits routinely near the top of lists of television's greatest dramas.
Source: The Wire
