All the Pieces Matter

by Jonathan Abrams

  It’s sad to think about. He’s Mr. I Want to Sell Candy, Because I Don’t Want to Sell Drugs. But if he would have just been doing that, he would have maybe gotten arrested, but past that, I don’t think he would have ended up in that situation or if he would have started off in that situation, he would have just stayed in that situation, and then he would have been better adapted for it later. It would have been more of a “Yeah, I’m an orphan. Nobody puts up with me because I’m an asshole and I do x, y, z.” And then he would have turned eighteen, but he would have been prepared for it. Randy was really a good kid, bad situation. Since that’s the case, when he got into trouble, he wasn’t poised to deal with it.

  ED BURNS (CO-CREATOR): You can rescue a child, but you can’t rescue the children, and that’s the difference. Opportunity is a much better word than hope. If a child sees the opportunity and you can direct the child toward the opportunity, then the kid’s okay. Hope is like a dream. That’s what I used to say to my kids. “Don’t believe in hope. Believe in yourself. You got to put the energy in to get the energy out.” Hope is just like something that the fairy godmother’s going to come down and sprinkle on you. That’s not the way it is for these kids. You got to work for it, then it’ll come to you, because you open yourself up.

  MAESTRO HARRELL (RANDY WAGSTAFF): That’s life. I think that’s really what it is. I know this might sound really bleak, but that’s the way I kind of view life. Think of it this way: When we’re kids, all we do is run around and play and smile all day. That’s all we do. Then life happens, and you start thinking that way. Shit’s just not that sweet. That’s really what it is, life constantly breaking [Randy] down, breaking him down, breaking him down. He’s a light bulb that’s shining a hundred watts. You can’t keep doing that if your circumstances aren’t getting better and there’s no one there for you and there’s no support system. Let’s be real. We all know how awful the entire system is for orphans and kids without parents. It’s not a fixed, great system, and especially not in West Baltimore. I think that’s also an issue we have societally, which we’re not here to talk about, but still it’s like, what do you expect these kids to go do? Do you expect the kids from West Baltimore to just be like, “Oh yeah, no, no. I’m just going to apply to college and then go pay for it?”

  I’m from Chicago, so it’s the same thing on the South Side. It’s like, are you serious? You really want to hold these kids to the same standard as some kids who grew up in Chicago on the North? No, you can’t. They don’t have the same experience. They don’t have the same life. They have no support system. Most of these people don’t know their father, and if they do know their mothers, let’s hope they’re clean. It’s just a cycle, and that’s the sad part about it. That’s why I was so happy about what this show portrayed. Even look at Michael. He was taking care of his little brother. What was he supposed to do? Was he supposed to stay in school? That’s not a real thing for him. He goes to school, and his little brother doesn’t eat, and then they both come home sitting on their hands like, “Oh, well. This sucks and mom’s on drugs.” No, you’ve got to do something. It’s sad, but that’s the cycle.

  The evolving ways that viewers were able to watch television revealed a sliver of The Wire’s future popularity. In 2004, HBO began releasing DVDs of the seasons, allowing the audience to absorb the show at their own pace. In the fourth season, the network allowed HBO subscribers access to episodes nearly a week before their airing, via On Demand. Also, HBO unfurled Season 4 in its entirety to critics months before its premiere, hoping to create elusive buzz and positive reviews. The ploy worked, with Stephen King among the legion of writers who showered glowing praise. Chris Albrecht announced his commitment to a final season shortly after Season 4’s premiere. The early release also ignited a black market. The show became introduced to a fan base that typically could not or would not have subscribed to HBO.

  NEAL HUFF (CHIEF OF STAFF MICHAEL STEINTORF): The thing that happened that was so fascinating, that really altered the whole course of television history, is they were fighting for their lives for Season Four. They released the entire season to the press, which was a new thing to do. So, all of a sudden, they were getting Tony Kushner and Stephen King, these op-ed pieces about the greatest thing that’s ever been on television. It also goes viral in the black market. So, it’s already a huge, huge hit, and it just kind of created this conversation about the totality of the show before Season Four even aired.

  KAREN THORSON (PRODUCER): In my travels back and forth to Baltimore, I would often look at dailies on the train. At this point, we’re in the DVD world now. We went from VHS to DVD through the course of the show, and we remained film the whole time and we never went to widescreen. I would watch the dailies on the train, and by the last season, people would look over my shoulder and say, “Hey, are you watching The Wire?” I couldn’t watch my dailies anymore.

  DAVID SIMON (CREATOR): I did believe that if we finished it, it would be on the shelf. There were these things called DVDs, and I could now see them coming out. People would watch these shows on DVDs. It’ll exist. They will find it. I did think that if we finished, people will find what we did and it would have merit, and that’s how we’ll be judged. I was trying to buck [Andre Royo] up. Andre was one of those guys whose heart broke after the Emmys came out. I was like, “That’s not why we do the work. Think about why we do the work.” He’d say, “Yeah, yeah, yeah, man. But this is my career. Without people noticing the work that we do, we die. It’s all about the next role and the next role.” He was right, too. It’s easy for me to say, “Fuck the Emmys.” It’s a lot harder for a working actor to say that. I rooted for him, but I couldn’t take it seriously.

  RICHARD PRICE (WRITER): My personal story with the series DVD is that my girls were young-side teenagers when I started writing The Wire. It wasn’t until after Season Three when the DVDs came out. All of a sudden, everybody can watch this maddeningly complex show. They can shoot up twelve episodes, and so the thing exploded. People discovered it on DVD because they could mainline it. All of a sudden, overnight, my girls are coming back from their schools, they’re saying, “Dad, did you know you’re really cool?” I say, “What?” At that point, I did three or four episodes of The Wire compared to—I have movies, eight novels. All of a sudden it’s like, “My dad’s a writer.” That’s the power of television. For everybody who reads a book, one hundred people go to the movies; for every one hundred people that go to the movies, ten thousand watch a TV show. It’s a numbers game.

  DOMINIC WEST (DET. JIMMY MCNULTY): I went into the local store, and this woman said, “Hey, you’re on The Wire.” And I went, Oh, wow, how do you like that? Then, a few days later, I was driving in London, and some guy probably cut me off or something. It was a hot, sunny day and I was in a bad mood, so I started shouting at him, or he shouted at me. Anyway, I was saying, “Fuck him,” and swearing at him, and he suddenly stopped and he went, “Hey, you’re McNulty.” That was the first time anyone had recognized me for anything, certainly for calling me by my character name, but it was quite embarrassing because I wasn’t behaving. I was swearing and cursing and angry, but that was really the first time I realized that there were lots of people watching it.

  NEAL HUFF (CHIEF OF STAFF MICHAEL STEINTORF): I do think there was a racial component to why so many people did not watch the show when it was on. I think people saw a lot of black faces and [said], “That’s kind of not my story.” And it wasn’t until it had been lauded to the point it was that people kind of came around to it. I remember being surprised when it was on that still people really weren’t on board with it. They didn’t know. They’re like, “That’s that really intense show. I can’t watch something like that. I can’t watch something about that type of crime on a Sunday night. I’m going back to work.”

  I was really disappointed in a lot of my friends. A lot of my friends in the business, to be honest with you, were completely unwillin
g to watch that show. It really took that whole thing with all the press that came after Four and Five that people came around to it. Friends were calling about having seen me on the show years afterward, which I do think is an interesting thing.

  WENDELL PIERCE (DET. WILLIAM “BUNK” MORELAND): I remember I had a moment where I thought I was going to leave the show. It was after the fourth season, which I think was one of the most masterful seasons, because it really dealt with politics and the school system, the dysfunctional school system and where we actually lose our youth, displayed so perfectly. I met [Charmaine McPhee]. She said, “Hi, Mr. Pierce, I’m going to Brown. I’m sorry I didn’t have any scenes with you, but I’d really like to work on some projects together soon. I look a little younger than I am, but I’m graduating this year and I’m looking forward to going to college and all.”

  I was just so impressed by this young lady, I’m like, “And you’re on the show?” She said, “Yeah.” “What character are you playing?” She told me “Laetitia.” And I said, “That’s the girl that slashes the girl’s face, right? You’re just totally out of control. There’s no order to her life. We’ve lost her. Her conflict resolution is a razor to the face.” And I said, “You played that?” “Yeah.” I said, “Well, why aren’t we telling your story?” This impressive young lady from Baltimore, or wherever she’s from, going to school. “I’m sure you had challenges. Why aren’t we telling that story? Shit, we’re a part of the problem. We’re a part of the problem. If we’re going to take this time to tell a story that involves kids in our community, and these are the stories that we choose to tell and not her story, well, we have a problem.”

  I told myself, I’m a part of the problem now. Then the season came on, and by the end of the season, I realized that everything was not arbitrary, that there was a reason we depicted the dysfunction, to show how easy it is we can let our kids fall through the cracks and how you wail and cry for Dukie and Randy. And Randy’s being beat up in the home, and Namond finally breaks the glass of dysfunction and finds a mother and father with Bunny. And then to see Michael, the most brilliant and most talented of them, turn into, ultimately, a murderer. We forget they’re kids, and here we’re challenging them to make good choices as if they’re the adults, with no adults around them to lead them in the right direction to make sure that they’re Namond, and he gets out, and you don’t end up Dukie or Michael, or fall victim once again like Randy, when we’re just trying to get another witness to take down another murder case and he falls victim with no protection. How can we make more Namonds? How can we save more kids? Look how we’ve lost these.

  You never see a bunch of kids that you assume are just wilding out and never give them—hopefully, after looking at that fourth season—give them the benefit of the doubt that they need people in their lives who have their best interests at heart. If they don’t have it at home, we have to give it to them somewhere. When we interface with kids, whether it’s school, whether it’s church, whether it’s the playground, we have to make sure that they’re getting every chance they can to have people who have their best interests at heart, to give them the best chance to make choices that will send them down the right road. Give them opportunity. I was in tears at the end of the fourth season. When I saw that, I said, “I can go back now.” Fortunately enough, we would shoot and then it would come on the air. Because I had finished the fourth season when I met the young lady.

  DAVID SIMON (CREATOR): I heard about that after the fact. He apparently didn’t bring that to me. He resolved it in his own head or carried it as long as he could and somehow outlived it. I don’t remember having to talk him back into the fold, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. Not everybody went to the boss man with their angst.

  WENDELL PIERCE (DET. WILLIAM “BUNK” MORELAND): My concerns were never, “Hey David, I’ve got to sit down and talk to you.” He’s right about that. I never brought my concerns to him. That was something that I harbored within me. Then the work showed itself to me. He may have heard a little bitching and complaining on the set from actors, like, “Why am I doing this?”

  The only concerns I ever brought to David was, “Hey, man, trust the actors a little bit more.” He doesn’t like showing you the scripts ahead of time. Like, if you let them know what the arc is, there’s some denouement that’s going to happen in the barbershop, where you finally catch somebody. If you know that’s happening in Episode Eight, in Episode Three, he thinks actors might go, “You know, something, I think I’m going to get myself a haircut at the barbershop. I hope everything works out.”

  He believed actors might tip their hand. I can embrace that to say, “Hey, I don’t know what tomorrow brings, so if I’m living too fully in the character, I’m in the moment, so I don’t need to know until I know.” At the same time, the two can coexist. Actors know where the edge of the stage is on Broadway. They don’t just walk off the stage. They live in that world conscious of the restraints of the physical world, of the stage being about two feet from the edge of it, and if you walk over there, your black ass is going to fall into the orchestra pit. They never wanted us to watch playbacks or anything like that. We’re not that vain. Okay, maybe we are, but still. He trusts that to the directors to make sure we know where the edge of the stage is and he wants us to just be in the moment of the play.

  CLARKE PETERS (DET. LESTER FREAMON): It was more like Four when it started to feel like more than just a show. That’s when I think we all began to realize that we had been hired to be actors on a mission. The mission was to educate the public to connect the dots, between local government, the economic situation that a city might find itself in, what’s happening with your children in school, and while you might be frustrated about that, the drug situation, the so-called war on drugs, which we know is a complete farce. These are things I was totally unaware of. I wasn’t brought up here. I was brought up in Europe, so I was being educated to these issues myself, as time went on. I think that’s the mission. It’s that the American public, or American citizenry, rather than being sort of jerked around by sound bites of things, if they’re better informed, like any citizenry, then you have a better chance of surviving and moving forward as a nation, as a country. When we start looking at people who are strung out on drugs as criminals rather than victims, it changes our attitude toward all of that. How can we possibly heal anything like that if we have the wrong idea about it?

  David Simon occasionally countered critics of The Wire by saying that the show’s writers illustrated the world they themselves had experienced and inhabited. Simon knew no landscape more intimately than the media. A fictional version of The Baltimore Sun therefore served as a focal point in the fifth and final season of The Wire. The season arrived with some moments both condensed and hurried—for good reason. Following Season 4, Simon had, again, barely stiff-armed cancellation by HBO. He agreed to a shortened, ten-episode arc and completed the season without some of his creative confidants. Ed Burns had begun working on Generation Kill, an HBO miniseries about the U.S. Marine Corps during the invasion of Iraq that Simon also turned his attention to following The Wire, and George Pelecanos had reverted to his day job of authoring first-class novels.

  In the newsroom storyline, Dominic West’s Jimmy McNulty concocts a fake serial killer of homeless men to create the budget for meaningful police work and the investigation into Marlo Stanfield’s syndicate, which McNulty eventually breaks up at the cost of his career. The Baltimore Sun has been purchased by out-of-towners, and a shrinking newsroom and dwindling resources decimate the paper. Scott Templeton (Tom McCarthy), an ambitious and morally challenged reporter, claims to be contacted by McNulty’s fake killer. Gus Haynes (Clark Johnson), an editor who becomes suspicious of Templeton, is cast aside by top editors who are eager to bring prestige to the paper through journalism prizes. The show’s final montage features Templeton accepting a Pulitzer Prize. Honest attempts at journalism bookend Templeton’s trans
gressions. Haynes links the workings of Councilwoman Nerese Campbell (Marlyne Barrett) to a drug dealer, and Mike Fletcher (Brandon Young), a young journalist, works hard to write a feature story that accurately reflects Bubbles’s (Andre Royo) struggle for sobriety. With more episodes, Simon said the series would have explored the impact of absent fathers—Cheese Wagstaff, portrayed by Method Man, is the father of Season 4’s Randy, played by Maestro Harrell, a nugget that the series did not have breadth to explore—and rounded out Templeton’s character. “We’d have done a little more with Prez and the decline of Dukie, who’s [Prez’s] favorite,” Simon added. “There would have been a little more anguish on the part of the reporter, Templeton’s parts, in terms of the sins he was committing against journalism. He was a little bit more on the fence, have him do some worthy work somewhere that doesn’t get quite noticed, but it’s honest. So, it teaches two lessons, one of which is that the grunt work of real good journalism sometimes is not the straight path to glory. But you would have known he did good work somewhere, and that would have helped.”

  Some critics argued that Simon pushed a vendetta through the course of the newsroom thread. In interviews, Simon spoke negatively of two former top Baltimore Sun editors, William Marimow—the show even gave his surname to a lousy, unsympathetic lieutenant—and John Carroll. For Slate, Simon wrote that the pair “are notable journalists with impressive résumés. But in Baltimore, in their hunger for prizes, they tolerated and defended a reporter who was making it up wholesale.” David Zurawik, a television critic for The Baltimore Sun who had authored glowing and appreciative reviews of The Wire’s prior seasons, eviscerated the newsroom storyline. “In my preview of the season,” Zurawik wrote, “I termed the newsroom scenes the ‘Achilles’ heel’ of the series. Worse, they became a cancer that grew deeper and deeper into other parts of the drama as the season wore on.”