Pilot air date: June 2, 2002, HBO
Stream it on: HBO Max; Prime Video
In the Autopilot series, we bear down into great first episodes in TV history. In the case of “The Wire,” David Simon’s granular HBO drama of cops, criminals, politics, and big city bureaucracy, we can zoom in even closer, to the very first scene.
A police detective sits on a Baltimore stoop with a young man late at night, a freshly minted corpse in the foreground. This is, or was, Snot-boogie, who was shot trying to rob a craps game. After discussing Snot-boogie’s unfortunate name, and the fact that he made a regular habit of robbing this particular game, the detective asks a reasonable question: Why did the other dice throwers keep letting him play?
“Got to,” the young man replies. “This America, man.”
It is indeed. And the America of “The Wire” is a democracy in the truest storytelling sense, where each group of characters gets a voice, and the plot lines unfold in parallel lines. This pattern takes shape in the pilot, as that detective, the affable human train wreck Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West), gets in trouble with his bosses for talking too much about a case to a judge. Meanwhile, a mid-level drug dealer, D’Angelo Barksdale (Lawrence Gilliard Jr.), gets in trouble with his superiors — not for killing an enemy, but for doing so in front of witnesses. Jimmy and D’Angelo are caught up in the same game, and in subsequent seasons it will expand to include dock workers, city politicians, public schools, and, yes, journalism.
But that’s all in the future. First, McNulty and his allies have to convince Baltimore police brass that the Barksdale crew, led by Avon (Wood Harris) and Stringer (a pre-stardom Idris Elba), is worth pursuing in earnest. The law enforcement higher-ups of “The Wire” are concerned with career above all else, which means reducing risk, which means settling for less. In this first episode we’re introduced to a guiding principle of the series: Expedient mediocrity usually rises to the top at the expense of idealistic goals.
Elba isn’t the only future star in the pilot. Michael B. Jordan had one of his first roles as Wallace, a young dope slinger whose conscience wasn’t made for this world. He gets his moment to shine later in the season, as does the late Michael Kenneth Williams, whose freelance outlaw Omar Little robs drug dealers for profit, sport, and vengeance. “It’s all in the game,” he’s fond of saying, and starting with the pilot, “The Wire” made clear that it was playing for keeps.