Ten years ago this month, "The Wire" premiered on HBO. While the show at first was mostly met with indifference, was routinely ignored by the Emmys and almost always faced cancellation from season to season, the show has obviously posthumusly grown in stature and is now regarded as one of the greatest shows to ever appear on television. Created by ex- Baltimore police reporter David Simon with the assistance of former Baltimore police detective Ed Burns, in many ways, "The Wire" changed the game of TV with its scope of vision and longtail patience.
Even some of the cast didn't understand the scope of the show. "I thought David Simon bamboozled the black cast when he brought all the white actors in to tell the docks story line [in Season 2]," Michael K. Williams, who played the fan-favorite character, Omar, said in a must-read oral history piece about the show in Maxim. "I was like, 'This is some bullshit!' But midway through Season 3 I saw that this was bigger than me."
Lord knows we've had enough cop shows over the years — but this was from some of the minds behind "Homicide: Life On The Streets," one of the best police shows in history. And as it turned out, "The Wire" was far from just a cop show — over its five seasons, it proved to be a sprawling, Dickensian epic examining virtually every aspect of Baltimore life, and it's since been widely acclaimed as perhaps the greatest television series ever made (if you've never seen it, you need to change that asap).
And now for that tenth anniversary, we've finally gotten a musical. Well, sort of: Funny or Die has premiered a new parody clip, which sees some of the stars, including Michael K. Williams (Omar), Andre Royo (Bubbles), Sonja Sohn (Kima) and Felicia Pearson (Snoop) reprise their roles in a stage musical. It's pretty funny, especially for die-hard fans of the show, and hopefully prevents some enterprising theater grad from ever actually attempting it for real. Watch below.