Despite being one of the greatest TV dramas of all time, The Wire had low ratings on broadcast, when compared to similarly acclaimed HBO shows. David Simon's crime drama was a sprawling story of the war against drugs, social inequality, political corruption, and a police department obsessed with budgets and bureaucracy. While The Wire became a huge hit in the era of boxed set binges, the actual ratings for episodes on broadcast rarely reached above 4 million viewers.
The Wire season 2 was the highest rated season overall, with an average viewership of 3.71 million, but ratings continued to dip in subsequent seasons. Despite the critical acclaim, The Wire season 5 had an average viewership of less than a million viewers. It's testament to David Simon's vision, and HBO's of creators that The Wire was allowed the time to conclude its overarching story. The commitment of Simon and his team guaranteed that, despite low ratings on broadcast, The Wire has become a major cultural touchstone. Here's how such an acclaimed drama series played to such a small audience.
The Wire Became More Popular After It Ended
The Wire ended in 2008, with the finale being watched by just over 1 million viewers, a figure which pales in comparison to the 11.9 million viewers that tuned into The Sopranos finale less than a year earlier. In the years that followed, the show built up a following through word of mouth, tapping into the burgeoning binge-watch trend. The ending of The Wire predated the launch of Netflix's streaming service by a few years, however, many viewers would buy boxed sets on the recommendation of friends, which was how the show began building an audience.
David Simon's rich tapestry of corruption and urban decay was better suited for the binge-watching audience, because it rewarded commitment. The interconnected Baltimore institutions, and complex connections between the players was seen as a turn-off for a weekly TV audience. However, it was a huge draw for those audiences who wanted to immerse themselves in David Simon's more journalistic, novelistic approach to storytelling.
The Wire Was Ahead Of Its Time For TV Shows
The debut of The Sopranos is rightly heralded as the start of the golden age of prestige television, The Wire broke more rules in its approach. While each season of The Sopranos had an overarching narrative, most episodes involved a central storyline that would generally be resolved by the episode's end - such as Christopher Moltisanti (Michael Imperioli) and Paulie Gaultieri (Tony Sirico) getting lost in the Pine Barrens while attempting to dispose of a body. The Wire, on the other hand, was an incredibly dense piece of storytelling that had no easy resolutions by the end of episodes, or even the end of the show itself.
Each season of The Wire had an arc, and a shift in focus to another of Baltimore's institutions, but the show's mantra was that "all the pieces matter". In that regard, The Wire changed TV, and predicted the long-form storytelling of many streaming originals of today, although many of these learn the wrong lesson from David Simon's classic. The key to the success of The Wire wasn't that it was just one long story, stretched out for the sake of it. Instead, it was that the scale and the magnitude of the story and the real-world social problems at its heart, which required such a lengthy examination across five seasons of TV drama.