The term “Great American Novel” has been applied to everything from older classics like Moby-Dick to more recent bestsellers like American Psycho, but I think the true Great American Novel is HBO’s The Wire. The term was coined by John William De Forest in an 1868 essay in which he opined that the Great American Novel probably hadn’t been written yet.
There are a few common picks for the fabled Great American Novel. Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a portrait of boyhood set against the Antebellum South. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is a sobering character study of the unfulfilled millionaire; the self-made man who achieved the American Dream and earned his fortune at the height of the Roaring Twenties, but still isn’t happy.
J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye is a quintessential tale of angst and rebelliousness, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird is a quintessential tale of racial injustice and one man’s fight for the truth, and John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath chronicles the impoverished struggles of the Great Depression. (Almost anything by Steinbeck would qualify as the G.A.N., actually.)
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy is a bleak, bloody western tackling the genocide of Native Americans — the atrocity upon which the United States was built — and with its unconventional structure and footnotes with their own footnotes, David Foster Wallace’s epic tome Infinite Jest is the definitive postmodern turn-of-the-21st-century American novel.
These are all solid candidates for the Great American Novel. But the Great American Novel shouldn’t just be a good story written by an American author; it should answer some fundamental questions about America. For my money, the Great American Novel — especially for the modern era — isn’t a novel at all; it’s David Simon’s groundbreaking HBO crime drama.
The Wire Is The Great American Novel For The 21st Century
McNulty and Bunk sit on their car in The Wire
No novel from the 21st century has captured America’s dark side quite like the greatest achievement in American television. The Wire asks, why is America the way that it is? Why is the U.S. so divided? And it explores those questions through the country’s fractured institutions: the justice system, the public school system, the government as a whole.
The Wire is structured more like a work of literature than a TV drama. It has chapters from the point-of-view of different characters, like a multi-perspective novel. Its social commentary is framed through the messy lives of these flawed but lovable characters. The show jumps all over its sprawling ensemble, depending on which institution a given storyline is critiquing.
Each season of The Wire introduces a brand-new cast of characters as it examines another broken institution of the American city. It’s the opposite of the usual approach to TV, where showrunners will hone in on the characters that audiences are responding to (i.e. Steve Urkel) and sideline everyone else.
Simon told his characters’ stories more like a novelist. He didn’t write superfluous material for Omar just because the audience fell in love with Omar. He just followed the characters that would help him tell the story he was telling and make the point he was making. The Wire doesn’t have a main character; the main character is the city of Baltimore.
Simon approached the series as a piece of investigative journalism. He’d spent years working as a crime reporter in Baltimore, so he knew the city and its police force and its criminal underworld like the back of his hand. He used Baltimore as a microcosm of America as a whole; the problems affecting this particular city are the same problems affecting the country at large.
As a journalistic investigation into the systemic problems embedded in American society, The Wire has an almost documentary-like sense of realism and verisimilitude. But in broad strokes, its narrative plays like a Greek tragedy. Simon and his writers told grand, mythic stories in the framework of this fiercely realistic police procedural.
Much like in a Greek tragedy, the characters tragically seal their own fate with their questionable life choices. Omar is like Achilles, the seemingly unstoppable warrior who’s cut down when he’s weakened by a broken ankle. Stringer is killed by his own hubris and entombed in his attempt at a legitimate business venture when two of his many enemies team up against him.
The Wire Tackled The Most Pressing Social Issues In America Today
The kids in The Wire season 4
Any Great American Novel worth its salt should comment on the state of the nation, and that’s what The Wire did best. Through the complicated lives of its dozens of characters, The Wire touched on just about every pressing social issue affecting American lives today. It looked at race relations, the class divide, and police brutality and the people that enable it.
The Wire demonstrates how the United States creates its own criminals. People below the poverty line, failed by the system, resort to a life of crime to survive. The series critiques an untrustworthy media landscape that treats news more as entertainment than information. Bubbles’ story highlights the disease of addiction and the humanity of addicts who are often portrayed as a statistic.
The series went into the underfunded public services that keep the 99% separate from the 1%. In season 4, The Wire takes us inside the walls of an inner-city public school, where good kids are being set up to fail. When Cutty is shot in the street, he gets the bare-minimum treatment at hospital, because he doesn’t have health insurance.
In season 3, the show uses Baltimore’s local government to tackle political corruption and empty campaign promises. Through the political career of Tommy Carcetti, The Wire shows that even politicians who want to make a difference and affect positive change are hobbled by a system designed to maintain a certain status quo. Despite their best intentions, people like Carcetti eventually become jaded and give up.
Instead of trying to affect change from his current station, Carcetti keeps going after higher and higher public offices. He naively tells himself he’s biding his time before he reaches a position where he can make a difference. He goes from city councilor to mayor to governor, and still thinks he needs to get elected into Congress to do anything worthwhile.
Carcetti could become the president and he’d still be making excuses that he’s not powerful enough to change the system from within — and the series hammers it home that, sadly, that would probably be true. The Wire doesn’t have any answers to these problems (nor should it; that’s not Simon’s job), but it does open your eyes as to why they exist.
The Wire Reinvented Itself In Every Season
Frank gets arrested in The Wire
The typical M.O. of a TV show is to maintain a status quo. The idea is to set up characters and a location that audiences can come back to week after week for years (and sometimes even decades). But The Wire never subscribed to that. Simon reinvented the show every season and brought in a new cast of characters to explore a new area of Baltimore.
The writers never caved to what the audience was responding to. They only utilized fan-favorite characters like Omar when they served the story they were telling and the social issue they were probing. Season 1 revolved around Major Crimes’ quest to take down the Barksdale Organization, but season 2 pivoted to the docks so it could explore the death of the working class.
Season 3 went inside the city government to show why politicians can’t get out of their own way. All of Carcetti’s plans to positively change the system from the inside fall by the wayside as he selfishly focuses on advancing his own career. He abandons his values and the promises he made when he sets his sights on the mayor’s office.
Season 4 goes to the root of the problem: the public school system. We’re introduced to a group of bright young boys who would have a promising future ahead of them if their circumstances were different. It’s heartwarming to see Prezbo’s redemption arc — a Stand and Deliver storyline inspiring his inner-city students to follow their dreams — but it’s devastating to see these kids grow up into criminals.
In The Wire’s fifth and final season, Simon turned his critical lens on the show itself — or, more broadly, on the media. As McNulty fabricates a serial killer to secure more funding and a journalist fabricates stories to boost newspaper sales, we see that the media serves its own agendas, and even a series like The Wire oversimplifies these issues.
The Wire Eschewed The Closure Of Traditional TV Dramas
McNulty stands by his car in The Wire
Closure is a key tenet of traditional TV dramas. The crime scene investigators in CSI always catch their guy in time for the end credits. When a character like Hank Schrader is killed in cold blood, he gets to go out on a triumphant end-of-the-road monologue. The good guys usually defeat the bad guys, and they all live happily ever after.
The Wire threw that closure out the window in favor of a much more authentic and ambiguous approach to storytelling. Cases go unsolved, characters are unceremoniously killed, and justice is rarely served. It’s a lot closer to the literature of Cormac McCarthy than a standard case-of-the-week TV crime drama. Omar didn’t get his ASAC Schrader moment; he was just shot dead by a kid.
Most cop shows, especially before The Wire came along, operated on a case-of-the-week format: each episode introduces a new case and solves it within the hour. But it doesn’t work like that in real life. A lot of cases go cold, some don’t get solved at all, and building a case against a powerful criminal figure like Marlo Stanfield can take years.
Even when you manage to get an Avon Barksdale behind bars, that gap in the market is filled immediately and the cycle continues. The Wire’s serialized storytelling went against every phony cliché of the police procedural genre and captured this frustrating futility perfectly. It was the first true police procedural: an intensely realistic chronicle of painstaking police procedures, with no manufactured drama.
The Wire’s pitch-perfect series finale encapsulated this thesis beautifully. As McNulty looks out at his city, we see a montage of where all the characters end up. There are a small handful of happy endings — Bunny adopted Namond; Bubbles got clean and reconciled with his sister — but the systemic problems remain.
Duquan becomes the new Bubbles as Baltimore’s resident addict; Michael takes Omar’s place as the city’s resident shotgun-wielding vigilante. Life goes on, the wheels keep turning, and despite everyone’s best efforts, nothing has really changed. The Wire is a raw, profound, brutally honest examination of American society, warts and all. It might not be printed on paper, but it is the Great American Novel.
