The Wire

It’s said that the first Velvet Underground album sold only 10,000 copies, but everyone who bought it formed a band. The story of The Wire is similar. Barely anyone watched it when it first ran on HBO in the early-mid 2000s, but few shows this century have proven more influential, or acclaimed, even if nearly all of that attention came long after it was off the air. 

Created by ex-reporter David Simon and ex-cop Ed Burns, The Wire was a Trojan horse of a series. It started out looking and acting like a cop drama, about the attempt of iconoclastic Baltimore homicide detective Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West) to bust murderous kingpin Avon Barksdale (Wood Harris). But really, The Wire was a show about all of of Baltimore, and, by extension, every American city — and, by extension, about the fragile condition of the American experiment itself after all these years. Over the course of five seasons, it not only interrogated the state of modern policing and the toxic nature of the War on Drugs, but looked at the death of blue collar work, the impossibility of political reform, the state of public schools, the warping of the news media, and a lot more. And it gave us some of the most indelible characters in the medium’s history, from Idris Elba’s calculating would-be mogul Stringer Bell to the late Michael Kenneth Williams as colorful stickup artist Omar Little.

Whenever a modern showrunner claims that they think of their newest season as “a 10-hour movie,” what they are really saying is, “I watched The Wire a lot, and I think I can do that.” And they almost never can. —Alan Sepinwall