In season 5, episode 8, “Clarifications”, it’s said that Omar Little is 34 but it also indicates his year of birth was 1960. Is the year of birth a deliberate mistake or is the show meant to be set in the mid-'90s? Setting it then would make sense from the POV of the technology used such as pagers in the 1st couple of seasons but then the war on terror is a significant background to other episodes so what’s going on? Just a mistake?
It is my understanding that The Wire is set in the same years that it’s being filmed. The years are referenced from time to time.
I think either Omar’s age or DOB is wrong.
I thought it was curious how Nick Sobotka was completely amazed by these new cameras that work completely without film! That was, what, 2002 or 2003? Ditto for the use of pagers. But the progression to burner phones does point more towards the 2000s.
The Wire has a lot of little anachronisms in it due to the fact that it was based on material that was written from David Simon’s experiences in the 1980-1990s. The show creators chose to leave some of that stuff in, even though the TV show was set in the early 2000s. So you have cops using manual typewriters, people using pagers in the first season, etc. Possibly Omar Little’s birthdate is another one of those things.
Cops do still use typewriters and pagers.
The third season takes place around the same time as the invasion of Iraq (2003). Two of the heroin “brands” being sold on the street are “WMDs” and “Bin Laden.”
I am sure cops use typewriters. But in The Wire (at least in the early seasons) they were using only typewriters. I’m pretty sure that even the most budget-conscious police departments in the mid-2000s had some PCs around.
Also, in the show, the pagers were primarily being used by the criminals, not the cops. (Do cops really still use pagers? My uncle is a cop and I’m pretty sure he has just used a cell phone for this purpose for a really long time now.)
It was also the around the time disposable cell phones came about (early 90s). They got adopted by the drug dealers really fast but a lot of the cops hadn’t heard about them yet.
Been a cop 15 years. Never owned a pager. Or used a typewriter.
I work for a law enforcement agency ( not a police department, though). We used electric typewriters until 2005 and pagers until at least 2000.
Drug dealers not using cel-phones was a pretty big plot element, so I’m not sure that’s really an example of an anachronism.
The typewriters were similarly on purpose, they were supposed to show how dysfunctional the Baltimore PD was. At one point the characters complain about how they were supposed to have gotten computers years ago.
Not recognizing a digital camera in 2003 was a little weird though. I can see where the dockworkers might’ve been too poor to afford them, but I remember thinking it was pretty weird to not have even heard of them.
An anachronism just means something that is chronologically inconsistent. You can have a deliberate anachronism, and I know from having read interviews with the show creators that some of the anachronisms in The Wire were indeed deliberate. They wanted to keep some of the plot elements from the original 1980s-era stories intact even though those elements were anachronistic in a 2000s-era TV show.
The stuff with pagers was them trying to make Lemonade out of Lemons. As someone above wrote, the material the show was based on was written when pagers were cutting edge. When the show was filmed, they were already outdated but they did some plot gymnastics to keep that aspect.
Re: the digital camera. It’s funny because just today to kill some time I watched the Pilot episode of Heroes which I haven’t seen since it first aired in 2006 and something that jumped out at me was when one character was recording another he used an actual camcorder with a tape. It was a mini tape but a tape nonetheless.
OK, but these weren’t really anachronisms in the sense of being inconsistent. They were using older tech, but the characters were aware the tech was antiquated and had reasons for using it.
In the first season, when McNulty was talking to his FBI buddy about getting equipment or whatever, the FBI guy mentioned that they didn’t have the resources they used to since 9/11 because a lot of the drug enforcement work was shifted to counter-terrorism.
It may surprise you, then, to learn that the NYPD spent $1 million buying new typewriters in 2009.
We have one around. There is one state form that one of the secretaries has to do on a typewriter.
I am currently watching the show for the first time. The one jarring thing about the show is the use of the word “police.” It must be some weird Balmer dialect. I’ve never heard someone say “I want to be a police” or “He’s natural born police.” I’ve been to Baltimore many times. Went to University of Maryland. Never heard someone say “I am a police.”
If the first season aired in June 2002 it was certainly still being written around the time of 9/11. Lets just say, the writing team was projecting forward …
I think people are getting different ideas conflated.
Some aspects of technology were used to develop plot - phones specifically, others used to make a different point (cctv to surveillance, typewriters to include disparate funding, digitization to demonstate it’s role in scoiety (both criminal and media), and so on and on).
Fwiw, I don’t think in either case it serves a purpose to pigeonhole, the idea in The Wire is to tell a great story and to develop societal issues.
If you recall, while using the typewriter she says, “the millenium done come and gone and we’re still using these typewriters.” One of the themes of the show is that Baltimore is a poor city and its police are often making due with out of date equipment.