The original post: /r/television by /u/ex1stence on 2025-07-28 00:53:31+00:00.
The Wire is, and will forever be, my favorite TV show of all time. But upon a recent rewatch, it just feels so…quaint?
Like, S2 when String and Co are dealing with a potency problem in their product. They try rebranding, marketing tactics, searching for new product with Prop Joe, etc.
These days, the cartels will just pump their shit with fentanyl and that’s that. They’ll communicate over Telegram or WhatsApp or any other encrypted messaging that the Feds have zero access to, and continue about their business totally unimpeded.
Which just makes the whole show feel sort of…meaningless? 100 percent of the technical aspects of the drama, the cat-and-mouse of it all, has been nullified by modern technology. No more texting pictures back and forth (Marlo arc), no more worrying about product quality, just raw fent pushed to extremes because you don’t even need a port connection (Sobatkas) to get a lethal amount of opiates flooding the streets these days.
I love the show, and I want to keep my rewatch going, but it feels like looking through an irrelevant time portal to an era that doesn’t exist anymore, and hasn’t for at least a decade or more.
EDIT - Jesus, downvote city. I guess what I’m getting at is could you even make a modern equivalent to The Wire in 2025? So much of how we access drugs, the corner wars over territory, the gang conflicts, etc etc are just…gone. On the one hand it’s almost a good thing, that cell phones and Snapchat and social media etc took over the corner conflicts, but now I watch and I think about how zero percent of the main story actually reflects the curve that humanity took in the drug war.