One of my quarantine projects is to rewatch The Wire with my partner, who has never seen more than a handful of episodes. It’s my second time going through the series, and while its still a high quality and riveting television show, my understanding of its politics have deepened. While I don’t have a disdain for the show or what it’s trying to say, the last five years have made the show’s politics seem lacking. Nothing makes me roll my eyes or feels particularly dated — but the parts about the politics of policing that have interested me the most seem barely elaborated on in five seasons of The Wire.

The first time I watched The Wire was in 2011. By then, my politics were formed by college organizing and I had been an active member of a student group concerned with mass incarceration, police brutality and the question of prison obselescence. Even as some attuned to those radical politics, I found myself swayed by The Wire’s desire to see the humanity in everyone: the kids on the corner, the low level dealers, the high level bosses, the beat cops, the sergeants, the politicians. Everyone had a bit of heel and babyface in them, some more than others, but the show seemed to say that they were all trapped in a system that urged them to look out for themselves with ripple effects that caused more harm. It challenged my comfort a little bit; my reading back then was that the show made the audience wish the cops could just break a few more rules, cut through some more red tape, in order to finally catch that dastardly Avon Barksdale. At the same time, it acknowledged that the lives of its law enforcement characters were generally protected by the system (no one ever fears for their lives), while the lives of people who live in and around the drug trade are tragically expendable. It felt like a “both sides” argument with some qualifications.

Upon my 2020 rewatch, I realized that’s really only the case for the first two seasons. The early parts of the show is a fairly straightforward cop drama where the biggest revelation is that cops are just like you and me: they don’t like working and their bosses are a pain. Starting with season three, with the beginnings of the Hamsterdam story arc, it begins to form a critique of policing as it is today. When the rogue Major Howard “Bunny” Colvin creates his own legalized drug zone to save the rest of the district, it broadly works, but doesn’t have the institutional, political, or cultural support to keep it up for long, or to ameliorate its new consequences. It’s in this arc that the show builds its legacy as a dramatic critique of the war on drugs.

But what is that critique? In a speech Bunny gives to Officer Carver, he outlines his vision of what policing used to be: a man who knows his community and focuses on the big trouble making forces over the stat sheets. In a way, he articulates a version of community policing. Both he and Carver represent the show’s moral center on the law enforcement side; the platonic ideal of the Good Cop.

Yet, even these Good Cops have barely examined tendencies: both still use the threat (and occasional use) of police brutality in order to wield authority from the people in their community. When a cop by the name of Colicchio goes on a power trip to shakedown a pastor, Carver’s instinct at first is to cover for him. It’s only when Colicchio shows further disrespect that Carver feels he has to break the blue line omertà and write him up. It’s like this for all the show’s Good Cops: Lt. Daniels moves to protect Pryzbylewski the day after he breaks a 14 year old kid’s face for smugly leaning on his car. Officer Kima Greggs is shown to be noble by refusing to finger a suspect she didn’t actually see in her own shooting, but was earlier willing to roll up her sleeves and beatdown a kid with a bunch of other officers because he dared to fight back.

At first I would look at these as examples of even Good Cops being complicated and flawed. These tendencies, it could be argued, are the accumulated scar tissue from decades of institutional decay. They protect each other and circle the wagons because that’s just what you do in the job; and that’s just what you do because there’s a 100 year tradition of doing so. But what does that say about the institution? That it merely needs more professionalized police and less red tape and scorekeeping? That’s the counter balance to the weight of institutionalized brutality?

The Wire in 2020 feels like it doesn’t ask enough questions about the overarching forces that put these people in situations that makes their lives difficult and tragic. It will ask them about the school system, the press, the police and the family unit, but even above those systems are the forces of survival in capitalism. Major Colvin can be controlled because the quality of his retirement is tied to making sure not to enrage his bosses. Kids like Randy and Dukie can’t be saved because there is no functioning social safety net for them. The extent to which Bubbles gets out of his addiction spiral is the result of hitting the right kind of rock bottom at the right time with a helping hand from his sister’s basement to provide stability, with little to no examination of the failings and successes of the homeless support services offered by cities and non-profits.

Sometimes it seems like the show is only saying that these people could have better lives if only the drug trade could be adequately tackled by Good Police. In the most egregious storylines, season five introduces a crisis where a budget emergency forces city hall to cut off police overtime. We see police equipment falling apart, policing fail to get a foothold against criminal institutions and characters driven to extreme circumstances to “turn the faucet back on.” It feels completely at odds with how I feel today amidst the arguments for defunding the police: we don’t see what that diverted budget does for schools, because it’s only meant to pay off their debt. We don’t even see a critique of what other services and departments would do with that funding. We are merely asked to accept that budget cuts to the police directly leads to broken squad cars.

In 2020 it’s hard to square that with the militarized police we’ve seen at Black Lives Matter police. It’s hard to square police as the same as any other underpaid blue collar worker with what we know about the salary jumps and overtime pay for LAPD. It is hard to square the proposal of good police without even wrestling with qualified immunity or excessive force or police gangs or alternatives to the threat of violence until people obey the law.

I appreciate that the show shows everyone, cop or criminal, having the capacity for good and bad. That seems to me a basic lesson of humanity. I’m not asking for a show that says the opposite or posits a simply flipped binary of good and evil. But this issue goes beyond merely understanding a person’s humanity. It does not get solved by only recognizing that we’re all good and bad and trying our best. The institutions and forces of survival are still out there turning “trying our best” into heinous acts that go against our humanity.

Is all this asking too much of a show that, at its core, still has to be a good drama over a statement about American police and cities? Maybe. But that’s also the standard we hold the show to because it chose such a big statement to make. It just might be that over a decade later, that statement has shrunk some.

Since it ended, The Wire has held a mythic place in pop culture as the show that critiques the institution of police; as something that provides insight and answers. Today, it’s still a great show, with exceptional writing and performances and, yes, important things to say. But it does not feel like the flag bearer that it once was. That role, it seems, remains unfulfilled to this day.