DiversityThe Wire

End of The Wire; best written show on TV, real diversity

By March 13, 2008 No Comments

I watched the last episode of  The Wire on Sunday night, and have been grieving since. If you have ever seen The Wire and became a Wire fan, you know what I mean and how obsessed you can become. I have spent hours on the phone and in person with friends and even customer service people at HBO reviewing every episode, and  talking about the characters as though they were real and I knew them. That’s what it felt like to me. My favorite character was Omar, who probably was one of the people on the show who did not break his own rules, and lived by a code of ethics. I couldn’t watch the episode where he was killed. It was as if I lost someone dear to me. It was also the kind  of show where you had  to see all five seasons to understand the whole system and it is a system.

This was one of the few shows about the drug trade that did not portray everyone as one or two dimensional. It showed the complexity of everyone involved, the police, the dealers, the dock workers, schools, media and politicians. The Wire was definitely not the show for binary, dogmatic thinkers.
The writing and acting was exceptional, and it was a show that truly reflected all dimensions of diversity; the visible and invisible. 
I highly doubt we’ll ever see The Wire as a movie but it will always stay in my head as I continue to analyze each episode and maybe even watch the series again. I wonder what or if there will be the next great show.