A beginner's guide to The Wire

There’s a sketch on the comedy website ChannelBee called You Haven’t Seen The Wire?, in which an office worker at a meeting is given very specific instructions by his boss. A crop-headed colleague jokes: “He’s like Wee-Bey to your Avon Barksdale.” Everyone in the room laughs, except one chap in specs, Max. “You know, from The Wire,” crop-head prompts. “Oh, right — I haven’t seen it,” says Max. The room explodes with disdain, mocking the bewildered innocent, until a new boy is herded in to meet the team. “Max here hasn’t seen The Wire,” crop-head tells him. “Has it been on normal telly?” Max begs helplessly, before the raging new boy attacks with lightning speed.

As Homer would say, it’s funny because it’s true. In the press, HBO’s Baltimore crime drama has been exciting the kind of devoted adulation traditionally reserved for Brazilian Premier League goalscorers who once played guitar with the Stone Roses. Metacritic, a website that aggregates TV reviews from across the world, says season four of The Wire is the most popular show in the site’s history.

You’d be forgiven for thinking the show transcends mere television and has somehow entered an almost holy state. The Daily Mash, a spoof online newspaper, captured it perfectly in this item: “A new prostate cancer drug which could save thousands of lives is still not as good as The Wire, critics said last night. Although the drug could potentially treat up to 80% of patients, scientists and television reviewers agreed it lacked the Dickensian scope of the Baltimore crime drama. Professor Henry Brubaker, of the Institute for Studies, said: (...) ‘This drug may attack cancerous cells, but it can’t match the sheer genius of that scene where the big, scary guy says something really profound but does it through the medium of chess.’ ”

This slice of miraclevision is, it has to be said, pretty damn good. Shown on HBO between 2002 and 2008, it is set in the seedy Baltimore drugs underworld, beginning as a cop show — the title refers to a wiretap — then opening up across seasons two to five to cover failing docks, local government corruption, bankrupt schools and, finally, the woeful inadequacy of the Baltimore Sun in reporting any of this. The Wire has credibility by the imported kilo of china white: its creator, David Simon, was crime correspondent on the Baltimore Sun, and Ed Burns, one of the main writers, is a former Baltimore cop and Vietnam vet. The acting talent is superb, and real-life cops, dealers and crooks have parts as extras.

Yet, for all that, the series had poor ratings. In the United States, it was pulling in so few viewers at the end of season three that Burns was convinced HBO would cancel it. “We had a five-year plan,” he says, “but we were pretty sure we weren’t going to get a fourth season.” That they did is a tribute to HBO and its subscription model. “I’m not selling eyeballs to advertisers,” explains the HBO executive Michael Lombardo. “The Wire was the right show for us. It had a very small but fiercely loyal viewership. That may have been the only show they watched on the channel, but that was reason enough for them to get HBO.”

In the UK, on FX (home to edgier shows such as Dexter and Generation Kill), it pulled in about 130,000 viewers — most of them, clearly, journalists and comedy writers. Now BBC2 has acquired the full five-season run — meaning, Max, that it will finally be on normal telly.

The problem is that you, like Max, don’t want to be discovering the show this time round. If, as Avon Barksdale might say, you want to have suction and stand tall, you can’t have dinner-party guests suspecting you’re really a yo boy. So here’s some help:

The problem: The Wire is, quite often, incomprehensible. The cast mumble in heavy Baltimore accents much of the time, and the script is littered with city-specific drug slang and cop jargon. Examples: to “re-up” means a dealer getting more drugs to sell; a “burner” is a disposable pay-as-you-go mobile phone; and a “title 3” is a wiretap.

The solution: switch on the subtitles for the hard of hearing until you get a grasp of things.

The problem: there’s a huge cast of mostly unknowns, and you’re getting lost in the early episodes.

The solution: hang in there. And anyway, most of them aren’t unknowns any more. Yanks such as Wendell Pierce and Brits such as Dominic West and Idris Elba are going to be global stars this year. “Before The Wire, I was kind of struggling,” Elba says. “The show really opened my career up. Although it’s shocked a few Americans who come up to me in the street and are like, ‘Yo dogg’, and I reply, ‘All right, mate?’ ”

The problem: Wire-savvy friends keep talking about Bubbles, Omar, Lester, Herc, Prez and the like. How do you bluff this?

The solution: concentrate on the most popular characters, such as Omar and Bubbles, at the outset. Omar is a gay dealer who refuses to swear and has certain moral values; Bubbles is a hapless addict whose idea of forgery is to photocopy dollar bills. It is important to find him heartbreaking. Or outgeek your pals by spotting Detective John Munch, played by Richard Belzer. Originally from Homicide: Life on the Street, Munch has since appeared in The X Files, Law & Order, The Beat, Trial by Jury, Special Victims Unit, Arrested Development and Sesame Street, as well as The Wire. A grim silence will envelop the conversation, but you will have won.

The problem: this whole show feels like a relentless and completely amoral battlefield in a decaying city where everyone is corrupt, incompetent, unpleasant or downright criminal, and anyone who tries for redemption is brutally killed.

The solution: tru dat.

The Wire runs weekdays on BBC2, from tomorrow, at 11.20pm

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