The TV series that will never be bettered, according to Stephen King: “Hasn’t aged a day”
Besides the many movie adaptations of Stephen King’s work, a considerable number of the author’s novels have also received the small screen treatment, from The Dead Zone to It and Under the Dome. Television is the perfect medium for giving stories the chance to develop with more space and complexity, and for King, this is ideal. While the movie version of It was a huge success, for example, the 1990 miniseries version arguably gave the lengthy novel (over 1,100 pages) more time to explore the terrifying killer clown’s story.
It seems that King is quite a big television fan (who isn’t?), having credited much of his early interest in the horrors that lurk among the mundane and everyday to watching The Twilight Zone as a kid.
In The Twilight Zone Companion by Marc Zicree, King revealed how “It wasn’t Eastern Europe—the horror could be in the Seven Eleven store down the block, or it could be just up the street. Something terrible could be going on even in a GI Bill-type ranch development near a college; it could be there as well. And to me, as a kid, that was a revelation, that was extremely exciting.”
Television can condense ideas into a short film format, or it can allow an idea to extend over hours and hours worth of space, making it a medium rife with endless potential. As a result of TV’s development over the years into something more cinematic and high-budget, many shows have emerged that have completely changed culture forever.
From the surreal blend of horror and comedy in Twin Peaks to the complexity and moral ambiguity found in shows like The Sopranos and Breaking Bad, many shows have helped to completely change the game. For King, however, there is one series that he finds to be simply unbeatable.
“The Wire keeps getting better, and to my mind it has made the final jump from great TV to classic TV — put it right up there with The Prisoner and the first three seasons of The Sopranos. It’s the sort of dramatic cycle people will still be writing and thinking about 25 years from now, and given the current state of the world and the nation, that’s a good thing,” he wrote (via Entertainment Weekly).
He called the show a “staggering achievement,” highly praising its approach to complex themes, such as poverty, drug trafficking, politics, and race. King explained, “The Wire is smart too, but never too smart for its own good. There’s enough going on about the decay of the urban environment to scare the living crap out of you, but no one climbs up on a soapbox.”
The Wire featured performances from the likes of Dominic West, Idris Elba, Deirdre Lovejoy, Lawrence Gilliard Jr, and John Doman, running between 2002 and 2008. While it doesn’t fall into the horror or thriller genre, which King is most well-acquainted with, it taps into the theme of corruption that defines the overarching themes of much of the writer’s work.
In a now-deleted Tweet, King demonstrated just how much he loved the show, writing: “I have set the new streaming stuff aside to re-watch THE WIRE. It hasn’t aged a day. Still the series by which other streaming dramas are judged.”
