David Simon's The Wire

“The Wire” created by David Simon has been given an incredible amount of praise for its writing. Much of the reason it receives that praise can be seen in just the first 4 episodes of the show, such as the plethora of characters who each have their own unique motivations and personalities, and the hard truths of the world that the show is based around being shown to the viewer, often quite harshly. This harshness is integral to the core of the show’s excellent writing, that core being its completely linear storytelling. As of the fourth episode, the show contains absolutely no flashbacks or any kind of traveling on the timeline other then forward.

This style of storytelling leads to an interesting mixture of learning things as soon as other

Most of the ones that are obvious like difficulty on expanding characters, the writers have made up for or even surpassed what was possible otherwise for the above stated reasons. However one of the greater issues that becomes more evident the more the viewer sees are the visual dead ends. It is revealed that there is strong evidence that Lieutenant Daniels took dirty money in the past. While it has not been expanded on yet, even if an entire season of episodes is devoted to this backstory, the audience will never get to “see” what happened. The audience can only ever get second hand or first hand accounts of the events that took place. Not only does that rely on the the continued perfection of the character interactions that the writers have presented, but it is very limiting for a piece of visual entertainment. The reason that people watch a show instead of simply hearing or reading about it is due to its visual elements, and all the advantages that it brings. For “The Wire” to continue its uniqueness would require it to forgo anything not already shown or anything that occured before the show to delegate to characters simply talking about it. This issue is compounded because of the show’s strong use of shocking visuals, such as the leg of the man that Omar shoots with his shotgun, which the director was quite willing to show. To deprive other moments of this same treatment simply because they happened in the past seems like a waste. This issue isn't as obvious for the first few scenes but slowly builds because the characters make a relentless amount of vague allusions to the past, such as McNulty’s previous cases or his messy