From the opening credits sequence, a bit retro/impoverished for an HBO series, with its purple cloud font, I got the feeling that The Wire is unofficially set in the mid-to-early 90s. A friend later asked it was supposed to be retro. The series creator, David Simon, states on one of the commentary tracks that the S. 1 scenes shot supposedly in the low-rise housing publicly subsidized housing “projects” were actually shot in an early 2000s retirement community, because, he said, that was the closest they could find to early 90s housing projects. Thus, I take the position that The Wire technically begins sometime in the early 90s, There’s also the fact that the production style is reminiscent of something you might have watched in elementary school on early 90s Reading Rainbow or Seasame Street (so much so that I keep expecting Lavar Burton to jump out of the recesses), which leads me to suspect that the producers explicitly employed period filming techniques (the same way as you might shoot a movie taking place in the 1930s in black-and-white). All speculation about the set period of The Wire aside, though, S. 1 makes its way past a rough introduction to tell a fascinating, multilayered cat-and-mouse story about the relationship between street criminal thugs and the police tracking them.
The Wire, S. 1
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