It’s been 10 years since we saw Det. Jimmy McNulty staring at downtown Baltimore from the highway, following a “where are they now?” montage set to “Way Down in the Hole,” The Wire’s opening theme song. It’s the final scene of what is, for my bread, the best show of all time.
Several shows have since attempted to replicate David Simon’s nearly perfect melding of realism and sensationalism, but nothing has quite hit the mark. Also, no show not named Game of Thrones managed to amass a cast that’s the size of a small Nebraskan town, yet manages to also be memorable, meme-able and pop culture touchstones in and of themselves.
Here are the 10 best characters of The Wire, in descending order:
Augustus Haynes (Clark Johnson)
The best character of the show’s final (and weakest) season, Gus connected with me because I was also a daily newspaper man and I admired his unwillingness to sell out and compromise everything he believed in. Also because, like me, Gus is a waffle-complected Negro.
Preston “Bodie” Broadus (J.D. Williams)
Bodie is the show’s biggest cautionary tale: He exemplifies what happens when you abide by all the rules of the street and play the game to the tee: you last longer than most, but you still get got in the end. If only he’d followed his longtime slinging partner Poot and quit to sell shoes. Guess real Gs never punch a clock.
Shakima Griggs (Sonja Sohn)
Holding it down for the sistas in what’s basically a sausage fest of a show, Kima is a tough narcotics officer who sprinkles her Black Girl Magic all over the cases to achieve results that her often inept colleagues could not. She climbs the professional ladder only to learn that shit generates at the top. Kima also had a non-sensationalized single-sex family, which was still somewhat rare in early-aughts television programming.
Michael Lee (Tristan Wilds)
Season 4 is not only the best season of The Wire, but one of the best seasons of television period. Watching Michael and his friends descend into the darkness of criminality, hopelessness and the system because they were let down by adults everywhere represents countless Black and brown American children. I feel a little guilty at the fact that it also makes for utterly compelling television.
William “Bunk” Moreland (Wendell Pierce)
Playing McNulty’s “moral center” (actually the worst enabler ever) Bunk is a good goofball but even better police. He has some of the best dialogue in the show, and my favorite scene of his involves him and McNulty combing a crime scene using only variations of one word that I can’t print here.
Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West)
McNulty is the perfectly complicated anti-hero: he’s a shitty husband, shitty father, and manages to screw up everything in every other facet of his life except being a cop with incredible instincts. It’s a testament to the show’s amazingness that we rooted both for McNulty and the people he was trying to lock up. Well, except for Marlo Stanfield.
Avon Barksdale (Wood Harris)
Wood Harris is fly in damn near everything he’s in, though he was seemingly typecast as a drug dealer or drug baron for several years near the turn of last century. With Avon, Harris perfected the role of the everyman drug kingpin, which is why I’m happy that he wasn’t killed off (though he’ll rot in prison forever). He also gets the drop over his presumably-smarter Benedict Arnold second-in-command, proving that book smarts are sometimes no match for street knowledge.
Russell “Stringer” Bell (Idris Elba)
Vice-president of the Barksdale crime organization, Stringer is the brains behind the operation, moving chess pieces when more than Avon’s street-smarts are necessary. Elba brought style and panty-dropping bravado to his role, which is why he likely has the biggest career of all Wire alum. Showrunners earned all the props in the world and proved that the popularity of no character is above the narrative when they employed Omar and Brother Mouzone to knock Stringer off in season 3.
Omar Little (Michael K. Williams)
If The Wire has any truly sensational element, it’s Omar, who somehow spends nearly five seasons getting away with robbing drug dealers who know exactly who he is. An openly-gay Hood Robin Hood type with the show’s best catchphrases, Omar didn’t deserve to get taken out by punk-ass Kenard – who would top my list of 10 most hated characters if I had one – but that he did is quite distinctly Wire-esque.
Reginald “Bubbles” Cousins (Andre Royo)
The beating heart of The Wire. We see Bubbles spend so long struggling against the heroin beast only to get clean and find redemption in the end. Watching him come out of his sister’s basement in the series-ending montage is the most satisfying sequence in the entire show. The Wire often wallows in misery, but Bubs shows it ain’t gotta be all bad, all the time.
Look, I know Michael “Bae” Jordan‘s “Wallace” didn’t make the cut. But give me a break…Jordan has a long career ahead of him to make “best of” lists. He just didn’t make this one, so put your pitchforks away, ladies.
Dustin J. Seibert is a native Detroiter living in Chicago. Miraculously, people have paid him to be aggressively light-skinned via a computer keyboard for nearly two decades. He loves his own mama slightly more than he loves music and exercises every day only so his French fry intake doesn’t catch up to him. Find him at his own site, wafflecolored.com.