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Wire News

From The Wire

Please add news in reverse chronological order by published date (where available), with the most recent links at the top

  • The New Yorker profiles David Simon (Oct. 22, 2007)--very detailed article includes background on Simon and other cast members, with indications of what to expect in season 5.


  • Dominic West's Diary (Oct. 20, 2007): The Guardian asked several celebrities to keep a temporary diary of their days, and published the results. Scroll down a bit to see find West/McNulty writing about his life during the very last days of shooting The Wire.





Curious, that, since a few links below, the article on Aidan Gillen (Carcetti) says that he's performing in Glengarry Glen Ross in London's West End. Gillen is portraying Richard Roma in the play (the role filled by Al Pacino in the filmed version), while Doman is playing the role of Dave Moss (Ed Harris in the movie).






  • iFMAGAZINE.COM rants about The Wire (Sept. 17, 2007), complaining that "the best damn show on TV", didn't even get nominated for a single Emmy.
  • Cleveland Plain Dealer TV critic says that since the best shows on TV this year (naming The Wire foremost) haven't been nominated for any Emmys, The Sopranos should win (Sept. 15, 2007)
  • Black Voices Blogs gives the top 11 reasons that The Wire should win the Emmy for Best Drama (Sept. 13, 2007)







  • From Two Broken Lives to One New Beginning (Aug. 9, 2007): Donnie Andrews, a primary inspiration for the character of Omar Little (and who has a small role in season 4 as one of the two guys who helps Omar out in jail), has his criminal past and later redemption covered in this article, as well as his recent marriage to Fran Boyd, on whom the central character of The Corner was based.


Q: Do you think the HBO series The Wire gives an accurate portrayal of gang life? It is clear from the show (if it is as real as it seems) that traditional policing strategies are very ineffective.
A: I am a huge fan of The Wire. I actually watched Season Two with a group of high ranking gang leaders/drug dealers in Chicago, who desperately wished that the series producers would make a separate show about Chicago! Everyone in the room agreed that the writers did well to show the nuances in the underground economy.



  • Real life, and then some (Aug. 2, 2007): "How close does the The Wire come to capturing life as it exists in the city of Baltimore?"


Out of the nearly 300 replies her entry generated, roughly a third are from women saying they love the show and the blogger is a sexist idiot, another third are from men saying the same thing, and a third are from people saying they'd never heard of the show but it did an excellent job of drawing out the blogger's prejudices. Many of the replies are worth a look, describing the merits of the show (and the people who watch it) with considerably more sophistication and insight than the article itself, and doing an impressive job of keeping the blogger way down in the hole.




  • HBO Presents A Night at "The Wire" Benefit for The Ella Thompson Fund (June 9, 2007): Many photos from the party and auction. Unfortunately you have to register to see the photos up close, and the site is not very informative about how anyone registers a new account. Thumbnails do show that Omar was auctioning off a signed box of Honey Nut Cheerios, as one part of his auction package--apparently each cast member put together an individualized package of stuff (personal items, signed pictures or DVD sets, props or costumes from the show that related to their character) which was then auctioned off. Don't you wish you'd been there?


  • Fantasy Emmy Award Nominees (June 1, 2007): A month before the actual nominees were announced, Entertainment Weekly created a list of its fantasy nominees for the various awards. Their choice for Best Drama was The Wire, about which a reader said, "If Emmy [voters] don't at least give The Wire a nomination this year, they need to be punched in their collective throat." In retrospect, knowing who the nominations and awards went to, I think we can all agree that Emmy voters need a good stab in the eye.




  • Wired for fashion (Apr. 30, 2007): The show's costume designers and wardrobe supervisors discuss the show's style.




Excerpt: "One of the things I [David Simon] am a little bit resentful for is we have a remarkable cast of African-American actors who are utterly unacknowledged by the industry. They are never nominated for anything. They are never regarded as having created any characterizations or achieved any sense of craft for what they are doing. It’s almost as if they think we turn the camera on people, and they just were being; that’s the way they are. And in fact, these are incredibly professional actors who are reading from a script."


  • Getting Wired (Feb. 10, 2007), a Guardian Unlimited overview of the show



  • The Fader interviews: Over several days in late 2006, Fader.com published short interviews with a number of cast members, called "Listening In". Unlike many interviews and articles here, these interviews mostly have content not duplicated elsewhere, and are well worth a look.
    • Listening in, Part 1 (Dec. 5, 2006): Anwan Glover (Slim Charles), Felicia Snoop Pearson
    • Listening in, Part 2 (Dec. 6, 2006): Robert Chew (Prop Joe). "I came down and auditioned for Prop Joe. I am sitting in the office with all the other actors and I’m looking around and all these guys are like super models. You know jackets and ties and hair neatly trimmed and leather shoes. I’m like, “Am I in the right audition?” I had a sweat suit on, I’m a big guy, I looked nothing like these guys. Then the next day they said I had the part. A month later I found out that Prop Joe was a real person and that he was handsome and debonair and a ladies man. That explains the other actors, how I got this part, I’ll never know."
    • Listening in, Part 3 (Dec. 7, 2006): Jay Landsman (Lt. Dennis Mello), not to be confused with Delaney Willams who plays the character of Jay Landsman on the show. Yes, it's hard to keep track. Also Rakiya Orange (Tilghman Middle student Charlene Young), and Rashad Orange (Sherrod). Landsman says, "One of the characters on the show is named Jay Landsman. When I read for the part they called me and said, You did a fine job, but you’re no Jay Landsman. Then the following year I played Lt Dennis Mello. I’ve been a cop 34 years, so I guess I might have had some experience acting like a cop."
    • Listening in, Part 4 (Dec. 8, 2006): Extended interview with David Simon. To the question, "How much do current events affect storylines?" he replies: "We use some stuff, but it’s usually two or three years old by the time we get to it. Some stuff we change. I’ll tell you this, [current Baltimore mayor] Martin O’Malley never ran against an incumbent black mayor. That didn’t happen. On the other hand, the school system did come up 50 million dollars short. On the other hand, that problem went away when the real estate boom filled the tax coffers of the city. That doesn’t happen in our version of Baltimore, we actually address, 'What if the money wasn’t there?'"




  • HBO Renews The Wire (Sept. 12, 2006): Broadcasting & Cable announces HBO's decision to push ahead with the final, fifth season of the show.


  • Setting Off a 'Wire' Alarm (Aug. 25, 2006): Stephen King's widely-read article about The Wire for Entertainment Weekly, in which he describes and praises the fourth season and the show overall




  • Hamsterdam (Dec. 20, 2004): A blogger's thoughtful piece about the conclusions drawn by the show's Hamsterdam experiment, and how it relates to real life. There are two notable flaws: one, he quotes a newspaper columnist who draws a false dichotomy of "legalize everything or legalize nothing", completely bypassing the possibility of legalizing or reducing penalties on some drugs or drug-related activities; two, toward the end he cites the success of the 'Broken Windows theory', when the show itself has commented on the fact that this theory is well known to be a failure! Cleaning up broken windows only reduces low-level crime, and has little to no effect on serious crime.
The blog author seems to feel that Broken Windows is a successful strategy for overall crime prevention, and that conversely, allowing broken windows to remain broken (by analogy to legalizing low-level drug use) will also increase serious crimes, which is incorrect; the book Freakonomics goes into detail about the research behind this idea and its failings.
It should be noted that Broken Windows does appear to have some effect when applied to low-level crimes, graffiti and related vandalism: if broken windows are fixed quickly, vandalism is repaired promptly, and low-level crimes are swiftly prosecuted, the overall level of those crimes theoretically decreases because people are less likely to commit them in the first place. There is some evidence that this theory actually works in practice; but those effects simply don't propagate upward to statistics for more serious crimes.
From Wikipedia: "...social science has not been kind to the broken windows theory. A number of scholars reanalyzed the initial studies that appeared to support it ... Others pressed forward with new, more sophisticated studies of the relationship between disorder and crime. The most prominent among them concluded that the relationship between disorder and serious crime is modest, and even that relationship is largely an artifact of more fundamental social forces." The Wikipedia article has further, equally serious criticism and reference links.




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