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Ben Sherlock is a Tomatometer-approved film and TV critic who runs the massively underrated YouTube channel I Got Touched at the Cinema. Before working at Screen Rant, Ben wrote for Game Rant, Taste of Cinema, Comic Book Resources, and BabbleTop. He's also an indie filmmaker, a standup comedian, and an alumnus of the School of Rock.
Warning! Series spoilers for The Wire, Stranger Things, Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad, The Walking Dead, and Succession.
Almost two decades ago, The Wire completely rewrote the rules for TV character deaths. When a character dies on TV, it’s supposed to be a big, dramatic moment where a beloved cast member bids farewell to their co-stars, but that’s not realistic. That’s not how death happens in real life. No one gets to give a flowery Hank Schrader-style monologue as their last words.
In The Walking Dead, Carl Grimes spent a whole episode sharing tender final moments with his loved ones, one by one. That’s certainly very nice, but it doesn’t exactly reflect the complexity of our relationship to death and our own mortality. The Wire didn’t downplay the horrors of death; it captured the suddenness, the confusion, the brutality.
Omar's Unceremonious Death In The Wire Broke All The Rules
When The Wire premiered, Omar Little instantly emerged as the fan favorite. As a sort of Robin Hood-type vigilante, Omar walked a fine line between both sides of the law. Michael K. Williams brought an effortless charisma that lit up the screen, and a pitch-perfect delivery of every one-liner, but he also brought depth and nuance that rounded Omar into a three-dimensional human being.
It’s rare that a TV show even considers killing off its breakout character; Daryl Dixon is still alive and kicking going into the fourth season of his spinoff. It’s almost impossible to create a character that resonates with so many people. So, when a TV show is bold enough to kill off a flagship character like Ned Stark, it makes a huge deal about it.
Even to this day, those are the rules for fan-favorite character deaths; we saw it just a few days ago with Eleven’s triumphant sacrifice in the Stranger Things finale. When The Wire killed off Omar in season 5, episode 8, “Clarifications,” it tore up that rulebook and did something no other TV show had dared to do.
We’ve seen Omar hold up an entire stash house at gunpoint. We’ve seen him in intense gun battles. But in the end, he isn’t taken out by a powerful drug lord in an epic shootout; he’s unceremoniously gunned down by a 10-year-old dealer with a hair trigger.
Very Few Shows Have Been Daring Enough To Copy The Wire's Best Character Death
Omar’s unceremonious death in The Wire was so effective that you would’ve thought a bunch of subsequent shows would copy it and kill their own darlings in similarly abrupt fashion. Shows like Stranger Things and House of the Dragon still make a big song and dance about killing off their characters, even now that it’s become commonplace.
The only other show that came close was Succession, which had Logan Roy drop dead all of a sudden on his private plane. His kids all got to have a final word with him over the phone, but it’s unlikely that he was conscious or even alive to hear those messages. The Wire was so ahead of its time that it took a risk 18 years ago that’s still considered a risk today.
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