In two days, the final season The Wire will be premiering, and this rapidly approaching moment has inspired retrospectives on both the show and its creator, David Simon. Surprisingly, a wide-ranging consensus has emerged: The Wire is relentlessly bleak ¹.

At the center of the discussion is Mark Bowden’s The Angriest Man in Television, an Atlantic piece warning against blindly accepting as truth The Wire’s depiction of Baltimore and its institutions. The show is dressed in realism, but it is far from a documentary:

Simon is the reporter who knows enough about Baltimore to have his story all figured out, but instead of risking the coherence of his vision by doing what reporters do, heading back out day after day to observe, to ask more questions, to take more notes, he has stopped reporting and started inventing. He says, I have figured this thing out. He offers up his undisturbed vision, leaving out the things that don’t fit, adding things that emphasize its fundamentals, and then using the trappings of realism to dress it up and bring it to life onscreen.

In leaving out the things that don’t fit, Simon has created, Bowden says, a vision of Baltimore deprived of hope. Instead of optimism, the show is filled to the brim with cynicism and pessimism. As Reihan Salam puts it in The Bleakness of The Wire:

David Simon thinks he’s constructed a critique of capitalism, but in fact he’s prepared an elaborate, moving brief for despair and (ultimately) indifference. … The Wire is ultimately premised on our inability to engage in self-help, and in particularly the inability of the black poor. It is about their lack of agency, and their status as eternal victims.

Matthew Yglesias further agrees, but sees it as a necessary evil of the mood Simon is trying to set:

Trying to do a piece of extended drama that embodied the values of pragmatic progressive reformism would be impossible. The results, if serious and true to the spirit, would be deadly dull. Moderate optimism about human nature and the possibility for change is, if done in an entertaining way, the stuff of light romantic comedies, not big-time drama.

The heart of these critiques seems split into interconnected halves. On one hand, there is a strong railing against how The Wire presents itself. The audience is to believe the television Baltimore and real-life Baltimore match one-to-one, and the show’s use of on-location shots, accurate vernacular, and so on all work to reaffirm this belief. But the personality of David Simon (closely explored in Mark Bowden’s article ²) and the supposed bleakness of the show contradict its proposed realism. As Yglesias says, “The result is the creation of a world — Simon’s Baltimore — that feels eminently real, but is imbued with all the artifice of Greek tragedy.”

It would be stupid to argue against this part of the critique. However, it is not entirely correct. The Wire may have political opinions that force it to overstep its bounds on realism, but (from what I have read) the show does provide an accurate portrayal of a facet of Baltimore life. There should be no problem in thinking The Wire presents life as it is for a certain set of people in a certain context in a certain city. Any misgivings should only arise when trying to extrapolate the show’s specific presentation to a wider swath of geography.

But small-scale or large-scale, The Wire may be bleak, but it is not hopeless. Given Simon’s experiences, he has written a show that continually rains down blows on the fat, unwieldy institutions (politics, police, education, gangs). However, individuals are hailed as saviors and sources of great change. Simon affirms this in a comment on Yglesias’s blog:

Writing to affirm what people are saying about my faith in individuals to rebel against rigged systems and exert for dignity. … The Wire is dissent; it argues that our systems are no longer viable for the greater good of the most, that America is no longer operating as a utilitarian and democratic experiment. … Camus rightly argues that to commit to a just cause against overwhelming odds is absurd. He further argues that not to commit is equally absurd. Only one choice, however, offers the slightest chance for dignity. And dignity matters.

Whether this opinion is practical is another story, but I think it highlights an important aspect of the show that undermines any desire to call it “relentlessly bleak”. Throughout the show, individuals are again and again shown to be making a difference, either in their own lives or the community. When they fail, they tend to do so as result of institutions. So The Wire is pessimistic about any broad social change, but very optimistic about radical, individual change. (Of course, the individuals in The Wire often have their progress negated by the overarching institutions, but Simon seems to be suggesting, Just keep throwing yourself against the wall until it breaks, it’s the only way.)

¹ I highly recommend reading not only the linked articles, but also the long list of comments following them. The article writers have come to a consensus against optimism, but almost all of the commentary thinks The Wire is much less bleak.

² Also online now is The Believer’s interview with David Simon. Home to illustrious statements like, “We won’t discriminate against a British actor who gives the best read, regardless of what you fucks did to our capital in 1812.”

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