BOILED DOWN TO ITS ESSENCE...:

While much of the debate surrounding The Wire has focused on the concrete political issues it addresses (such as America's drugs policy), one of the show's greatest achievements has been widely overlooked. The Wire presents a damning portrait of inner-city life in America without the prospect of redemption. It has none of the faith in the ultimate triumph of justice and the saving power of goodness that shows through many of the most hard-boiled thrillers. Taken seriously--as the series was undoubtedly meant to be, though it contains many scenes of black comedy--The Wire plants a compelling question mark over the creed of nearly all of those today who insist they have no religion: the belief that the intractable conflicts that are the stuff of tragedy are slowly being left behind.

Simon has acknowledged the influence on the series of ancient tragedians such as Euripides, Sophocles and Aeschylus. Like the Greek dramatists he shows humans enacting fates they cannot escape. As Simon put it in a 2007 interview with Nick Hornby, he lifted his thematic stance "wholesale" from the Greeks, aiming "to create doomed and fated protagonists who confront a rigged game and their own mortality. The idea that... we're still fated by indifferent gods, feels to us antiquated and superstitious... But instead of the old gods, The Wire is a Greek tragedy in which the postmodern institutions are the Olympian forces. It's the police department, or the drug economy, or the political structures, or the school administration, or the macroeconomic forces that are throwing the lightning bolts... In much of television, and in a good deal of our stage drama, individuals are often portrayed as rising above institutions to achieve catharsis. In this drama, the institutions always prove larger, and those characters with hubris enough to challenge the postmodern construct of American empire are invariably mocked, marginalised, or crushed. Greek tragedy for the new millennium, so to speak."

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