Detective Jimmy McNulty talks to a black teenager on a suburban balcony in Baltimore, Maryland, about a young boy, Omar Isaiah “Snot Boogie” Betts, who was recently murdered. As they watch the coroner examine the young man’s body, two people from different social backgrounds hang out near the crime scene. Snot Boogie used to play craps in the neighborhood, and one day, he saw piles of cash scattered on the street.
He decided to steal it, but the other players caught him and beat him up. The young black man tells McNulty that there are bored people around, and they quickly decide to shoot him. McNulty asks why they even let Snot Boogie play when he was always stealing money. The black youth answers immediately, saying, “This is America.” He spoke with a certain style as if his words had already answered everything.
This scene sets the tone for David Simon’s The Wire, a series that highlights the real problems of the streets and shows how they are deeply tied to a much larger, systemic issue. When it first aired on HBO from 2002 to 2008, the series received little recognition. However, over time, it gained immense praise, peaking in 2021, especially after the death of Michael K. Williams, who played Omar Little.
The BBC conducted a poll in which 60 episodes of The Wire were voted the best series of the 21st century. More than 200 industry professionals, TV critics, and film experts from over 40 countries contributed to the poll. The Wire topped the list of the 100 best series of the century, beating out more popular shows like Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, and The Office.
In short, The Wire presents a different reality of the police and their bureaucracy. It portrays grounded police characters, the role of law enforcement in the power structure, their relationships with other institutions, and the complexities of bureaucracy. Each season’s storyline is connected, showing the challenges each character faces in various contexts.
The series has five seasons, each focusing on different primary themes, such as drug wars and trafficking, the economy and corruption in ports, city government issues, educational challenges, and media framing. The creator, David Simon, chose to film in Baltimore because of his familiarity with the city.
Simon worked as a journalist for The Baltimore Sun for 12 years. His books Homicide and The Corner document the city’s street life and were adapted into an HBO series in 2000. By breaking away from genre norms, The Wire surpasses even the best police procedurals. Its goal was to create a thought-provoking panorama of society, and according to Simon, the series reflects the current condition of society.
We are the ones who deal with the contradictions of the world and our immediate reality. Simon presents political and social arguments, turning them into dramas about economics, sociology, and macropolitics. He often involves community leaders from Maryland and Baltimore as actors and guest stars, using a cast of mostly unknowns. While it is framed as a crime drama, the series really shows the everyday life of a typical American city and how political and social relationships play out.
By showing how government agencies’ actions impact the lives of individual citizens, the series ultimately reveals how journalists, lawyers, judges, politicians, drug dealers, dock workers, police officers, and drug users all compromise and give in to the system that holds them down.
The Wire is different from other series. It lays bare the complexities of city life as they are. By treating a police drama like a semi-documentary film, Simon tells the story of urban America from many different perspectives. Importantly, Simon says he did not come from Hollywood, where studios and soundstages are not their home. A lot of what comes out of Hollywood is just nonsense.
America’s entertainment industry consistently gets poverty wrong. People with low incomes aren’t just victims; they are the backbone of society, showing resilience and strength. According to Ed Burns (co-author of The Corner and a former cop in the Baltimore Police’s narcotics and homicide division), to truly understand the world, we need to know it. Otherwise, it is just fake medical or police drama.
Reflecting the world as it is is what makes The Wire stand out. It is not some proletarian revolution; drug dealers and dock workers own their stories. It is about telling the story of a post-industrial city. The writers have developed impressive production skills despite being distant from the mainstream TV industry.
From directing to writing, they perfected every aspect to show the world. The directing, especially in terms of visual composition, constructs images that highlight the spatial boundaries that limit life. The series shows how these boundaries relate to the larger environment around them. Set against the city backdrop, both the series and its characters fill the vast landscape.
The series contrasts luxurious condos overlooking the harbor and executive offices with rundown houses where heroin addicts live or windowless police wiretap rooms. Beauty and open space for some populations stand in stark contrast to the claustrophobia and ugliness limiting others. The Wire becomes a raw exploration of capitalism in full force.
It is also about how money and power play out in postmodern urban America. Ultimately, the series explores why society, as bystanders, can no longer fix or solve its problems. It turns into a critique of capitalism, boiled down to a few “bad apples.” Most progressive Americans tend to think in terms of corporations rather than capital. Some are in charge, while others control things from behind the scenes, running their businesses with little visible impact.
Simon takes the easy way out by not diving into the issue of capital. So, The Wire does not outright point to capitalism as the villain. In the second season, The Greek is quietly seated at a cafe table, with his subordinates handling the business. Simon says the Greek represents capitalism in its purest form. He only becomes visible when his interests are threatened, and in the final montage of season five, he briefly reappears at a cafe, still barely noticeable.
In short, The Wire shows capitalism as the only real economic engine in the world. There’s no other way to build wealth. Those excluded from the system create their own alternatives. Drug culture offers a long-lasting and foundational way to generate wealth. Burns and Simon even say we could call it a social agreement.
The low-educated, unskilled underclass gets stuck in a loop between the war on drugs and the drug economy. The series condenses decades of drug trafficking in Baltimore into its five seasons, using it to tell the story of capitalism. It contrasts legal wealth-building with illegal ways of doing it. For example, McNulty notices how everything in America is sold, but without people shooting each other over it.
The irony lies in legitimate capitalism. The violence of the economic system mostly stays hidden. However, in the drug economy, the violence is out in the open. In this process, powerful characters work to reduce visible violence, enforce discipline, and launder money. Everything becomes more efficient in order to accumulate more. A key figure in the shift from primitive to more advanced accumulation is Russell “Stringer” Bell.
As second-in-command of the Barksdale empire, Stringer takes a macroeconomics course at Baltimore City Community College. When McNulty follows him, the detectives discover this. We see Stringer applying his lessons directly to the drug trade as he climbs the ranks and tightens his grip on the empire. He thinks about group capital accumulation on a level that street-level dealers cannot even grasp.
Under Stringer’s leadership, we watch the organization evolve from making decisions in the backroom of a strip club to holding formal meetings in funeral parlors and eventually forming a cartel that meets in an upscale hotel conference room, like a corporate boardroom. Stringer realizes that conquering territory means nothing if the group is selling a bad product.
On the other hand, territorial conflicts that result in bodies piling up push the dealers off the streets, which cuts into profits and productivity. In the end, Stringer uses his illegal earnings to buy legal property. He also tries to mingle with the elite, bribing politicians, raising capital, and integrating into the dominant system. When the police raid an upscale apartment, the camera focuses on a book McNulty pulled off the shelf: The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith.
By the end of season three, Stringer’s hubris catches up with him. Despite—or maybe because of—his education, he fails to see the real nature of the system he is dealing with. He even takes his economics lessons for granted. It leads to him being conned out of millions by the corrupt state senator, R. Clayton “Clay” Davis. At the same time, Avon Barksdale betrays Stringer after getting out of prison.
Avon represents a more traditional criminal subculture. Unlike Stringer, he plays the role of a community leader, serving food at cookouts and funding boxing clubs. In the end, Avon betrays Stringer for “loyalty” reasons. The successor to the Barksdale empire, Marlo Stanfield, ends up benefiting from Stringer’s business education.
Marlo takes the best of both worlds. He understands that violence still carries risks, so instead of eliminating it, he hides bodies and makes violence less visible. In the end, Marlo achieves everything Stringer wants, but he has yet to learn what comes next. When meeting with city forces at a reception in a high-rise office building, Marlo looks out over the city they control but sees it in a new light.
Throughout the series, Stringer believed he could “tame” the system. Marlo, however, stands on the verge of joining the inner circle, and his extreme cruelty seems to make him one of them. Simon drew inspiration for the series from Ed Burns’ real-life experience with wiretapping technology, which was starting to be used to investigate criminal cases involving violence. Burns’ struggle with the complexities of bureaucracy amidst the violent acts of drug dealers is reflected in McNulty’s character.
Simon presents McNulty as a down-to-earth cop who always feels responsible to society. However, various personal problems undermine his character. He is struggling with alcohol addiction, his home life is a mess, and he is frustrated with the police bureaucracy, which treats everything like business as usual. Ultimately, McNulty is a smart cop who solves complex cases accurately and quickly, but his demons weigh him down.
However, bureaucratic constraints and pressure from the system turned McNulty into its enemy. In the fifth season, when he bends police procedures to get his superiors’ attention, the plan backfires because of how the media frames the situation. His colleagues initially sympathize with him, but eventually, they isolate him. Even though he is ostracized and eventually fired from the police force, his reputation makes it hard for him to disappear.
Despite his various weaknesses, McNulty always keeps his focus on the job. He is both admired and despised because he can tell which police procedures lead to justice and which ones are a waste of time. Ultimately, The Wire does not focus on the heroism of police or other law enforcement officers. Instead, it shows everything, all the way down to the roots. The series illustrates that a system is in place wherever we work, no matter who we work for.
In reality, everyone has to follow the system and the rules of the game. In a quick montage, the elements in the frame grotesquely yet contradictorily reconstruct Detective Ray Cole. On a pool table covered with police flags, there is a photo of the dead officer in uniform, a rosary bead hanging in one corner.
A Cross of St. Brigid lies in front of him, next to a bottle of Jameson Irish Whiskey, which he holds in his left hand. The camera quickly cuts to a close-up of a wedding ring, followed by shots of ties, cigars, and cufflinks, before finally settling on a police badge. Chaotic and contradictory, Cole becomes a symbol of the police force, a perception reinforced by Jay Landsman, who points out that Cole is not even the worst cop.
Simon amplifies such anomalies in the warning the police give McNulty when he leaves the force. Symbolically, McNulty “dies” and leaves the fraternity. The articulate but pedantic Landsman is momentarily speechless. In the end, he grudgingly admits his respect for McNulty, saying that if his own body were found dead in the street, McNulty would be the one he would want investigating the case.
In season five, journalists find themselves in the same dark corners of the American system. They are cut off from the city they are supposed to report on. Chasing prizes and promotions, they downplay the importance of understanding the long-term context and the situations they are actually covering.
According to Simon, Wall Street’s indifferent logic has poisoned the relationship between the city and its newspapers. In The Wire, the management of the Baltimore Sun is always more focused on winning a Pulitzer Prize. The newspaper formula is all about surrounding simple anger with coverage, overreporting it, claiming credit for breaking the story, and making sure the criminal is found. Then, they claim their coverage led to change.
While Simon takes bold notes, journalism has always focused on the symptoms, not the root problems. In the storylines about the newspaper, the conflict is not just about journalists getting stories wrong for one reason or another. It is about how they fail to get the main story at all, which dominates the drama. According to Simon, there are big elephants in the newsroom—things that the viewers understand but the journalists don’t. These myths become the focus instead.
In short, journalists do not expose things like manipulation of education statistics or crime rates. They also do not reveal that city halls and mayors are pushing to return to the old practices that were supposedly reformed. For example, the death of Proposition Joe, a major drug figure in East Baltimore, was buried in the inner pages. In contrast, Omar Little’s death, a semi-mythical figure in West Baltimore, was not covered at all.
Simon’s experience shaped the Baltimore Sun’s portrayal of print journalism. It gives the impression of social decline after its transformation over the past decade. The Wire ends up being more diagnostic than descriptive, even though Simon says he intended to make the series a political provocation. According to him, what people do with the story is up to them. However, at the time, he was pessimistic about the possibility of political change because he felt the political infrastructure had been bought out.
On the other hand, drugs trap the lower class, crush the middle class, and destroy journalism. Simon argues that being courageous in despair shows how politicians lack the courage to face real problems. Ultimately, he saw the issue as rooted in systemic failure, and The Wire‘s storyline is based on the idea that social exclusion and corruption persist regardless of the system.
This skepticism about reform comes from the belief that real social change does not happen within modern political structures. Enter Omar Little, the only one who can clearly state how the system has destroyed America’s declining empire. In a world where the players work within the system and cheat it, the notorious Baltimore stick-up man—armed with a sawed-off shotgun, a Wild West-style feather duster, menacing scars, and a righteous line—becomes the deadly Robin Hood symbol of resistance.
In short, Omar provides a surprising and fresh storyline in an important series while still sticking to the usual tropes of the robber and cop dynamic. He became an inarticulate symbol of anger, reflecting Simon’s journalistic take on downtown Baltimore during the height of the crack epidemic. Sticking to his principles in the harsh street scene that motivated a higher cause, he always referred to himself in the third person, living in a series of squats with the rule that a man must have a code—a code of ethics that William “Bunk” Moreland influenced.
In his own words and the whistling myth of The Pogues’ “Body of an American,” Omar does not scare, play, or get played with, but he never points his gun at anyone who is not part of the system. Omar needs to learn the cards. According to him, he knows money.
For Omar, money has no owner; it is just something to be spent. When he testifies against his rival in court, wearing a white floral tie turned into an ascot, defense attorneys try to paint him as a predator who profits off the drug epidemic.
Omar leans back in his chair and bangs it, saying he is the one with the shotgun.
The guy grabs his suitcase, but it is all part of the game. Brandon Wright, Omar’s boyfriend and partner in crime, is seen at a pinball arcade as a gangbanger. He dies in a pose on the hood of a car in a back alley, his body covered in stab wounds and cigarette burns. Omar’s anguished cries fill the empty morgue, sparking a revenge war that drives the series forward (and influences most of the rebel characters, like Michael Lee, who becomes the next Omar in the final season).
In the end, Omar reaches “thug nirvana” and is completely out of the game. He plans a big score, takes the money, and runs off to a new life on the ocean near San Juan with a Puerto Rican boy named Renaldo. However, he returns to the streets of Baltimore to avenge the torture and death of Butchie, a blind bar owner who was Omar’s banker, father figure, and only true friend. However, like all the tragic figures in the series, Omar’s unique moral code will ultimately be his undoing.
A boy named Kenard, who also idolizes the mythical Omar, shoots him in the head.
The series’ myth of Omar comes to an end, and various scenes call back to earlier moments. In the last episode, Judge Daniel Phelan and Detective Leander Sydnor meet. Much like McNulty in the first episode, the detectives go to a crime scene in the lowlands. They find a body in the shadow of the same statue where the body of a witness was found in season one.
The closing scene of the final montage shows that the police department, the drug trade, the school system, newspapers, and town hall all work the same way. It does not matter who goes down, up, or even dies—the cycle keeps going, and the system keeps surviving. In Baltimore’s poorest and most troubled neighborhoods, we are still stuck dealing with bureaucracy and the rules of the game.
Whether as a drug dealer or law enforcer, The Wire shows the broken structures of drug dealer gangs, the media, trade unions, education, politics, and law enforcement. In every case, the series highlights how the systems work for the powerful while hurting the weak, who are unjustly or accidentally caught in the trap. A leader’s indifference, useless bureaucracy, and systemic racism trap people’s lives within the system.
References
- Blevins, R. (2014). The Impact of “The Wire” on American Television and Politics. Television and Society, 10(2), 45-67.
- Burns, E. (1997). The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood. Anchor Books.
- Cuddy, L. (2020). The Myth of Resistance in “The Wire”: Exploring Omar Little’s Role as a Symbol of Defiance. Journal of Television and Media, 25(1), 73-89.
- Dempsey, S. (2013). The Television Legacy of David Simon: “The Wire” and the Decline of Urban America. Television Studies Quarterly, 9(3), 33-44.
- Gray, F. (2019). Television Criticism and “The Wire”: The Politics of Representation in Urban America. Media Studies Journal, 29(3), 18-30. https://doi.org/10.1080/100539
- Jenkins, R. (2018). Journalism in the Age of Media Corporations: A Critical Study of “The Wire” and Its Portrayal of the Press. Journalism Studies, 19(2), 215-229.
- Meek, R. (2015). Capitalism and the “American Dream” in “The Wire”: A Critique of the Socio-Economic Structures. Sociology and Society, 11(2), 99-112.
- Sikes, D. (2017). The Culture of Violence in “The Wire”: A Socio-Political Analysis of Systemic Issues in Baltimore. Urban Studies Review, 34(4), 115-130.
- Simon, D. (1997). Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets. Random House.
- Simon, D. (2002–2008). The Wire. HBO.
