I’ve been reading a bit of stuff online about The Wire, and in a few places i’ve come across some general statements regarding the show’s audience on HBO. A few of these have said, without providing any figures, that the show’s audience was comprised of more black viewers than white.
Now, this doesn’t seem like too controversial an assertion, on its face, but i’d still like to know if it’s true. Does anywhere know where i can find the sort of stats that will tell me this? Or at least a reputable source quoting the stats?
I’ve done some searching, but my Google-fu is weak on this one.
For an example of the statements/implications about black and white audiences, see this page, which is a call for submissions for a Wire anthology:
I can’t tell you stats but I can share a quick, boring anecdote.
When I was looking for videos of The Wire and its actors, I did a YouTube search. Most of what I came up with was clips from the cable channel BET (Black Entertainment Television), be it promos or award shows or talk shows. Actually, BET broadcast The Wire even though it was an HBO show.
I would say that having so much hype on BET would definitely be an indicator of a show’s popularity with blacks over whites.
And, well - why not? Most of the characters, good and bad, were black. And almost all of the “bad” characters were sympathetic so it’s not like you’d be a total loser for rooting for a drug dealer. The show also depicted blacks in power (even tho often corrupt) and blacks in positions of authority.
It probably feels a lot more real to more African Americans than The Cosby Show
I’m sure that’s right. A show is unlikely to make it onto BET unless the BET folks think it will have some success among their target audience.
On that subject, i’ve read a few articles that are extremely critical of BET’s basic-cable-style butchering of the show: blurring nudity, bleeping swear words, and cutting some of the more violent scenes. Also, to fit in commercials they had to devote 90 minutes to each episode—except in Season 2, where they managed to keep each slot to 60 minutes by basically removing most of the story about the (white) dock workers. :rolleyes:
But then again, The Wire did make it into Stuff White People Like… so there were definitely a fair number of white viewers.
Actually, in terms of friends and coworkers that I know are fans of The Wire, I’d say it’s pretty much an even split between asian, white and black, with one mixed-race girl thrown into the mix just for fun (plus one token gay guy). Totally unscientific, but there you have it.
I thought BET bought the rights to The Wire after it became eligible for syndication just like happens with a lot of shows, not despite it being an HBO show. And that was because, ultimately, BET is a black-oriented station.
If they hadn’t had 5 minutes of commercials for every 3 minutes of show, they might not have had to do this. And yes, they did butcher it and not just the violent scenes.
I’m not surprised by The Wire’s popularity with black audiences, just at its lack of popularity with everybody else (don’t worry, though, it’ll be taught in English or History classes soon enough). I’m very surprised and annoyed that BET has been butchering the damn thing. What makes the show great is that it doesn’t pull any punches in depicting life in and out of the drug trade; editing a bunch of content out to suit somebody’s delicate sensibilities pisses on the very idea of the show.
I’m imagining a certain crime scene investigation in Season 1.
“Beep!”
“What the beep?”
“Beep beep beep beep beep.”
“Beepin beep.”
“Motherbeeper.”
“Beep! Beep beep.”
And so on. MIght be funnier than the original.
In any case, I wonder about saying it’s not popular with “everyone else.” I consistently hear it mentioned by white people as the best television show in history; it seems like nearly every white person I’ve talked with about the show has said something similar.
Yes, among the people that have watched the show, The Wire is perhaps the highest-rated thing I’ve seen or heard about (witness the staggering 9.7/10 average user rating at IMDB!). It’s just that if you’re counting raw numbers in the general population, The Wire still hardly shows up at all. Hell, the majority of people I know have never even heard of it (until I come along preaching its virtues like a priest at the apocalypse). It will eventually be regarded as one of the great classics of television, though. Just too bad it wasn’t more than a cult phenomenon during its run.
But this sort of gets to the heart of the issue, because it seems to be popular among a particular segment of the white audience. Mahna Mahna pointed out that the show appears on the Stuff White People Like website, but one of the central themes of that site is precisely that it’s not really talking about things that all, or even most white people like; it’s talking about the things that appeal to a particular, generally urban, professional, left-liberal subsection of white America.
I mean, look at some of the other things that appear on the website:
Political prisoners
Hummus
Self-aware Hip Hop references
Grammar
San Francisco
Hating corporations
Knowing what’s best for poor people
Apologies
Vegan/Vegetarianism
Manhattan (now Brooklyn too!)
Farmers’ markets
It’s pretty hilarious, really. And, as an urban, left-liberal white guy, i actually cringe a bit at how many of the things on that website accurately describe me, and the people i hang out with. But while everyone i know loves The Wire, most white people in America didn’t watch it.
For me, also, there was the hometown aspect that brought it to my consciousness first. If i hadn’t been living in Baltimore during its run, i probably would have been much less inclined to seek it out. Before the first episode even aired, people in Baltimore were looking forward to seeing what it would be like; Homicide and The Corner also got a lot of local attention, as do any movies filmed or set in Baltimore, from John Waters and Barry Levinson films, to big-budget movies like Ladder 49 and The Sum of All Fears (in which much of the downtown was actually destroyed by a nuclear bomb!).
I’m wondering if its ratings don’t look like the bigger network numbers is because, not only was it a niche kind of show (mostly black, urban, gritty, violent) and it was on cable. Not all of the television viewers in the US have cable and since HBO is not part of basic cable, fewer people have that.
The Wire is the only show I know that features intelligent black gangsters. Even on The Shield the black gangsters are shown to be pretty dumb (I’ve only seen the first four seasons.)
For some reason intelligence and business savvy are reserved for the Latin or European gangs. On TV black gangs are almost always run by idiots.
The show also has smart black characters were you don’t usually see them on TV, including detectives, politicians, and school kids.
It is hugely popular here. The boxsets of the 5 seasons were a big item this Christmas. I first encountered it on Ireland’s primarily Irish language channel, TG4 a number of years ago but it is steadily becoming more and more popular here and, I believe, in the UK where it has aired on FX.
As a random note, Barack Obama and Keira Knightley are both apparently huge fans of the show. Barack’s favorite character is Omar. I must say, this has a much bigger effect on my opinion of our President-Elect than it should (now, if we could only get Obama to start whistling “A-Hunting We Will Go” :))
Also, I suspect that the show will have a limited Shawshank Redemption effect (i.e. increasingly popular by word-of-mouth in the years following its actual first run).
I’ve only just started watching it and am really enjoying it, although I’m not 100% sure I understand everything I’m watching (my mother and I watch it together and we share a few confused looks from time to time).
Yeah, there’s very little exposition, and what little you get might not come until two or three episodes later. My favorite confusing bit is in S2, when McNulty is plotting tides, drawing lines on maps and faxing them off to someone.
I’ve googled all over for viewer demographics and I can’t find anything either. Lots of ratings info, but nothing saying who’s watching.
Back in the early seasons, the complaints about the audience wasn’t that it was too black or too white, but that it was just too small. I remember crossing my fingers and toes after the end of the first two seasons hoping that HBO wouldn’t cancel the show for low ratings. It never hit the general public’s radar like the Sopranos did. Of course there was plenty of critical love from the start, but SNL never did a fake The Wire commerical with over the top comments from critics playing over scenes from the show like they did with the Sopranos.
I read an article about the audience of the Wire (maybe in Slate or Salon?), sorry I can’t find it, but it said the core audience for the show was essentially urban centers and that the suburbs largely tuned it out. According to the article, the Wire’s biggest fans were inner city blacks and white professionals living in citites. I also remember an article in the Washington Post about blacks in DC who really found the show resonated with them.
