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“I think it’s unquestionable the impact that the show has had not only on my career but many of the principal cast. Who’s the tough female cop, person of colour?
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I think she is a character I started seeing a lot more in cop shows. In a phone interview, Sohn recalls: “I can’t say that I thought she was going to be iconic in any way, but I do think she has become so.
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There was the hard-drinking maverick cop Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West), the world-weary detective Lester Freamon (Clarke Peters), the aspirational, smooth gangster Stringer Bell (Idris Elba), the quietly heroic recovering addict Bubbles (Andre Royo) and the enigmatic, gay Robin Hood figure Omar Little (Michael K Williams), whose distinctions include a facial scar, quaint turn of phrase and being Obama’s favourite character.Īnd in police detective Kima Greggs (Sonja Sohn), we had American TV drama’s first major portrayal of a black lesbian. The standard we were looking at was Balzac’s Paris or Dickens’s London, or Tolstoy’s Moscow.”īefitting a novel, the characters were richly realised archetypes that leapt off the screen. Simon has memorably said: “Our model when we started wasn’t other television shows. The Wire was intricately, unforgivingly plotted, capturing the prosaic nature of police procedural work, the brutal dynastic politics of drug kingpins and the corruption and grubby compromises of civic life. Baltimore was just a metaphor it depicted post-industrial America.” “I think it was voted one of the best pieces of television of the 00s and, as a document, it will be remembered. “I think it’s magnificent television,” Kwei-Armah says. Recently he met its creator, David Simon. When British actor, director and writer Kwame Kwei-Armah moved to Baltimore in 2011 to head the Center Stage theatre, he had not seen The Wire so he caught up via iTunes. In 2015 Jonathan Bernstein wrote in the Guardian: “The temple of the US one-hour TV drama has four pillars: The Sopranos, The Wire, Mad Men and Breaking Bad, novelistic shows that indicted America for its failures but refused to condemn their complex, emotionally crippled leading men.” It stands undiminished in the cultural pantheon. The Wire never won an Emmy award or gained a mainstream audience its acclaim rests largely with critics and fans, including Barack Obama, who named it his favourite show. Its hard-boiled realism included a scene of four minutes and 40 seconds in which the dialogue between two detectives consists entirely of 31 “fucks”, four “motherfuckers” and one “fucking-A”.īodie and D’Angelo Barksdale (right and second right) in season one of The Wire. It was a study of the havoc wrought by the drug war on trust between black communities and police.
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From June 2002 to March 2008, the epic HBO series mapped the city’s geography, society and soul, charting the never-ending street battle between cops and drug lords.
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This was the world of The Wire and it is still very much intact. We’d like to think art can move the world but this problem is so intractable on so many levels it’s going to be with us for a long time.” You’ve got 18-year-old kids killing each other. Michael Olesker, an author and former Baltimore Sun columnist, says: “It’s turf wars. In 2017 so far (up to 10 May), there have been 124 murders, outstripping Chicago and putting Baltimore on course for its bloodiest year ever. In 2015, the death of an African American man in police custody triggered widespread unrest, while the total murder rate of 344 was the highest per capita in the city’s history. While some parts of Baltimore are thriving, others have gone into reverse. Even the name D’Angelo strikes a chord as the name of a principal character in the first season.īut as the disappointment over school places illustrates, progress is painfully uneven. A couple of houses near Preston’s were used during filming. A nearby design college is still recognisable as where the “corner kids” hung out. The Montessori school building was previously home to a beleaguered government school and starred in the fourth and arguably finest season of the show. This is Greenmount West, a community striving to put distance between itself and its portrayal in one of television’s most indelible dramas: The Wire.