CHAD L. COLEMAN (DENNIS “CUTTY” WISE): If you’re a trailblazer, you’re ahead of your time. You’re ahead of schedule. Where the people are is not forward-thinking. They’re just in their day-to-day, whatever it is. When you’re a trailblazer, you still have to be able to engage those people that say, “Well, it is what it is,” and say, “Well, no, there is another way.”
DEIRDRE “DEDE” LOVEJOY (ASST. STATE’S ATTY. RHONDA PEARLMAN): My favorite thing is that, years later, I ran into one of the DAs I had trailed, and he said, “You know, I read an article the other day that at ten every Sunday night in Baltimore, for three and a half years, the wiretaps would all go dead, and it is because all of the wiretapped people were watching The Wire.” I thought that was pretty fucking fantastic, right?
DENNIS LEHANE (WRITER): I’d rather be part of something that was acknowledged in my time than in my moment. Moments pass.
MICHELLE PARESS (ALMA GUTIERREZ): It’s true today as it was when it was shot, and unfortunately, it’ll be true probably ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty years from now. It’s the system. It’s a revolving door, a cycle, a circle that just doesn’t get broken. And I think The Wire was able to really show just life in the inner city, not just from the crooks’ point of view, or the corner boys’, but from the cops’ point of view, from the news’ point of view, from the kids’ and how the school system is just so incredibly dysfunctional. It just shined a light on so many things that people just don’t want to talk about, and I think that’s why people are still talking about it and they’re taking classes in it at Yale and Harvard, because [it] affected so many people on such a deep, deep level.
LAWRENCE GILLIARD JR. (D’ANGELO BARKSDALE): There’s always going to be the clashes. There’s always going to be the people who have more, the people who have less, and the people who have nothing. That’s going to keep that show relevant forever, probably. There’s always going to be corruption. That’s just the way it is, man. That’s just the way it is. I think it’s going to be that show that just lasts forever and not just for entertainment value, not like Friends or Seinfeld or whatever. It’s always going to have some kind of social impact and some kind of social relevance.
METHOD MAN (CALVIN “CHEESE” WAGSTAFF): It didn’t just talk to one audience. It talked to a few different audiences. Each season was consistent with what Baltimore was about. That’s why it always helps to have people that are in the communities, policing the communities, living in the communities, writing this stuff, because they understand it and they have their fingers on the pulse of what’s going on in these neighborhoods. Mostly the hood gravitated to it because we love hood shit, especially when it’s well made. And the other people, like critics and people of that nature, loved it because it didn’t pull punches and it wasn’t afraid to peel back that layer and show the real Baltimore.
DOMINIC WEST (DET. JIMMY MCNULTY): A show comes along every ten to twenty years which totally redefines the genre. Hill Street Blues redefined the cop drama. I think on the simplest level, so did The Wire. It completely refreshed our ideas of a cop show in so many ways. It showed you a deeper understanding of the world and of the world of both the gangsters and the cops. It’s one of those shows that stand out as being revolutionary, iconoclastic in that way, and redefining the genre.
I think it’s not too much to say it’s spawned so many imitations and certainly in the UK, it’s been considered, among other shows, a benchmark in how real and how intense and how broad and epic the television drama can be. I think the legacy of The Wire is it’s made television drama everywhere much better. I used to constantly hear the BBC, they’d go, “We want to make something like The Wire.” And it became a benchmark for writers and producers to make TV that was as profound an art form as cinema or writing novels. I think it was, in some ways, one of those first shows that became a novel on-screen. It had a deeper and broader scope than any two-hour film could have. It had the depth and scope of a great, epic novel.
MICHAEL B. JORDAN (WALLACE): One of the best shows to ever be on television. It’s kind of crazy, and I said that with confidence, right? I said it like I meant it. Sometimes people say that and you’re like, “He don’t really mean that.” I kind of mean that. I mean that. I’m very proud of being a part with that cast and that crew.
DENNIS LEHANE (WRITER): It’s one of the most caustic, scabrous visions of America in decline that’s ever been put on the screen. And it changed TV a bit, pushed its borders a little further than where they’d previously been positioned.
ERNEST DICKERSON (DIRECTOR): Movies used to be the place where the cool stuff got done. Now the cool stuff is happening on television. I think that all started with The Wire. It completely revolutionized the way stories are told on television.
MICHAEL KOSTROFF (MAURICE “MAURY” LEVY): Artistically, there’s a hidden message, which is there’s such a wealth of hugely talented black actors that we’ve never heard of. One after another, after another, after another. To me, the message is: write the parts, because the talent is there. There are so many, and these guys blew my mind.
LANCE REDDICK (LT. CEDRIC DANIELS): The subsequent success of the show has shown that, regardless of what the gatekeepers try to use as an excuse, mostly people don’t care what color people are in their leads in shows that they watch. They just want to see great human stories. The Wire has become such a huge phenomenon in Great Britain, in Western Europe, in Scandinavia, truly by word of mouth. It’s certainly not because of any awards, any promotion of HBO per se, compared to the way HBO promoted the other shows. I’d say that, for me, that’s the legacy. So much of the great work that I’ve had the opportunity to do has come from young white guys between the ages of thirty and forty who grew up in the [world] of hip-hop and who were huge fans of The Wire, who just don’t think about [race] because it’s still their world. When they go into a room, most of the people in positions of power are white men. They just don’t think about race the same way. You’re not seen as a black actor as much. You’re seen as an actor who happens to be black.
MICHAEL B. JORDAN (WALLACE): The Wire was one of the few shows ever, especially at that time, to have an eclectic group of characters being played by black actors. It was a calling card that it could be done. I think we just need to aspire for more stories like that. Once the characters are being written, we’ll find the actors to play them and that’s what we’re going to do.
LANCE REDDICK (LT. CEDRIC DANIELS): Playing so many three-dimensional, highly intelligent characters, no matter what they were, that, for me, was the biggest part of what was so revolutionary and so cool about the show. When I was doing it, I didn’t even realize how cool it was. I realized it in retrospect, partly because the industry changed so much with the beginning of the new millennium. I just felt like the industry started getting really white again. Given how much our show got snubbed, as predominantly black as the cast was, I never thought of our show as a black show or that it would be perceived as such, until then. To me, it was a human show. It’s just most of the people happen to be black.
DOMINIC WEST (DET. JIMMY MCNULTY): The older it gets, the greater distance we have from it, the more cherished it seems to be and the more people realize that it’s a classic.
It’s been ten years now, I think. It’s the gift that keeps on giving, really, and I’m really glad about that. Most shows, you finish and you’re glad to see the back of them or the public’s glad to see the back of you. I never really felt particularly that McNulty defined me or that I would never get anything else, because it wasn’t really that sort of role. I’ve done roles since then, where I played serial killers and things like that, where there’s much more danger of people not being able to separate you from the character and much more danger of not being able to move on to other parts. That was never the case with McNulty, partly because he was very different from me and sounded very different from me, so it’s easy for me to move on and ju
st enjoy the fact that, as the years go on, people are still watching it and still coming to it for the first time.
DAVID SIMON (CREATOR): I’m more interested in the arguments. I wish that were the legacy of the show.
RICHARD PRICE (WRITER): My theory about David is, because he’s a police reporter, he likes adrenaline. He likes something happening, crisis after crisis. He didn’t go back to books, because I think he would have to downgrade his metabolism to go back to being a turtle. He’s a rabbit now. He even wrote me an email saying, because he owed [editor John] Sterling a book, years and years ago, and I’m paraphrasing, but something like, “Tell Sterling I’ll get back to the book as soon as I finish sucking on the glass crack dick of HBO.”
I think it really is crack for him. You sit in your office typing, all of a sudden you hear, “Six dead,” or, “An explosion somewhere in Baltimore.” Boom. You’re out of there. Then you gotta compete with all the other dogs, and you’re looking for angles nobody else has. He’s got that. When I was going around with him, and he was hooking me up with cops, detectives in Baltimore, he saw police barriers and they wouldn’t let him in, and he was very embarrassed. He scaled a backyard fence to get into the apartment where no one was looking where the fire took place. He’s like an animal. Like any good reporter, he’s an animal like that. His intellectual muscles, he can go from zero to sixty in an instant, and I think TV gave him that, because it’s the same low-key sense of crisis every minute.
DAVID SIMON (CREATOR): Bad news: I’m the same guy who used to have his feet up and argue with other reporters on the Metro desk about what the news meant. That’s infinitely more interesting to me than being political about entertainment that’s already been off the air for five years. I just can’t. I’m just not built that way. I’m not offended. I’m not personally invested in everything that was The Wire, but if you ask me whether I should give a fuck about, in a fair fight, who’d win, Omar or Stringer, or who’s cooler, my initial reaction and my second reaction and my fourth reaction is, “Who gives a fuck?” That’s who I am. I’m not saying I’m right and I’m not saying it’s everybody’s metric, but I know what I do.
ED BURNS (CO-CREATOR): With Freddie Gray, you can see that it’s the same. I would like to see the confrontations continue. When the quote-unquote riots, when the disturbances, were happening in Baltimore, there was concern. Soon as they stopped happening, the concern disappeared.
The only cool thing that came out of it, as far as I know, is that when they hit the pharmacy and they got all the pills out, my daughter was working, at the time, at the VA. She’s a clinical psychologist, and she had to walk up to her car, which was two blocks away from the VA in downtown Baltimore. The price of Oxycontin and all those things, which was, at one time, fifty dollars a pill after the riots, it was down to ten dollars a pill and slowly went back up to fifty dollars as the supply ran out. She was like, “Well, something happened. Something good happened out there.” I love that story.
WILLA BICKHAM (CO-FOUNDER OF VIVA HOUSE): It’s been more in the news because of the Freddie Gray incident, his death, but I have to say, there are days that we get really discouraged, especially living with all this vacant housing now. It is just disgusting. All the people that were in the soup kitchen today. They live in the cruddiest, crappiest—I’ve never seen such housing. I mean, it’s never been quite this bad, but there’s no money. Baltimore doesn’t have any money.
KWAME PATTERSON (“MONK” METCALF): The marching was a very good thing. The marching needed to happen. It was good. I think it kind of helped bring the city together, especially with all the different gangs coming together at that moment and putting everything to the side and just protesting and being peaceful. I hate that it happened with Freddie Gray, but I think it was something that was way overdue with the marching and the protesting. The looting and stuff, that helps nothing. The first thing we do is we loot our own community. They marched down in Fells Point, but it wasn’t looting in Fells Point. Police don’t care about you looting in the hood. That’s the hood. They don’t care about that.
It’s the same thing when the LA riots happened. It’s like, “Y’all looting in the area where y’all live at. That’s stupid. Go to Beverly Hills if you want to prove a point.” Because they ain’t going to let you come to Beverly Hills. They gonna shut you down quick. You looting in Inglewood, Compton, they just standing out there watching. They just making sure they don’t get too crazy. They just stand out there. But come to Beverly Hills and start looting like that, they gonna shut it down quick, and that’s just what it is. So, if you’re going to do that, not that I’m condoning it, do it where it matters. That’s why I’ve never been a big fan of the whole rioting stuff, because I think it’s stupid. I feel like when they do that, they’re not really about the cause. They’re just trying to get some free shit. If you’re really about the cause, you’re going to go where it matters. If you’re mad at white people, then go where white people live at. Don’t loot where we live.
PABLO SCHREIBER (NICK SOBOTKA): It doesn’t feel like we’re doing much to change many of the issues that David was talking about. It doesn’t really feel like it’s had a huge impact in terms of changing things. I wish it had. I don’t know necessarily where this country goes from here. But I think that was another point of view of the show as well, like, “Where the fuck can we go from here?” I don’t know, man. I think it’s probably a sad legacy. But at the same time, for people who want to think deeply about this country and our role in terms of trying to make it a better place to be, I think it’s achieved more than any other show ever has.
BENJAMIN BUSCH (OFF. ANTHONY COLICCHIO): The Wire really lived in Baltimore. It knew the alleys and cellars. It knew the lingo and the night shifts. It knew the children. It remembered the dead. It was like [Joseph] Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, like [Charles] Dickens writing about London, or [Herman] Melville about whales. Ed Burns and David Simon were not cosmetic surgeons. They studied terminal illness. They gave cancer a narrative for the first time. They kind of made it a character with sensibilities of its own, and I thought that was remarkable. I don’t know that any of us knew, in the cast anyway, at first what The Wire was doing, that we would become delegates, but I think every one of us became its fiercest fans.
WENDELL PIERCE (DET. WILLIAM “BUNK” MORELAND): It challenged us to think about the material that we were dealing with. It challenged people who watched it. The reason we still are engaged with the show today is because it really expressed the most important role of art, which is the form where we reflect on what our values are, decide what they are and then act on them. It’s where we have that debate of what we believe, where we failed, where we’ve triumphed. That’s what the art is to the community as a whole: a place where you reflect on these issues and say, “This is what we value, and let’s act accordingly.”
S. ROBERT MORGAN (BUTCHIE): A million people interpret it as a commentary on Baltimore, and that’s not what this show was about. That show could have been in New Jersey. It could have been in Arizona. It could have been somewhere in Florida or somewhere in Georgia. What it really was, if you think about the topical nature of the show, season after season, it was really about comparative institutions and the people within those institutions and what made them work and why they didn’t work.
ED BURNS (CO-CREATOR): Baltimore’s an interesting city. The majority’s African American, and yet, there’s been no programs coming out of Baltimore that would be cutting-edge, new ways of looking at things.
In fact, we adapt programs from Boston and Kansas City, towns that are totally unlike Baltimore. They come here and they fall flat on their face. The reason is because this is a very cheap little town, parochial. We don’t think big. We don’t think outside the box. Then, you got Johns Hopkins and the University of Maryland, which are the two big employers here, and nothing’s coming out of them, so it’s the same old crap over and over and o
ver again, same old approach.
There’s this wonderful line from a theologian named Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who got it in his head—he was a German—to leave England in 1944 to come back to confront Hitler. He was [executed] two weeks before the end of the war. He has this line, he says, “If you get on the wrong train, running down the aisle backward is not a solution. You have to get off the train.” We created these programs, back in the sixties, seventies, eighties, nineties, that were the wrong programs. That’s our train, and we tinker with them, but the problem’s way back there and we’re not getting off the train. There’s this whole idea of the war on drugs. I mean, that is our longest war, and that war has more casualties than all other wars combined. We keep doing the same stupid things, and our great hope is that, now [that] white people are dying of heroin, [that] they might do something, which they won’t. That’s the thing. We’re not willing to get off of that train because we’re all experts on the train. We step off the train and now we have to open ourselves up to the problem and rediscover. Now we’re no longer experts. If I had a PhD behind my name or two or three behind my name, I’m not getting off any fucking train. I’ll ride that baby right into retirement.
ANDRE ROYO (REGINALD “BUBBLES” COUSINS): Sometimes you can’t talk to [Ed Burns], because he truly believes the only way it’s going to get better, the only way we’re going to fix this planet, is they got to blow it up. The machine is too broken. You’re trying to fix it from the inside, you’re just wasting your time. It has to be burned down and rebuilt. That’s how he feels. That shit is scary. I would call him every once in a while and talk to him about parenting. Parenting is rough, and I would want to hear from him what he thought about certain things. I would talk to him about politics. By the end of it, I’ll have to take a shower. God damn, he would just jack me up. He’s an awesome dude. I think a part of me, if I could work with anybody else again out of that whole cast, it’d be Ed Burns. I would love to do another show with him.
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