“We’re building something here . . . and all the pieces matter.” Detective Lester Freamon

From The Wire: Truth Be Told, edited by Rafael Alvarez and published by Canongate

Swear to God, it was never a cop show. And though there were cops and gangsters aplenty, it was never entirely appropriate to classify it as a crime story, though the spine of every season was certain to be a police investigation in Baltimore, Maryland.

But to say so nearly a decade ago, back when The Wire first premiered on HBO, would have been to invite certain ridicule. It would have sounded comically pretentious to suggest, as much as Lester Freamon, that we were building something and that all the pieces would ultimately matter.

As a medium for serious storytelling, television has precious little to recommend it – or at least that has been the case for most of its history. What else can we expect from a framework in which the most pregnant moment in the story has for decades been the commercial break, that five-times-an-hour pause when writers, actors and directors are required to juke the story enough so that a trip to the refrigerator or bathroom does not mean a walk away from the television set, or, worse yet, a click on the remote to another channel.

In such a construct, where does a storyteller put any serious ambition? Where are the tales to reside safely and securely, but in the simplest paradigms of good against evil, of heroes and villains and simplified characterization? Where but in plotlines that remain accessible to the most ignorant or indifferent viewers. Where but in the half-assed, don’t-rattle-their-cages uselessness of self-affirming, self-assuring narratives that comfort the American comfortable, and ignore the American afflicted; the better to sell Ford trucks and fast food, beer, athletic shoes, iPods, and feminine hygiene products.

Consider that for generations now the cathode-ray glow of our national campfire, the televised reflection of the American experience – and by extension, that of the Western free-market democracies – has come down to us from on high. Westerns and police procedures and legal dramas, soap operas and situation comedies – all of it conceived in Los Angeles and New York by industry professionals, then shaped by huge corporate entities to calm and soothe as many viewers as possible, priming them with the idea that their future is better and brighter than it actually is, that the time was never more right to buy and consume more and more.

Until recently, all of television has been about selling. Not selling story, of course, but selling the intermissions to that story. And therefore little programming that might interfere with the mission of reassuring viewers as to their God-given status as indebted consumers has ever been broadcast – and certainly nothing in the form of a continuing series. For half a century, network television wrapped its programs around the advertising – not the other way around, as it may have seemed to some.

This is not to deny that HBO is a profitable piece of Time Warner. The Wire’s 35mm misadventure in Baltimore – for any of its claims to iconoclasm – is nonetheless sponsored by a media conglomerate with an absolute interest in selling to consumers. And yet, on that conglomerate’s premium cable cannel, the only product being sold is the programming itself. In that distinction, there is all the difference.

Beginning with Oz and culminating in The Sopranos, the best work on HBO expresses nothing less than the vision of individual writers, as expressed through the talents of directors, actors and film crews. For a rare window in the history of television, nothing much got in the way of that. Story was all.

If you laughed, you laughed. If you cried, you cried. And if you thought – and there is actually no prohibition on such merely because you had a TV remote in your hand – then you thought. And if you decided, at any point – as many an early viewer of The Wire did – to change the channel, then so be it. But on HBO, nothing other than the stories themselves was for sale and therefore – absent the Ford trucks and dish soap – there is nothing to mitigate against a sad story, an angry story, a subversive story, a disturbing story.

The first thing we had to do was teach folks to watch television in a different way, to slow themselves down and pay attention, to immerse themselves in a way that the medium had long ago ceased to demand.

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