“Also, no one likes the name Jimmy McArdle.”
Bob considered this for a moment. “How about McNulty?”
“Jimmy McNulty.”
“It’s my grandmother’s family name.”
“McNulty it shall be.”
By November 2001 we were back on the streets of West Baltimore. The scripts were in many ways the same ones that I had originally turned in, albeit with some scenes added to the pilot that hinted at the surveillance techniques that would be employed later in the season, once the detail had slowly earned the probable cause to secure a wiretap.
The casting by Alexa Fogel in New York and Los Angeles, and the redoubtable Pat Moran in Baltimore, surpassed all expectations. Only the role of McNulty gave us fits, until a bizarre videotape landed in Baltimore, shipped from a London address. On it, an actor was tearing through the orange-sofa scene in which Bunk and McNulty jack up a reluctant D’Angelo, search him, find his pager, then walk him away in handcuffs.
Unlike every other casting tape ever made, however, this one seemed to be the merest suggestion of a scene. The actor, a square-jawed, Jack-the-Lad sort named West, was reading the McNulty lines, then pausing in silence, reacting to emptiness where the responding lines should have been.
With several weeks of fruitless searching for a lead actor weighing on our souls, the tape caught us off guard. Bob and I watched this weird half-scene for a long moment, then fell out of our chairs, laughing uncontrollably. Hearing us, Clark Johnson, the Homicide veteran who was directing the pilot, entered the room, watched a few moments of tape, then joined us on the floor.
“What the hell is this goofy motherfucker doing?”
The audition tape may have been comic, but the performance itself – when we gathered our wits and began to concentrate on what the actor had going – was impressive. A week later in New York, Dominic West explained that he couldn’t get anyone in London to read the scene with him, and he didn’t have access to a casting office to put himself on tape. His girlfriend had tried to help, but her full English accent kept making him laugh, throwing off the scene. Best she could do was keep quiet and hold the video camera steady.
“I didn’t know what else to do,” our McNulty confessed, “except say my lines and leave spaces where the other lines are supposed to be.”
By the time we returned to shooting the remainder of the first season, Ed Burns and I had drafts of the first six episodes in hand, as well as elaborate beatsheets that brought us all the way to the final episodes. Deliberate planning and overarching professionalism had exactly nothing to do with it, but rather a sense that a story so intricate, with so many characters and so much plotting, had to be considered a single entity.
An early script note from HBO execs – who, by and large, were gentle and discerning with their input – argued that an early-episode robbery by Omar and his crew should be omitted, primarily because the robbery was perpetrated on random street dealers who had no value to the central plot.
Our counterargument was basic: wait.
Omar seemed an aside early on, just as Lester Freamon and Wallace seemed to be mere hangers-on. But in time, they would prove themselves essential to the story. And we needed the street robbery to hold Omar’s place in the tale, to remind viewers that he and his crew were still in the world, so that by the fifth episode, when McNulty and Greggs try to pull him up for information, we are still aware of who, exactly, this much-talked-about Omar is and what it is he does for a living.
After all, we had it in mind that we would not explain everything to viewers. The show’s point of view was that of the insider, the proverbial fly on the wall – and we had no intention of impairing that point of view by pausing to catch up the audience. Consequently, all of the visual cues and connections would need to be referenced fully and at careful intervals.
Perhaps the first fundamental test of our willingness to forgo exposition and an end-of-every-episode payoff came in the fourth episode of that first season, when D’Angelo Barksdale first claimed responsibility for the murder of a woman in an apartment out near the county line. Fronting for the boys in The Pit, D’Angelo describes the murder in some detail and suggests that he was the shooter. Later in the episode, McNulty and Bunk Moreland are in an emptied garden apartment, examining old crime-scene photos of a slain young woman and reworking the geometry of the murder.
The five-minute scene offers no explanation for itself beyond the physical activities of the detectives as they address the crime scene and the almost continuous use of the word ‘fuck’ in all its possible permutations – an insider’s homage to the great Terry McLarney, a veteran Baltimore murder police who once predicted that Baltimore cops, in their love of profanity, would one day achieve a new and viable language composed entirely of such.
A casual viewer could watch the scene and ascertain that the detectives had figured out the murder scenario. They conclude, in fact, by locating a rusting shell casing outside the kitchen window.
But what exactly is that scenario? And does it match the murder that D’Angelo spoke of earlier? And what were the white speckles on the floor in the crime-scene photo – the droplets that Bunk pointed to? And how did that lead McNulty to open the refrigerator door, then slam it closed? And why, for Chrissakes, will no one explain what the hell is going on?
For the answers, viewers would not have to merely wait out the episode, but all of them. Only during D’Angelo’s interrogation at the season’s end does he corroborate the crime scene details in a way that convinces Bunk and McNulty of his authenticity. And, even then, the exposition is at a minimum.
When D’Angelo explains that he had brought cocaine to the woman, who told him she would put it “on ice,” the detectives acknowledge the connection to their crime scene with a single word:
“Refrigerator,” says Bunk.
And McNulty nods casually.
Such calculating restraint offered viewers a chance to do something that television rarely, if ever, allows its audience: they were free to think hard about the story, the different worlds that the story presented, and, ultimately, the ideas that underlie the drama. And the reward for such committed viewers would come not at the end of a scene or the end of an episode, but at the end of the season, indeed, at the end of the tale.
As storytelling, it seemed like the best way to do business. But, even so, we had to acknowledge that this much plotting from episode to episode was an extraordinary risk, even for HBO. We would certainly lose some viewers: those who did not devote enough effort to follow the intricate story, those who gave it their all but were confused nonetheless, and those who, expecting an episodic television drama, would be bored to death by the novelistic pace of The Wire.
Bob Colesberry and I told ourselves repeatedly that we were making the drama for those remaining. A couple dozen or so hard cases, at least.
Before the first season aired in June 2002, HBO made sure to send as many as five consecutive episodes to critics – all of those we had edited. The hope was that by seeing more episodes, those being asked to consider the show would understand that while the pilot episode violated many of the basic laws of episodic television, it was at least an intentional affront.
To that same end, in a series of press interviews, I began referring to the work as a “visual novel,” explaining that the first episodes of the show had to be considered much as the first chapters of any book of even moderate length.
“Think about the first few chapters of any novel you ever liked, say, Moby-Dick,” I told one reporter in a phone interview. “In the first couple chapters, you don’t meet the whale, you don’t meet Ahab, you don’t even go aboard the Pequod. All that happens is you go with Ishmael to the inn and find out he has to share a room with some tattooed character. Same thing here. It’s a visual novel.”
All of which sounded great to me until I hung up the phone and turned to confront a certain Baltimore writer by the name of Lippman, who has penned and published nine actual novels and
with whom I share quarters. Her lifework is replete with hardback covers, actual chapter breaks, and descriptive prose that goes a good deal further than “INT. HOMICIDE UNIT/HEADQUARTERS – DAY.”
“First of all,” she informed me, “you just compared yourself to Herman Melville, which even by your egotistical standards is a bit over-the-top. And second of all, if The Wire is really a novel, what’s its ISBN?”
A mouthy broad; clever, too. But, fortunately, a lot of critics were less exacting with my hyperbole, and, more important, they actually put four or five tapes into their machines before writing reviews. At least in the hinterlands they did. In New York, where time runs faster than elsewhere and critics can give you no more than an hour to make your case, The Wire suffered poor reviews in every single newspaper. We went oh-for-four in The Big Apple, feeling much like the Orioles on a long weekend at Yankee Stadium.
Ratings dipped, too, but HBO – being HBO – did not panic.
“We love the show,” Carolyn Strauss said repeatedly, reassuring us. “We don’t care about ratings, so you shouldn’t care about ratings.”
For his part, Chris Albrecht called to say he had just watched the cut of Episode Five and “it’s getting better with every episode.”
I hestitated to argue that I thought they were all good episodes, that they were paced precisely for the maximum payoff over 13 hours. Instead, I took the comment to heart, reminding myself that when you read a good book, you are more invested with every chapter. What Chris was sensing was our intention.
By the last third of the season, the tide had slowly turned. Viewers were fully committed and there were more of them; ratings began to rise amid some healthy word of mouth. A couple of New York critics revisited the show and affirmed its worthiness. The actors, too, began to sense that we were building a different kind of machine. One Monday on set, Andre Royo, who owned the role of Bubbles, sauntered over to a pair of writers to say he had watched the previous night’s episode:
“Every time I start to wonder what you all are doing with a scene, I just wait a couple episodes, and, sure enough, there’s a reason for it.”
Otheractors, notably those on the wrong side of the law, began to wonder what we would do if we were picked up for a second season, what with Avon and D’Angelo Barksdale heading to their respective prison cells.
Corey Parker Robinson, who played the role of Detective Sydnor, thought he had it figured: “They’re gonna get out on a technicality, right?”
It was an understandable assumption, given that we were standing on a film set in the West Baltimore projects, where we had thus far filmed much of our story. But in our heads, the writers were already elsewhere, and, as a finishing touch, we made sure to deliver McNulty to the police boat at the end of the last episode.
By then, a lot of viewers had forgotten Sergeant Landsman’s prophecy in the pilot episode, that McNulty would ride the boat if he didn’t stop provoking the departmental brass. As far back as the pilot, we had decided on the substance of a second season, should there be one.
And when McNulty shipped out with the marine unit, it happened – typically – without dialogue, with nothing more than Bunk Moreland and Lester Freamon walking to the edge of the dock and tossing him a fifth of Jameson’s beneath the roar of boat motors.
If you got the joke, great. Thanks for staying with us.
If not, hey, sorry. It’s what we do.
It’s Laura Lippman, again, who gets a mention for making me read George Pelecanos. Not that I hadn’t been given fair warning of what George had been doing with his D.C. novels – half a dozen other writers had urged me to check him out, comparing his voice and material to that of The Corner. But we Baltimoreans have this chip on our shoulders about Washington, and though I’d grown up in the same D.C. suburbs as George, I had long ago taken my allegiances north, embracing every stereotype about those tie-wearing, GS-rated, lawyer-assed sonsabitches down I-95.
When I finally cracked The Sweet Forever and saw that Pelecanos had been mining a different Washington altogether, it made perfect sense. And, later, upon encountering George at the funeral of a mutual friend, I tried to explain what we were trying to do with The Wire, and why he might want to be a part of it.
“It’s a novel for television,” I said, but under my breath, for fear that my consort, also in attendance at the memorial, would overhear.
Like many writers, George had suffered the slings, arrows and indignities of trying to get so many of his own worthy stories to film, and he immediately grasped the possibilities. In the feature world, after all, it’s the studios, if not the directors and stars, who have the drag. In episodic television, by virtue of the continuing storylines, it’s the writer with the suction. And at HBO, this is more so.
During the first season, George was given the penultimate episode – particularly because it included the stark, horrifying death of Wallace. The drama of that singular moment required a writer who had built so many of his novels toward similar crescendos. And George, true to form, nailed it.
Would he come back for Season Two? Would he commit to working as a story editor and producer? He certainly didn’t need the money; his day job of drop-kicking genre fiction into the literary ether was enough without the hassle of a television gig.
But George, who loves film and can’t resist a story well told, not only signed on, he set about enlisting other novelists who were doing much the same kind of work.
We could promise Richard Price and Dennis Lehane no reward commensurate with the talent. The best we could offer was that, unlike any other film project with which they might become involved, The Wire would not compromise story for the sake of a studio, a director, or a movie star.
“If you get fucked over, at least it’ll be another writer doing it to you.”
And while both Lehane (Mystic River) and Price (Clockers) are masters of a strain of crime fiction that long ago rendered the presumed boundaries of genre meaningless, the addition of Price to the writing staff seemed especially appropriate, if not at all probable.
Anyone who has ever read Clockers – which is to the cocaine epidemic of the early 1990s as The Grapes of Wrath is to the Dust Bowl – understands the debt owed to that remarkable book by The Wire. Indeed, the split point-of-view that powers The Wire is a form mastered first in the modern novel, and Price, in his first Dempsey book, proved beyond all doubt how much nuance, truth, and story could exist between the world of the police and the world of their targets.
On learning that the Season Three lineup of writers would include Price and Lehane, Bob Colesberry was beside himself with glee. And whom,I teased him, did he want Pelecanos to bring us for a fourth season? Elmore Leonard? Philip Roth? How about this Melville fuck I keep mentioning? He hasn’t worked in a while, has he?
And Bob would laugh at the effrontery of it, though in his own way, he, too, was expanding the show during the second season, transforming it from a limited cops-and-dealers saga into something larger, something panoramic enough to justify all the writing and acting talent.
The rotting piers and rusting factories of the waterfront – and, most of all, those Gothic cranes at Seagirt and Locust Point – gave Colesberry the visuals he needed to show just what could be done with a television series shot on location.
His standards had always been those of the directors he had worked with in his long feature career – Scorsese, Parker, Benton, Forsyth, Ang Lee – and Bob had learned well, rising from location manager to first AD to line producer. He was not a deskbound executive. He was instead a set rat, familiar with every aspect of filmmaking and committed to serving story.
His elegance, and that of Uta Briesewitz, the show’s director of photography in those early years, found subtle ways into the film throughout the first season. In the pilot episode, note the decision to stay wide, filming from across the street as Wee-Bey berates D’Angelo for talking about business in a car. As Bey dresses the less experienced player down, he stands outside a carryout and
beneath a neon sign that reads BURGERS.
D’Angelo, humiliated, is framed beneath a second sign: CHICKEN.
The camera stays wide as Wee-Bey starts back to the parked SUV, only to pause as two police cars, blue lights flashing, wipe frame and wail away, seemingly after those, unlike Bey, who fail to take the lessons of the street to heart.
Film such as that, conceived and edited with intelligence and restraint, was Bob’s stock-in-trade. The projects of West Baltimore and the taut, credible precinct sets of production designer Vince Peranio guided the show’s first year to an appropriately claustrophobic look, just as the rogue fashions of costume designer Alonzo Wilson suggested a violent and stunted street world. All of it was creativity with absolute context.
As the show began to grow – carving off fresh slices of Baltimore – so, too, did Colesberry expand the show’s visual sense of a working city. And even as Season Two was underway, Bob and I were contemplating a third season in an altogether different locale, and a fourth elsewhere, too. With each season, by showing a new aspect of a simulated American city in all its complexity, we might, by the end of the show’s run, have a chance to speak to something more universal than Avon Barksdale or Jimmy McNulty or drugs or crime.
To do the same show over, season after season – this was never an option. And Bob – who was once made to concede that the last pass on The Corner scripts would be writers-only – had become a partner in every aspect of the storytelling. He was never happier about the show’s plotting than during the writers’ meetings for the third season – meetings at which he was a full and welcome participant.
Midway through the meeting on the second episode, in fact, Richard Price expressed surprise on learning that the man sitting to his immediate right was not actually a fellow writer.
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