TIL that The Wire only had 60 episodes total across 5 seasons

I was clicking around on Wikipedia the other night looking up old HBO shows and found out The Wire had way fewer episodes than I thought. It only ran 60 episodes from 2002 to 2008, with season 2 being the shortest at 12 episodes. That blew my mind because it feels so much bigger and more detailed than something like Game of Thrones which had 73 episodes in 8 seasons. Has anyone else been surprised by how short a classic show actually was compared to how long it felt?

2 comments

2 Comments

ben48620d ago

Yeah that one surprised me too. I remember finishing the last season and feeling like there was still so much more story to tell. The show packed so many characters and plots into those 60 episodes it felt like twice that many. Compare that to something like Breaking Bad which had 62 episodes and felt about right. The Wire just had this density to it where every scene mattered and moved something forward. It's wild that they covered the whole drug trade, politics, schools, and the newspaper in just 5 short seasons. Definitely one of those shows that made every episode count.

derek9920d ago

A buddy of mine from college binged The Wire over a summer and kept complaining around episode 40 that there was 'no way they wrap this up clean'. Then he got to the end and texted me at 2am saying it felt like he'd read a whole novel, not watched a TV show. He actually checked the runtime against something like Breaking Bad to see if he'd misread the episode count. I remember him saying the same thing @ben486 mentioned, how every scene carried so much weight it stretched the whole experience out.