The Wire: More Than Just a Show, It’s a Lesson in Resilience and Determination

When it hit HBO 20 years ago, The Wire was widely considered one of the best television shows (alongside “The Sopranos”).

Unlike its aforementioned contemporary, though, “The Wire” took the bird’s eye, sociological POV instead of the more individualistic, psychological POV of Tony Soprano (or later, Walter White on “Breaking Bad”). Showing how the drug trade in one American city affects that American city from every angle it occurs.

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When the dust finally settles and enough time passes an earnest look at the Covid-19 pandemic could potentially do the same. Of course, it would need to do so with as much taste, nuance, and (hopefully) success as the aforementioned series…the one that helped pave the way for what is often called “the Golden Era” of television.

A series that tracks the lives of people across the nation and globe, with each vignette zeroing in on a different facet of the pandemic- the hospitals, the protests, the schools, the businesses, the politics, the vaccine labs, the zoom calls, the driveway get-togethers, and so on and so on and so on. Just to be clear, though, this would not be a real-life carbon copy of “Contagion” (2011) but its own unique, hard-hitting, incisive series. One that shows a world in the midst of a true sea change.