Everything is Connected
Note: This article was originally published as an Alternate Current at PopCultureShock. In the manner of our culture, there’s some new content added at the end for our much-appreciated audience.
HBO’s The Wire, co-created by David Simon and Ed Burns, finishes up its five-season run on Sunday. For its small but incredibly devoted viewership, this provides closure to over five years’ worth of emotional investment in an intricate serialized story about countless people from all walks of society and how they mingle, relate, love and kill. Propelled by a single artistic vision, five seasons, each with their own theme, build on each other to form a single complex and unified tale, manipulating existing genre conventions to create something wholly new and different.
Sound familiar?
It’s no surprise that television and comics have become kissing cousins over the past few years, sharing talent, ideas, and sometimes whole properties – they’re both serialized visual media that extend a story over a long period of time, creating a natural back-and-forth between the creators and the fanbase/viewership. They can be open-ended or finite, deliberately paced or created one at a time, episodically self-contained or continuity-laden.
So what makes The Wire unique? Largely its ambition. Meticulously plotted and incredibly complex, The Wire engages the viewer eloquently, trusting him/her to stay alert, put together the pieces and follow the narrative without the consistent recapping and handholding that often permeates network television. Each season introduces a new cast of characters that supplements rather than replaces what was already there and exposes a new layer of the interrelated machinery that runs the city of Baltimore.
So what does any of this have to do with comics? To look forward, we must first look back. In 1993, David Simon’s book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets was published, leading to both considerable acclaim and the seven-season NBC police drama Homicide: Life on the Street, which Simon left journalism to work on himself.
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