The Wire

by Rafael Alvarez

  This is the world of The Wire, the America left behind.

  Make no mistake: a solitary television drama cannot – and would not – claim to be all of Baltimore, or by extension, all of America. The Wire does not claim to represent all of anything as large, diverse, and contradictory as the American experience. Our storylines and our cameras rarely ventured to Roland Park or Mount Washington or Timonium, and the lives misspent and misused in our episodes are not the guarded, viable lives of private schools and county tax-bases and tree-lined business parks. The Wire is most certainly not about what has been salvaged or exalted in America. It is, instead, about that portion of our country that we have discarded, and at what cost to our national psyche we have done so. It is, in its larger themes, a television show about politics and sociology, and, at the risk of boring viewers with the very notion, macroeconomics. And, frankly, it is an angry show, but that anger comes honestly.

  I used to work at a great gray newspaper in Baltimore until Wall Street found the newspaper industry and eviscerated it for short-term profits, and out-of-town chain ownership proved that they could make more money producing a mediocre newspaper than a good one. The worship of the bottom line, coupled with the venalities of transplanted, prize-sniffing editors, sucked all joy from the place. My co-creator and fellow writer, Ed Burns, worked at a police agency in Baltimore, until organizational politics and Peter-Principled, self-preserving commanders undermined the best police work. On the writing staff of the show since the first season, George Pelecanos sold shoes and tended bar, and then spent years researching and writing novels about that portion of the nation’s capital that remains virtually invisible to the nation’s leaders, the Shaws and Anacostias where black life is marginalized in the very shadow of the great edifices of American democracy. A fourth writer, Rafael Alvarez, saw his father’s career on Baltimore’s harbor tugs end on the picket line outside McAllister Towing and was himself working as an ordinary seaman on a cable-laying ship when HBO came calling for an episode or two. A fifth, Richard Price, spent hour after hour, day after day in the Jersey City housing projects to find his lost and tragic voices, just as a sixth, Boston’s Dennis Lehane, brought to the page the working-class hurt and hunger of the rough-and-tumble Charlestown and Dorchester neighborhoods. And don’t leave out Bill Zorzi, who spent years covering the smoky backrooms of Baltimore politics before joining the staff to help create and guide the show’s political dynamic.

  These are professional writers, of course. It would be a pompous fraud to claim that those of us who inhabited The Wire’s writing room are perfectly proletarian. It is one thing to echo the voices of longshoremen and addicts, detectives and dealers, quite another to claim those voices as our own. The D’Angelo Barksdales and Frank Sobotkas live in their worlds; we visit from time to time with pens poised above splayed notepads.

  But neither would it be fair to categorize The Wire as a television show written and produced by people who were intent on writing and producing television. None of us is from Hollywood; soundstages and backlots and studio commissaries are not our natural habitat. Hell, never mind Los Angeles, with the exception of Price – and his great Dempsey books speak to the worn Jersey cities across the river – we are not even from the literary capital of New York.

  Instead, The Wire and its stories are rooted in the ethos of a second-tier city, of a forgotten rust-belt America. No, it isn’t as if the angriest and most alienated souls in West Baltimore or Anacostia or Dorchester actually hijacked an HBO drama series and began telling tales. But, at this point, it’s as close as television has come to such an improbability.

  Which credits HBO as well, for giving us the chance to voice something other than the industry’s standard fare. The Wire could not exist but for HBO, or, more precisely, a pay-subscription model such as HBO. Nor could Oz or The Sopranos or Deadwood or Generation Kill. These are stories that can entertain and amuse, but also disturb and nettle an audience. They can, at their best, provoke viewers – if not to the point of an argument, then at least to the point of a thought or two about who we are, how we live, and what it is about our society and the human condition that makes it so.

  The first season of The Wire was a dry, deliberate argument against the American drug prohibition – a Thirty Years’ War that is among the most singular and comprehensive failures to be found in the nation’s domestic history. It is impossible to imagine pitching such a premise to a network television executive under any circumstances. How, he might wonder, do I help my sponsors sell luxury sedans and pre-washed jeans to all the best demographics while at the same time harping on the fact that the American war on drugs has mutated into a brutal suppression of the underclass?

  The second season of The Wire was even more of a lighthearted romp: a treatise about the death of work and the betrayal of the working class, as exemplified by the decline of a city’s port unions. And how exactly do we put Visa-wielding consumers in a buying mood when they are being reminded of how many of their countrymen – black, white and brown – have been shrugged aside by the march of unrestrained, bottom-line capitalism?

  Season Three? A rumination on our political culture and the thin possibility of reform, given the calcified oligarchy that has made raw cash and simple soundbites the mother’s milk of American elections. And having established our City Hall, the stage is set for viewers to coldly contemplate the state of public education and, by extension, the American ideal of equality of opportunity and what that might mean for the likes of Michael, Namond, Randy, and Duquan in the drama’s fourth season.

  Finally, for anyone who has come as far as season five, a last reflection on why these worlds endure, why the crime stats stay juked and the test scores stay cheated and the majors become colonels while the mayors become governors – a depiction of what remains of our media culture, a critique that makes plain why no one is left to do the hard work of explaining the precise nature of our national problems, so that we have become a nation that comfortably tolerates failing schools and corrupting drug wars, broken levees and bought politicians.

  And through all of this, how can a television network serve the needs of advertisers while ruminating on the empty spaces in American society and informing viewers that they are a disenfranchised people, that the processes of redress have been rusted shut, and that no one – certainly not our mass media – is going to sound any alarm?

  The decoupling of the advertising construct from a broadcast entity was the key predicate for the political maturation of televised drama. It made it possible for writers such as Burns, Price, Lehane and Pelecanos to work in television without succumbing to shame and self-loathing. And again, HBO was smart enough to simply let it be.

  As I learned on my earlier experience in network television, the NBC executives used to ask the same questions every time they read a first-draft Homicide script:

  “Where are the victories?”

  Or better still:

  “Where are the life-affirming moments?”

  Never mind that the show was called Homicide, as head writer and executive producer Tom Fontana liked to repeatedly point out, and never mind that it was being filmed in a city struggling with entrenched poverty, rampant addiction, and generations of de-industrialization.

  Brave soul that he is, when Fontana wanted to write three successive episodes in which a violent drug trafficker escaped all punishment, he was told he could do so only if the detectives shot and killed the villain at the end of a fourth episode.

  Good one, evil nothing. Cut to commercial.

  To bring it all the way back, The Wire had its actual origins in the main Baltimore County library branch in Towson, where I went as a police reporter to schmooze a city homicide detective named Ed Burns.

  It was 1985, and I was working on a series of newspaper articles about a career drug trafficker whom Burns and his partner, Harry Edgerton, had managed to bring down with a prolonged wiretap investigation. Edgerton, or at least his facsimile, would later becom
e known to NBC viewers as Detective Frank Pembleton. But Burns? Too implausible a character, even for network.

  When I first met Ed, he was sitting by the checkout desk, a small pile of books atop the table in front of him. The Magus by John Fowles. Bob Woodward’s Veil. A collection of essays by Hannah Arendt.

  “You’re not really a cop, are you?”

  Seven years later, when Burns – having alienated many of his bosses in McNulty-like fashion with his sprawling investigations of violent drug gangs in the Westside projects – was contemplating retirement and life as a city schoolteacher, I approached him with an alternative.

  If he could delay his teaching career for a year and a half or so, we could venture together to one of Baltimore’s one hundred or so open-air drug markets, meet the people, and write a book about the drug culture that had consumed so much of our city. Which corner? Pick a corner, any corner, at random.

  The idea appealed to Ed, who had spent 20 years watching the city police department win battle after battle with individual drug traffickers, yet continue to lose the war. As a patrolman in the Western District, a plainclothesman assigned to the escape squad, and finally a homicide detective, Burns was impressed by the organizational ethos of the West Baltimore drug trade. Amoral and brutal they might be, but the true players were committed – more committed, perhaps, than much of the law enforcement arrayed against them. It was not unlike Vietnam, he acknowledged, and it is fair to say that as a veteran of that losing effort as well, Ed Burns was more entitled than most to render the comparison.

  We chose Monroe and Fayette streets in West Baltimore and spent 1993 and much of the ensuing three years following the people there. The Corner was published in 1997, and by then – with my newspaper increasingly the playground of tone-deaf, out-of-town hacks – I had moved across town to the writing staff of Homicide, hired by Barry Levinson and Tom Fontana.

  As a day job, it was a great one. And I found that the artifice of film and the camaraderie were enough to offset my exile from the Sun’s city desk, where I had long imagined myself growing old and surly, bumming cigarettes from younger reporters in exchange for back-in-the-day stories about what it was like to work with Mencken and Manchester.

  Script by script, Tom shaved my prose style until the pacing and dialogue began to show muscle. Then he slowly began adding fresh responsibilities, sending me to set calls and casting sessions and editing. Jim Finnerty, the production manager and line producer who has long played Stringer Bell to Fontana’s Avon Barksdale, offered lessons of his own in practical filming, crew management, and, most of all, making the day.

  “You become a producer to protect your writing,” Fontana explained.

  By the time The Corner was published, Tom was already locked down in Oswald Penitentiary, proving to HBO and the world in general that even the most discomfiting drama now had a place on American television. Perhaps, I thought to myself, there was room at HBO or some other premium channel for something as dark as life on an open-air drug corner.

  Tom and Barry didn’t see The Corner as material for a continuing series, but Fontana was good enough to call Anne Thomopoulos at HBO on my behalf. At the resulting meeting, it became clear that the cable channel was willing to take a shot, provided I could pair myself with a black writer.

  It didn’t matter to me one way or the other – I knew I had those Fayette Street voices in my head – but the other white folk in the room were not about to let a lone pale scribbler produce a miniseries about black drug addicts and dealers.

  “How about David Mills?” I ventured.

  One of the HBO execs in the room, Kary Antholis, startled. “Do you know David Mills?”

  “We’re friends. I worked on my college newspaper with him. We wrote our first script together.” And so we had. A second-season Homicide episode in which Robin Williams had guest-starred. Mills had taken that outcome as an omen, quitting his reporting job at the Washington Post and moving to Los Angeles, where he had spent five years making a name for himself in network television. Kary had known about Mills for a long time.

  “If you can get Mills on this, that would be great.”

  I volunteered him as an executive producer, no problem. And upon leaving the HBO offices, I used a cell phone to catch the man at home: “Hey, David. I know what you’re doing for the next year.”

  On the production side, Jim Finnerty volunteered a protégé, assuring me I could do no better for myself. Nina Noble had been first assistant director on the premiere season of Homicide and had worked her way up in the Fontana organization. Of course, I immediately agreed to the partnership: a recommendation from Finnerty is enough for such things.

  Mills, Noble, myself – that was all the producing we needed for a six-hour miniseries, or so I thought. But HBO had doubts aplenty, and the execs wanted a visual producer in the mix. Antholis arranged interviews in New York with several candidates.

  Enter Bobby Colesberry, whose résumé of nearly two decades producing high-end features made me nervous. I saw myself and David fighting with Feature Boy over the down-and-dirty scripts, and over the rough-and-tumble, handheld manner in which we wanted to shoot the drug corners. I saw Nina, too, fighting with him to keep the budget down, to make him realize that series television was not a place for two-page days and arcing crane shots.

  So there was little trust in Kary’s office that day, particularly when we walked in and saw a copy of The Corner splayed open in front of this Colesberry fellow, its pages already marked up in two different colors of ink. A healthier soul might have taken this as a good sign: here was a producer, a veteran of an industry where studio suits reduce all stories to single-sentence concepts, endeavoring to read a 550-page tome and then begin charting scenes and shots in his head. Instead, I’m embarrassed to say, I trusted him not at all.

  “We’ll take your script notes, but the last pass is ours.”

  Bob agreed.

  “And we don’t want to be frozen out of production. We’re not as experienced as you, but David and I know how to put film in the can.”

  No problem.

  Months later, with The Corner beautifully cast and crewed, and with Charles “Roc” Dutton turning in magnificent dailies as the director of all six hours, I thought back to that first meeting with Bob Colesberry and realized I did not want to put anything to film ever again without him. For something that had begun as a shotgun wedding, it was turning out to be quite a marriage.

  Looking past The Corner even before it aired, I thought about what it was that I still wanted to say about the drug war, about policing, and, ultimately, about what was happening in the city where I lived.

  The Corner was the diaspora of addiction brought down to microcosm – a single, broken family struggling amid the deluge in West Baltimore. The scripts had allowed us to probe the human dimension of the tragedy; the failure of policy, however, could only be implied with something so intimate.

  And so back to Mr. Burns, who was by now getting the full dose of the Baltimore public educational system as a middle-school teacher of social studies. There were days, Ed assured me, when a Western District patrol shift felt safer and more manageable than a tour of duty at Hamilton Middle School.

  We turned in the pilot script a few months after HBO had collected a trio of Emmys for The Corner, and, so, the timing felt right. After all, had we not delivered on that previous project? Just write some checks and send us back to Baltimore where we belong.

  But Carolyn Strauss and Chris Albrecht were unconvinced. The show’s emphasis on surveillance would be new, and the tone of the piece was different from network fare, but The Wire, as it began to be called, still appeared to be a cop show. And HBO’s primary concern became apparent: if the networks do cop shows, why are we doing one? The nightmare was to imagine critics across the country finally declaring that this was not in fact HBO, but TV.

  I asked Carolyn for a chance to write two additional scripts, if only to show that the pacing, arc, and intenti
on of this drama would be decidedly different from anything on a network. She agreed, and I went back to work as The Corner team drifted away, looking for fresh work elsewhere.

  Nina Noble produced and managed the HBO movie Shot in the Heart for Fontana-Levinson, then headed home to North Carolina. Dave Mills went back to Los Angeles and began banging his head against the network wall, working on a series of pilots and producing a promising gangster epic, Kingpin, which, in true network fashion, would be canceled after six episodes. Bob Colesberry returned to features, producing the science fiction film K-Pax with Kevin Spacey.

  In the end, it took HBO more than a year to agree to shoot even a pilot. There was a second pass of the three scripts, followed by a begging-ass memo to Chris Albrecht by yours truly, followed by an ingathering of The Corner crew – save only for David Mills, who could not be budged from a fat development deal. I remember picking up the phone to call Colesberry in Los Angeles, catching him as he was just completing post-production on the Spacey film.

  “I bet you thought that HBO show was dead,” I remember saying to him.

  “Very dead,” he admitted.

  Asked what I had done to get the green light on the pilot, I confessed that other than begging Chris Albrecht, I was not entirely sure. I read Bob the memo over the phone, and in his own gentle, Bob-like way, he affirmed that it was pathetic, and that, ever after, I should consider myself Mr. Albrecht’s bitch.