The Wire, 10 years on: ‘We tore the cover off a city and showed the American dream was dead’

When, in 2001, the actor Frankie Faison accepted the role of deputy commissioner Ervin Burrell in a new HBO drama called The Wire, he thought he was signing up for a cop show. “I was expecting it to be more about wiretapping,” he remembers with amusement. “It evolved into something much more fascinating.”

HBO laboured under a similar misapprehension because The Wire’s creator, David Simon, had pitched the show to them as an unusually thoughtful police procedural, not an anatomy lesson in US dysfunction that he really had in mind. “I sold it as a cop show, but they don’t know it’s not really a cop show,” he told the novelist George Pelecanos when he invited him to join the writing team. In fact, he said, it was something audaciously new: “A novel for television.”

Exactly 10 years after its final episode aired, The Wire is established as one of the greatest shows in the history of US television – some would say the greatest. But, while shows such as The Sopranos and Mad Men launched with loud fanfares and walked paths strewn with accolades, strong ratings and Emmy awards, The Wire’s route to the pantheon was a long slog. “David Simon had to fight for every season,” says Clarke Peters (Det Lester Freamon). “Nothing was ever guaranteed.”

Source: theguardian