Despite urging from critics all over the country, from magazines as prestigious as the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, and the Columbia Journalism Review, people still refuse to watch The Wire. At least it would appear this way from a Baltimore Sun article published Jan. 10, which noted that the Jan. 6 premiere of The Wire’s fifth and final season drew only 1.2 million viewers, the lowest rating of any of its previous season openers.
But low ratings and flagging popular support are nothing new for The Wire, an HBO original series that usually draws less than half the audience The Sopranos did. In its five years on HBO, the Baltimore crime drama has fought continuously for survival, staying alive on scraps doled out by the critics and barely getting renewed for a fourth season.
This lack of mainstream recognition doesn’t bother Dominic West, one of the show’s stars—on the contrary, he relishes it. In an interview with Newsweek, West said, “You get a lot of cachet from being the underdog. ...And I rather enjoy that feeling—that you’re a cult thing, a secret delight.”
For its first three seasons, The Wire certainly was a “cult thing,” but the fourth season was what one might call a breakthrough season. With the arrival of the fourth season came the arrival of the show as a pop phenomenon, with magazine stories, “Best Show on Television” talk, and even Facebook groups. A year ago, when I was writing a review of the third season, I did a Facebook search for The Wire, looking for fans to interview. The search returned only 50 Columbia students. For this article, I did the same search and it returned roughly 500 Columbia Wire fans. These additional 450 fans are mostly recent converts—i.e., fans of the fourth season.
Many of these new fans were drawn in by the fourth season’s critical buzz, but didn’t actually watch the season as it unfolded. Erik Holsten, CC ’10, only started watching The Wire last summer, when he finally caved to the urging of friends and television critics. “I powered through the first four seasons on DVD,” Holsten said. “I certainly plan on following this season very closely, mostly because it will be so hard to part with these characters.”
A large number of The Wire’s viewers watch the show on DVD or HBO On Demand, or download it from the Internet. For this reason, the poor ratings of season five’s opener are misleading. In fact, the show’s audience has probably grown a lot since the beginning of season four, mostly through download and DVD.
Though The Wire’s “crossing over” from cult hit to pop darling can be attributed to any number of factors, the strength of season four must be one of them. It focused on Baltimore’s crumbling educational system, taking the viewer into the lives of young “corner boys” Namond Brice (Julito McCullum), Michael Lee (Tristan Wilds), Randy Wagstaff (Maestro Harrell), and Duquan Weems (Jermaine Crawford). Each one of these kids performed as well as or better than any of the adult actors, a feat made all the more difficult by The Wire’s remarkably solid cast. The classroom scenes were riveting, with newbie teacher and former cop Mr. Pryzbylewski (Jim True-Frost) breaking up knife fights while learning how to teach.
The Wire is often praised for its realism. Certainly, the fourth season delivered in this regard. Paco Martin Del Campo, CC ’11, started watching during the fourth season and noticed many parallels between the show’s fictional Baltimore middle school and the real Oakland elementary school in which he was a tutor. “I knew and worked with a bunch of Michaels, Duquans, and Namonds,” he said.
Those who loved the fourth season’s gritty realism may be put off by the fifth season’s white-collar focus. Season five zeroes in on the news media industry, looking at the role the media plays in a city. This season swaps the politics of the urban classroom for the politics of the newsroom, with plagiarism and corporate buyouts replacing knife fights and bathroom rapes.
Of course, the crises facing the news media do have dramatic potential. John Fritze, a Baltimore Sun reporter covering the City Hall beat, is excited about season five. “Less inherent drama in news-reporting than in teaching?” Fritze asked. “I don’t know. I think what I do is pretty interesting. ...When I heard he was doing schools, I thought, ‘How are you going to turn that into something and really say something about it?’ But he really did ...I tend to think this season will be as interesting from a drama point of view as any other.”
More than any other, this season can deliver a complicated and intellectual climax. Until now, the average viewer was merely a voyeur, glimpsing the failed infrastructure of the American city. But now the viewer is actually being engaged—if he reads newspapers, he is a part of the system that the show analyzes. This season could tie it all together.
And even if it doesn’t, it’s still another season of The Wire, and therefore better than anything else on TV.