Everything You Need to Know About The Wire in HD (Which Might Not Really Be in HD)

On August 22nd, Polygon Editor Arthur Gies uploaded a video to YouTube, the contents of which he claimed he'd seen on HBO earlier that day.

He followed that up with a tweet:

And for a little over a week, that was largely that.

Today, for whatever reason, that trailer blew up, leading to myriadarticles from many a pop-culture site blaring to the heavens the news of this minor miracle that The Wire, widely recognized as one of the best (if not the best) television shows in the history of the medium, would finally get a hi-def release.

Well... maybe. Maybe not.

Firstly:There is no hi-def version of the show available, and there never has been - which is why people are so excited by this prospect. If you own the DVDs, you already own the program in the highest possible quality (so far). The show was shot on film, and if HBO wished to go back to the negatives and re-scan a new master from those negatives, then it's entirely possible that the show could be pressed to blu-ray, and streamed on Amazon Prime and iTunes at native resolutions higher than 480p. But nobody seems to know if that's actually happened yet or not.

Also, to clarify: The Wire was never intended to be framed in any other aspect ratio but 4x3. There's a common misconception that the label "HD" is tied to aspect ratio and not image quality, and so HD video must be 16x9 or wider. This is not the case, as evidenced by the many4x3 films and television shows currently on blu-ray disc that take advantage of all that extra resolution. The camera negatives for The Wire contain more picture on both the top and sides of the frame than seen in broadcast and on DVD, but for aesthetic purposes, the show's creator David Simon decided to adhere to a more documentarian feel provided by the standard "TV-like" framing.

Secondly:David Simon has gone on record as saying he likes the aesthetics of The Wire's standard definition presentation. However, if you click that link I just provided, you'll see that like many people, David Simon was also confused as to what constitutes "HD" in the first place. After cinephiles in his blog's comments section corrected his mistaken assumption that hi-def is tied to aspect ratio instead of image quality, he said he might be up for a high-definition version of his show, but he'd have to see how it looked first, as an upscaled, reframed version of his show seen on the BBC looked, in his words, "awful."

Thirdly: HBO did have this marathon on their schedule, and people had already set their DVRs to record the show in the hopes they would be capturing a 1080p broadcast. The show has since been pulled from the schedule, and HBO told The Verge the removal was due to their remaster not being quite ready yet.

That's what worries me. I'm fairly sure their "remaster" is an upscale of the standard definition versions they already own, reframing the image to fit 16x9 televisions. Because that's what they've broadcast in the BBC previously, and it's also what they sent to Amazon Prime when they entered into their streaming deal earlier this year.

This is a screencap from my own DVD set.

This is a screencap from Amazon Prime's "HD" stream

To be fair, these images are both compressed, and most HD streams aren't all that high quality in the first place. But even keeping that in mind, you can see that the 16x9 HD version has a little more visual information on the left and right, a little less information at the top and bottom of the frame, the contrast seems to have been turned up slightly, but otherwise there is almost no real increase in overall image quality.

Looking at those two, it's obvious HBO didn't take the laziest route and just cut the top and bottom off the 4x3 image and call it a day. They're reframing shots as they go, a practice old videophiles remember as the dubious art of pan & scan. That's not to say this endeavor doesn't take a lot of work; reframing entire seasons scene by scene while upscaling the image and applying new filters to give it a more cinematic look isn't exactly easy. But it's also not really HD, either.

But you could still call it a "remaster," and you wouldn't be lying. That's not to say that maybe HBO hasn't been secretly scanning the film negatives, and David Simon's been keeping all this work under his hat for over a year. It'd be really cool if that was the case. But I'd think if HBO spent all that money for new scans and new transfers, that trailer would have said "new master" instead of "remaster," and there'd have been more of an announcement than just that one trailer, for a single marathon screening on HBO Signature.

Maybe I'll be surprised whenever it is that HBO puts this marathon back on their schedule, and I can see every tiny jiggle of Clay Davis' jowls in 1,080 lines of vertical resolution as he stretches the word "shit" like so much melted Laffy Taffy. But until then, I'm pretty certain this remaster is nothing more than HBO plugging a hole in their schedule with a broadcast of "HD" files that you can already watch if you're an Amazon Prime subscriber.

Let's all hope I'm wrong as hell.

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