Why Britain can’t compete with “The Wire”

“America can hardly understand that show—and it’s about us.” — David Simon

The American television drama is undergoing something of a Renaissance these days, and HBO’s under-watched but much-lauded show The Wire is its crowning achievement. Though at first it seems only a cop show, it soon unfolds to become a sprawling epic and a lament on the decline of a city. Could any contemporary British drama be praised with such a description?

The simple answer is no. The problem is not one of dramatic ambition or quality, but rather of a willingness to engage in the social realities of the day. Why is this? The tempting answer is that the British are simply not inclined that way. British dramatic history is garlanded with such luminaries as Shakespeare and Marlowe, none of whom tended to deal with the hard realities of the average man and the effects of the decisions of those in power on their daily lives. But then, Britain is hardly alone in this: indeed, that kind of story only really started to appear in the 19th century anyway. And of course, one can always cite Dickens as an example of a great British writer who dealt primarily with social issues. This tempting answer can be brushed aside: after all, there is no shortage of “contemporary stuff” in contemporary British drama. It is just that none of it is any good.

The answer, I think, is in the differing points in the arc of history that the two countries lie, and the consequent sense of self-identity. Britain is a post-imperial power: it has, to put it softly, had its day. Its sense of its present is firmly rooted in its past greatness; yet it cannot face its present relative mediocrity. Juxtaposed with the self-image of stately homes, Big Ben and foxhunting, the entrance of poverty, drugs and gang violence—which of course was never really an entrance—seems like an unwelcome intrusion to an otherwise pleasant party. They are reminders of what Britain is not. But where these problems could previously be ignored, now they must be faced: and when something must be done, usually it will not be done with pleasure.

America, on the other hand, is still a young imperial power, still in uncomfortable adolescence, and still searching for a definitive epic of self-definition—if such a thing is possible—just as in the Greece of Homer or the Rome of Virgil. Hence we hear of its writers’ persistent search for the “Great American Novel”. There is no such thing as the great British novel or the great Spanish novel or the great Iranian novel—they, perhaps, have no need of one. The American need for one is not merely, as some might condescendingly argue, a desire borne of a feeling of cultural inferiority next to their European friends. When the American writer John William DeForest coined the phrase in 1868, he was writing about Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, The House of Seven Gables and The Blithedale Romance, of which he had no literary complaints, but whose characters he thought “belong to the wide realm of art rather than to our nationality.” He went on to say:

They have no sympathy with this eager and laborious people, which takes so many newspapers, builds so many railroads, does the most business on a given capital, wages the biggest war in proportion to its population, believes in the physically impossible and does some of it.

So when the term sprang up from DeForest’s brain, it meant a work of fiction which caught on paper the American spirit. It needed not do so in a one-sidedly positive fashion, but it did need to be a source of national pride. Since then, though, the idea has evolved and grown to encompass more: it must still capture the American spirit, to be sure, but it must also be a complex portrayal of the realities of American life, its weaknesses packed together with its strengths, its vices with its virtues.

To call The Wire a contemporary great American novel may seem like something of a stretch. After all, it can appear uncompromisingly bleak, and seems not to celebrate any American values at all. But amidst the organisations—official or not—that are mired by bureaucracy and corruption, there are exceptions to the overwhelming rule, strong individuals unwilling to fold under the great weight of the authorities above, and it is these characters who we as viewers admire most. The Wire seems to say that these free-thinking mavericks, heirs (though in a nearly unrecognisable form) to Huckleberry Finn and other great American characters, are the true America, and that the organisations, thinking more about their own survival rather than the job they are there to do, are not.

These might merely be observations drawn on a writer’s comfortable armchair, if it were not for their enormous effect on The Wire’s central focus: inner-city poverty and the “war on drugs”. These are the major issues of contemporary America, just as racism was in Twain’s time. It is not that poverty in America is anything new, but rather that its extent is so shocking for a rich country, and that the degree to which it is inescapable is even more so. Moreover, poverty and its attendant problems are more central to America’s national identity than they are to most of the free world. Nothing is a stronger embodiment of the American creed than the Statue of Liberty’s invitation to “your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” As much as mainstream America may avoid the issue, the problems of the poor affect them more painfully: the more a country prides itself on equality of opportunity, the more it is shamed when it sees the extent that it doesn’t exist. There are two sides to America: on one stands the American dream and the promise that hard work and enterprise will lead you to success, and on the other you have the hard reality on the street: that your hard work and your entrepreneurial skill will be wasted in a game that may very probably lead to your early death.

It is the tension between the two that is so ripe for dramatic plucking; one which The Wire plucks so well and which Britain does not really have. If Britain yearns for anything, it is not a yearning for its citizens to breathe free, but for the dominance of yesteryear. In this climate, it may produce one or two good social dramas, but these would not be borne of a genuine need to engage with the issues in a deep way, only of a superficial desire to show that they care.

This article was originally written for sevenglobal.org, and can be seen here.