Consider This from NPR - Does HBO's 'The Wire' still hold up after 20 years?

Episode Date: June 25, 2022

Omar Little, Jimmy McNulty, Stringer Bell, Snot Boogie. If you recognize these names, you are probably a fan of the HBO series The Wire. This month marks 20 years since the series premiere. It ran for five seasons, following the lives of the cops, criminals, political players, and everyday folks caught up in Baltimore's often futile war on drugs. Many argue that The Wire is the best television show ever created and has earned praise for its realistic, humanizing, multi-dimensional portrayal of Black characters. But 20 years on, the conversation about policing in Black communities has changed. The deaths of Freddie Gray, George Floyd, and many others after encounters with police and the rise of the Black Lives Matter Movement have brought about more public scrutiny, debate, and criticism of the police. As social commentary, is The Wire still relevant? We speak with NPR TV critic Eric Deggans and Ronda Racha Penrice, editor of the essay collection, Cracking The Wire During Black Lives Matter.In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment to help you make sense of what's going on in your community.Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Yeah, now, well, the thing about the old days, they the old days. You best not miss. If you know those clips and that music, then you are probably a fan of the HBO series The Wire. And you are not alone. At the front end, I've got to tell you, I'm a huge fan of The Wire. I think it's one of the greatest, not just television shows, but pieces of art in the last couple of decades. I was a huge fan of it. This month marks 20 years since the premiere of the series. Set in Baltimore, The Wire ran for five seasons following the lives of the cops, criminals, political players, and everyday folks caught up in the cities and, by definition, the nation's war on drugs. Some argue it is not only

a great show, some say it is the best television show ever. And people are still talking about it. Man, we hanging out having this good wire conversation, man. Yes, yes. Syph, you started watching The Wire. I got into The Wire this season with the kids. I think that was the fourth season. Oh yeah, that was the season that got everybody. Yeah.

What's up, everybody? Welcome to The Wire at 20 podcast from HBO and Campside Media. I'm your host, Method Man. You might remember me as Melvin Cheese Wagstaff from seasons two through five. As streaming content, the series has attracted a whole new generation of avid fans. But things have changed in the past two decades, especially after encounters with police led to the deaths of Freddie Gray, George Floyd, and many others. Deaths that took place either in public or were taken up by an increasingly vigilant and vocal public and thus could not be ignored. That, along with the growth of the Black Lives Matter movement, has given new life to some old and often ignored debates about the role of police in places like Baltimore and elsewhere. Consider this.

The Wire has been heaped with critical praise as television for its realistic and humanizing portrayal of characters caught up in Baltimore's drug wars. But as social commentary 20 years on, how does The Wire hold up? That's coming up. From NPR, I'm Michelle Martin. It is Saturday, June 25th. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today or visit WISE.com. T's and C's apply. Well, I always try to remind people that I never lost an election as opposed to the mayor on the

wire, so I distinguish myself a little bit. That's Kurt Schmuck. He's currently president of the University of Baltimore, but he was mayor of Baltimore from 1987 to 1999. He served in many roles in public service and the academy, and he actually had a small part on the wire. Yeah, I played the health commissioner in a couple of episodes, and I had to join the Screen Actors Guild because of that, so I still receive a certain amount of money. Usually the check that I get is just about as much as the stamp. Okay. So it didn't make you a star in a different venue.

No. It did not change your life. Right. Being on the wire did not augur well for changing my career. It said, keep your day job. I asked Kurt Schmoke how he thinks the show may have influenced people's view of Baltimore and also how it may have influenced views about the bigger issues raised by the show, such as poverty, the drug trade, addiction, and crime.

Sure. Well, it was a mixed view because certain people, particularly in our business community, were very worried about it. The predecessor show was Homicide, Life on the Street. And I think many people remembered a particular incident in that show where a tourist came to Baltimore and was actually shot and killed near the baseball stadium. That incident, even though it was fictional, it was on TV, led to a lot of calls to the police department and to City Hall with people thinking that that happened in real life. So some people remembered that as art having a real impact on the perceptions people had of the city. And so that segment of the city was not real pleased. Other people, though, reacted very positively. They knew David Simon. They knew Ed Burns. They thought that the war on drugs was a failure, having disproportionately negative impact on the communities.

So their reaction was, good, somebody is showing exactly what life is like here in some of our hard-pressed communities. So it was a mix. And how did you feel about it? Because, I mean, as a person who was working in this space, I mean, you had been a state's attorney. I mean, you had been a state's attorney. You were mayor. You had multiple roles yourself, you know, in the city, around the city.

You were a person who always had a hand in whatever the kind of latest public policy thinking was. You see what I'm saying? You had multiple relationships. Do you remember how you felt about it at the time? Because I have to say that a lot of people from Baltimore, after a certain point, they might have recognized the art of the show, but they came to resent how, you know, in fact, there were multiple people who wrote about this.

They would say, at some point when people found out you're from Baltimore, inevitably they would be like, the wire. That's correct. And people would be like, I don't really know. That's a picture. It's not the whole picture. So how did you feel about it? I viewed the wire as the good news outweighing the bad news.

That is, I just thought that it was an important show dealing with important issues. But on the other hand, as you probably know, I wrote an article for the newspaper in England trying to show the real Baltimore as compared to what people saw on the wire. Bottom line for me is that I tried to persuade people that viewing all of Baltimore by what they saw on the wire was like considering the civic life of New Jersey by just looking at the Sopranos. And, you know, so you can think about a show as good art, but it doesn't necessarily reflect the reality of an entire community. Speaking of kind of the pros and cons of the show, some people appreciate the show because they felt that it did try to explore some of the systemic issues that cities experience in terms of the way that racism plays a role, both in policing and in access to opportunity.

But some people feel like there's just, it just got, you know, overwhelmed with just the usual show business qualities of the violence, the charismatic characters. Did you feel that it told a truth that was worth hearing, even if everybody didn't necessarily see it? Yeah, I thought the show was effective in showing that the drug issue was a cancer on the community and it was spreading throughout the community and not just in certain neighborhoods. Because the show also talked about the impact on the docks in various communities throughout the city. So I thought it was effective in that fashion, ensuring that the war on drugs was just having a bad impact in many different segments of Baltimore, where, of course, the negative side was that some people came away thinking that the entire

city of Baltimore was crime-ridden, drug-infested, and deteriorating, and that was just not the case. What about now? Even when The Wire first aired, it was a period piece. I mean, for example, some of the public housing projects that were depicted had been torn down a long time ago and had to be recreated through CGI, for example. But what about now? I mean, do you think that some of the themes that were explored in The Wire, are they still relevant? You know, I think we still have a very serious problem in the country as it relates to substance abuse, but there are certainly more elected officials throughout the country, including our state, that are talking about drugs as a public health problem rather than a criminal justice problem. There seems to be more of a recognition now that we can't arrest and prosecute our way out of this problem. It may be because some of the issues with OxyContin and some other drugs

have shown that addiction is a problem in the upper middle class as well as some of the poor communities. But I do think that the issue of substance abuse is still an important one to address. And The Wire, I think, helped move along the conversation about how confounding and complex the issue is. Kurt Schmoke is the president of the University of Baltimore. From 1987 to 1999, he was mayor of Baltimore and has served many other roles in public life. Coming up, what The Wire got right, what it got wrong, and if you've never watched the show, why you might want

to reconsider. I mean, when you think about The Wire, it's actually an anti-police show. It's like the opposite of most cop shows that you see

on TV these days. Eric Deggans is NPR's television critic and media analyst, and he will tell you straight up, he is a fan of The Wire. I spoke with him recently and with Rhonda Riche Penrice. I'm the editor of Cracking the Wire during Black Lives Matter. She's an historian and cultural critic who assembled and edited a collection of essays by Black writers about The Wire. I started our conversation by asking Eric Deggans, what makes The Wire different from your basic police procedural? And he said the show succeeds because it's about systemic failure. The Wire is about ultimately about how all these institutions failed the city of Baltimore, starting with policing and politics

and labor and education, and then finally the media. And one of the ways that it gets at that is to just display the futility of the war on drugs and how the war on drugs basically became a war on black and brown people and poor people, particularly in the city of Baltimore. And so, you know, your typical cop show will show a virtuous cop who's good at his or her job, challenging a dysfunctional system and winning, you know, finding justice in the face of, you know, bureaucratic problems or a few bad cops or whatever. But The Wire demonstrates a system that is wholly dysfunctional that virtuous cops who are good at their job cannot overcome. And eventually the system wins out most of the time.

They may have small victories here and there. And then the other thing The Wire does is it humanizes the types of characters that are normally overlooked or stereotyped on cop shows. So people who are dealing drugs, people who are using drugs, the poor, you know, law-abiding people who are kind of stuck in neighborhoods that have problems with the drug trade, you know, working-class folks, they're all given a very layered and complex and really compelling life on the wire in ways that a lot of other cop shows don't do. Rhonda, you conceived of the project Cracking the Wire During Black Lives Matter, and you edited the collection of essays, which resulted, you know, one of the things about your collection of essays is it does kind of explore the both-and, if I could put it that way. Does that sound right? I mean, it's like, yes, on the one hand, this is, some of these

stories were hard to watch, right? On the other hand, a lot of these stories were true or had truth to them. So talk a little bit, if you would, about some of the things that your book explored. Well, one of the things that I had to include, I have a section on Baltimore versus the wire, because a lot of times when I would meet people from Baltimore, they did not like the wire. So they were like, the wire is not Baltimore and so forth. So I have three contributors who grew up in Baltimore, lived there for a long time to offer their perspectives. One of the persons, Julia Chance, calls herself a wirecologist and is just gung-ho the wire, but also acknowledobic ideas and was transformed by the representation that Michael K. Williams brought to Omar. There's a young man who looks at the presentation of

the journalism aspect of The Wire and addresses some of the the oversights there in regards to race and representation especially when you're talking about reporting in a city that's predominantly black. I would love to dig in a bit more about the racial politics of the show I mean the people it's uh season two is the exception but mostly the series centers on the african-american community that is uh infused with or that lives against the backdrop of let me put it this way the culture of drugs and crime it's both both a reality and a stereotype and it's something that i think i think ron is certainly your your essays of essays struggles with, and I think people watching the show may have struggled with. So, Eric, do you want to... And also, the principles behind the

show, the big names behind the show, you know, David Simon and Ed Burns, George Pelicanos, one of the show's original writers, all white, And yet, so, I don't know. Eric, how does that land with you? Well, you know, I think it's certainly fair to look at the show's production team and writing team and say that, you know, most of them were white people. Now, you know, I've asked David about this over the years, and he said he got one Black writer, David Mills, to contribute a script and wanted him to join the writing team. But David was developing his own series ideas. David said that he tried to reach out to a few other Black novelists to see if they might be

interested in joining the show. But they had their own things going. So that's certainly a criticism that people could levy. But I feel like the characters, the Black characters on The Wire are all humanized. You know, West Baltimore is predominantly Black, is very poor, it struggles with the drug trade and problems connected to it. And that's kind of the reality of it. So, you know, I can understand that that vision might make people feel uncomfortable. But I also don't want us to be in the habit of sort of turning away from depictions of these neighborhoods just because they make us uncomfortable. the war on drugs is that it shows how it turned the cops into this, you know, occupying force that brutalized those neighborhoods. And so you have to, you know, if you want that message to come across, you have to spend time in those neighborhoods and get to know those people. I know Eric is the critic here, and he'll just tell you straight up if he likes something or doesn't like something. He clearly likes The Wire.

Now, Rhonda, do you mind if I ask you, did you like it? Oh, yeah. I mean, I watched The Wire in real time, and I watched it often multiple times a week. But even though you like something doesn't mean that there aren't problems with it, especially when you go back in hindsight. Like in the essay that I contributed, I talked about the characterizations, particularly of straight Black women. They're just things that I am bothered by. But can you flesh that out a little bit more? Like what, that they're either what, like victims or just hard-hearted Hannah's kind of thing? What's your, flesh it out a little bit. Well, there was no

greater window for them. Whereas like, for example, when you look at characterizations of Avon and Stringer Bell or even Wee Bay, there's like this broader range of agency given to them. Whereas a lot of times the women were just like stand-ins, there were no true backstories in a lot of instances to, you know, their position in this world and, you know, why they may be there or what, you know, their like thoughts around this community, these circumstances are. So, you know, and I mean, that's not a particular knot just against, you know, the wire. True, true. It's not like, yeah, please insert name of story here.

Insert name of show here where Black women, like, have no agency and are over-sexualized or, you know what I mean? You know what I mean? I mean, well. And, you know, I would interject and say I completely agree. I think if there's a knock on the wire, it's not so much about race as it is about it hasn't necessarily served its female characters as well as it could. So before I let each of you go, I mean, you've given us a lot to think about. And I know that it's sort of an antiquated practice like TV Guide isn't something that like lives on all of our coffee tables the way it used to. I'm dating myself now. But if you were to write the entry for The Wire now, given everything we know about all that has happened since, everything that we have now started to talk about openly about the so-called

war on drugs about policing the way policing is practiced in the wake of freddie gray in the wake of george floyd like how would you write that entry like what would you say if somebody were to ask you you know should i watch this what would you say i i guess i what i would say is it's a pioneering police drama that reveals the excesses of policing, the failure of the war on drugs, and the failure of major institutions in the city of Baltimore. Okay. Rhonda, what would yours say? say it's an unprecedented look at the humanity of Black people who are often on the margins of society and that you can see some of the greatest, most a relatability that's just hard to turn away from. That was NPR television critic Eric Deggans. We also heard from Rhonda Riche Penrice. She's the editor of Cracking the Wire during Black Lives Matter and the author of African American History for Dummies. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Michelle Martin.