Based on his experiences as an investigative reporter for the Sun, experiences that also spawned the television series Homicide: Life on the Street and The Corner, The Wire explored the rotting of America via an examination of Baltimore. Starting with the drug trade in project housing and tracing its entanglement with law enforcement, city politics, the school system, and the new media, The Wire managed to be at once poetic and real, a tragedy that felt both true to the citizens it followed and indicative of the entire country.
Which meant that a lot of great characters died on The Wire. In addition to innocent Wallace, there was the incredibly charismatic Omar Little (Michael K. Williams), who robbed drug dealers and met an ignoble end in season five. There was Snoop (Felicia Pearson), who has one of the show’s most memorable exchanges right before her execution. There was first season antagonist Stringer Bell, whose death was the culmination of a tragic downfall. And then there was poor Frank Sobotka (Chris Bauer), killed off screen at the end of the series’s second (and best!) season.
Of course, The Wire had incredible moments of optimism too. Famously, Simon reversed his original decision to have Detective Kima Greggs (Sonja Sohn) die of gunshot wounds in season one. Even better, addict Bubbles (Andre Royo) managed to kick the habit that ravaged him for five seasons, resulting in one of television’s all-time great character arcs.
But that’s not what people want to talk to Simon about. They want him to apologize for making them care so much about these characters and then ripping the characters away. And Simon was happy to do it, provided that voted for Democratic Aftyn Behn over Republican Matt Van Epps, whom the writer called “some cheese-eating supplicant for any tinpot dictator.”
Or, rather, Simon would have been happy to do it. But not only has Simon since removed his post (“writer’s cramp,” he explained) but Van Epps defeated Behn by nine percentage points. Which is exactly the type of terrible thing that The Wire set out to chronicle, and what made its deaths feel so real.
