TV is firmly in its reboot, revival, and reunion era. Shows such as Frasier and Sex and the City have been revisited, with varying degrees of success. Some of these exploits, like the newsmaking Fresh Prince reunion, have added valuable perspective to the original show.
But with all the nostalgia floating around Hollywood, it’s surprising that HBO’s The Wire, a prescient, innovative chronicle of urban blight in America, told through intersecting characters in Baltimore, hasn’t had a large-scale reunion. In the 23 years since the show’s debut, seemingly every American institution has cratered in a way that showrunner David Simon and co-writers Ed Burns, George Pelecanos, and Nina Noble foretold during its initial 2002-08 run.
Between that social commentary and unforgettable characters who helped define the modern antihero — puritan stickup man Omar Little played by Michael K. Williams, wild-card homicide detective Jimmy McNulty played by Dominic West, and reformed corner boy Malik “Poot” Carr, played by Tray Chaney — The Wire has earned a loyal fandom that only continues to grow.
Now, the 43-year-old Chaney is on a mission to feed those fans with his The Wire Reunion movement, which includes YouTube interviews, public engagements, and Instagram Live sessions with Wire cast members. He also offers conversations with certain Wire actors on his ChaneyWay website. And last year, he released several videos under the title “Live From the Pit” on his YouTube channel, which were spliced from conversations he had with several Wire actors during a photo shoot in Baltimore’s McCulloh Homes, one of the show’s key locations. It’s Chaney’s goal to expand the concept into an ongoing series where he interviews every living Wire character in that setting. In January, he posted an open letter on social media asking HBO to help facilitate and air the episodes.
“I don’t care if you were an extra, I don’t care how big your role was, I don’t care how small your role was, I want an interview,” Chaney says over Zoom from his hometown of Forestville, Maryland. “And the basis of it is, ‘Before The Wire, what were you doing? When you got cast for The Wire, how was your experience, and then how’s life after The Wire?’”
So far, Chaney has spoken with Hassan Johnson, who played Roland “Weebay” Brice, and Tristan Wilds, who played Michael Lee, for the project. He says he’s confident that he’ll be able to reach some of the show’s biggest stars, too: “I’m coming for Michael B. Jordan and Idris Elba. They next on my list.” Last year, Elba did a voice-over for Chaney’s Undeniable: The Tray Chaney Story documentary, while Jordan (who played Poot’s best friend Wallace in a breakout performance at 14) liked one of Chaney’s recent The Wire Reunion posts on Instagram.
Chaney says he’s been coordinating events under The Wire Reunion banner since the show’s original airing. He recalls throwing parties titled The Wire Reunion as early as 2002 with castmates Jamie Hector, who played Marlo Stanfield, and Anwan “Big G” Glover, who played Slim Charles. ”We were documenting footage back then,” he says. The catalyst for the “Live From the Pit” series was a 2024 fashion collaboration with DJ Quicksilva and clothing brands Shoe Palace and Downtown Locker Room. In September 2024, Chaney and The Wire actors Glover, Johnson, and Wilds had a photo shoot for the clothing line in the Pit. The crew took photos sitting on what Chaney believes was the actual orange couch used on the show, where the trio of Poot, Wallace, and Bodie Broadus (J.D. Williams) maintained a stronghold for the Barksdale drug organization.
Chaney says McCulloh residents quickly recognized the actors during the shoot, and they were taking pictures with the whole neighborhood by the end of the day. With his uncle Mark recording, Chaney says the cast members shared memories throughout the eight-hour shoot, including rats’ propensity to steal food from The Wire’s craft services table. Chaney edited the videos and uploaded them to his YouTube channel, also sharing them on Twitter to fanfare among Wire die-hards. Chaney’s The Wire Reunion playlist, also on YouTube, currently has 45 episodes consisting mostly of two- to five-minute clips. The playlist contains a hodgepodge of content, including behind-the-scenes clips from the photo shoot and a dedication to Michael K. Williams, who died of a drug overdose in 2021.
Glover, who’s also a founder of the legendary D.C. go-go band Backyard Band, has seen Chaney’s work up close and says he’s proud of him. “Tray is a super-grinder, man,” Glover says. “He’s always been like that since I met him.” He adds that being around his peers during the Pit shoot felt like a homecoming: “It was a good experience. It was fun. All of us was right there just chillin’, talking about old memories.” He says that McCulloh residents kept asking them if they were set to reprise The Wire.
The same reaction rippled over social media, prompting Chaney to publicly push back on the sentiment. He later clarified on social media that he’s seeking HBO’s help in platforming his Wire reunion content. “I really been pushing hard to bring The Wire Reunion to National Television,” he posted to X. “My 5 Season Experience on this critically acclaimed groundbreaking show was life-changing.”
Chaney says his plea “did get inside of some of the ears” of HBO executives. (Neither HBO nor David Simon replied to requests for comment on the matter.) In his eyes, The Wire deserves the kind of homegrown love shown to another HBO favorite, The Sopranos. In 2024, timed to the 25th anniversary of that series premiere, HBO premiered Wise Guy: David Chase and The Sopranos, which explored the life of Sopranos showrunner David Chase. And streaming service Max airs Talking Sopranos, a video podcast where Sopranos actors Michael Imperioli and Steve Schirripa break down every episode of The Sopranos alongside various castmates and writers.
Glover ponders, “You see them other shows doing reunions and things of that nature, you want to be like, ‘Wow, what’s going on?’ And people talk about us — actors, podcasters, the rappers, the singers. I don’t know, man. HBO, they push heavy on a lot of shows, and they make shows back-to-back. I’m really not sure why we haven’t done anything like that.”
Chaney says The Wire keeps earning new fans decades later because of its unique narrative. “[There] was no other show like it when it came out and right now, it’s no other show like it 23 years later,” he says, lauding the show’s holistic coverage of the War on Drugs from both the drug dealer and cop perspective, and its expansion into gripping stories about how the unions, education system, city hall, and the media industry were all faltering.
Glover adds, “It was just real. People around the world can relate to the stories. For any young kid that was outside doing what he was doing [on the show], any parent that was going to work can watch this show and watch what their kids had to endure dealing with school, being on the corners, dealing with police [and] politics, the whole nine. The Wire was a whole layout of what life is really about.”
Even though the series was set in Baltimore, it told a universal story, with deft writing that gave characters like Omar a sharper moral compass than the police officials and politicians. Viewers were captivated by the tragic tales of characters like Little, drug dealer Michael Lee, drug addict Bubbles (Andre Royo), and dock worker Frank Sobotka (Chris Bauer). That region-expanding appeal has had the Forestville native traveling the country for The Wire-related events. Last year, he and J.D. Williams went on a veritable Poot and Bodie appearance tour in Las Vegas and Miami (the two have also played close friends on Starz’s BMF and Bounce TV’s Saints & Sinners). And in May, there will be a The Wire Reunion event in Virginia Beach with actors such as Williams, Glover, and Johnson holding a panel discussion and autograph-signing.
Even though he’s not as close to some of his castmates, Chaney notes, “it’s still love there” when he sees them. He recounts that 20 years ago, Pelecanos told him, “Tray, you’re going to get paid in some type of way off of The Wire forever. This show’s going to be a part of your life, it’s going to be talked about forever.” And though the writer’s words didn’t fully register to him as a kid — Chaney was a 19-year-old rapper who’d opened for Big Daddy Kane when his manager urged him to audition for the HBO pilot — they do now. Chaney says he feels pride in maintaining professional relationships with his castmates, which he hopes to parlay into more films and commercials, branding deals with cannabis companies, and any other kind of engagement that makes sense.
“I still, to this day, 23 years later, put money in cast members’ pockets to pull up and do autograph signings, even if I’m not there,” he says. “I just feel like I wanted to pay homage forever to a show that gave a young kid from Forestville, Maryland, a chance back then.”
Chaney says that he’s invigorated to keep spearheading The Wire Reunion on his own. But ultimately, he would love to work with HBO on these efforts. “It might not happen today, it might not happen tomorrow, but eventually, I just got a big feeling it’s going to happen,” he says. “Or what I’m doing right now is going to get so big until they going to have to call. I’m building it from the ground up, and I already got the motion.”
From Rolling Stone US
