What Is “Systems Storytelling,” and How Can It Help Us Learn?: “The Wire” as Gateway Drug
I am one of those Wire elitists. As in, the HBO television series from the early 2000s. The Wire is that police drama that’s famous for having tons of people who plan to watch it. The people that finally get around to watching usually place it up among the top things they’ve ever seen. I am one of those people, convinced that David Simon’s sprawling Baltimore opera is the high water mark of what television can do as a medium. And like many other Wire nuts, I’m fairly obnoxious about it. I lean into it hard.
It’s not just the murderer’s row of indelible characters (see above) or the dozens of memorable quotes that the show generated (“The Bunk is strictly a suit-and-tie m*****f*****.”). The show was radical in its approach. After a critically acclaimed first season following Baltimore detectives on the trail of the Barksdale drug cartel, the show took a hard pivot to look at corruption in the white working-class enclave of the city docks in Season 2. Half the cast was replaced; it was almost a new show. Through this gambit, The Wire showed its hand: it was not going to be another police drama about cops and robbers. It wasn’t even going to be about Baltimore, really.
The Wire, unlike any other show before or since, tackled big-ticket themes like the death of work, corruption and pettiness in the police ranks, inequity in our schools, Big Media cynicism, the huge con that is the American criminal justice system, and beyond. It was like muckraking journalism told in poetry. Beloved characters came and went (and returned sometimes), all to serve these huge thematic efforts. There were plotlines, to be sure, but they weaved in and out of each other in a way that you’d never see in other excellent prestige television like The Sopranos or Breaking Bad, which depended on iconic characters and propulsive storylines. More than anything, The Wire was less concerned about a group of characters doing things, and more about documenting a place and time through characters doing things.
It’s a unique style of storytelling that I like to call “systems storytelling” (h/t to Eugene Wei, who actually came up this name once over dinner), and it’s focused on using characters, places, and events to draw larger thematic points. Now, all good storytelling is serving a theme, from Goodfellas to Gojira. But systems storytellers are really using the characters and plots as pawns toward a bigger, bolder statement. They are less personal and psychological, more schematic and sociological. The Wire is not the only show to do this, of course. There are many examples from this century alone. Simon has deployed this tactic successfully on other shows like Treme and The Deuce, and David Milch followed suit in the ill-fated Luck. You can see systems storytelling in a novel like Michael Faber’s The Crimson Petal and the White, an unflinching satire of Victorian class systems. You can see it in non-fiction work like The Unwinding, George Packer’s pre-Trump account of America at a crossroads. You can see it in the third season of Serial, where Sarah Koenig moves her wildly popular podcast from its whodunit roots to a morality play about crime and punishment in Cleveland’s main courthouse. It’s in the freakishly accurate side missions that make up Los Angeles (OK, “LoS SAntOs!!”) in Grand Theft Auto V. And finally, it might be most prevalent in much of the best journalism happening today; Andrea Elliott’s riveting Invisible Child for The New York Times being one shining example, which contrasts the new Gilded Age of New York City against a young girl and her homeless family.
It’s hard to find a lot of movies that do systems storytelling well, which is kind of on-brand, actually. Most films are punchy explosions of plot and dialogue. Telling the story of an institution is pretty hard to do in the format (Robert Altman being a clear exception, with films like Nashville helping define the technique). Movies just aren’t great at that kind of sprawl, and when they are — The Godfather, natch — they’re usually carried along by a larger-than-life character. Systems storytelling is trying to comment on some institution through the use of characters and plot, and it’s the institution that is the star of the production.
OK, so…what’s the problem? Current modes of story consumption like on-demand, micro-stories, social storytelling, and bingeing are actually pushing systems storytelling to greater prominence. Just let the market work its magic, right? Sure! I don’t think there’s actually a problem, per se, more an opportunity. At Caseworx and in my research, I’m interested in storytelling as a learning device, and I’ve come to see systems storytelling as possibly the most effective way to employ story. Why? Because of a secret ingredient: empathy.
We’ve written about it a bit before, but empathy and focus are really the keys to advanced learning, because virtually all of the valuable advanced skills — communication, leadership, creativity, innovation — require working with people. There’s no way to consistently get over on people, or bully them, or use smoke and mirrors. At some point, you have to work with them. Empathy is probably the most important component in working effectively with people, and building those truly hard-to-master skill sets. Stories have always been some of the best empathy delivery systems; systems storytelling is like HGH, ironically, because of its portrayal of external factors. Zeynep Tufecki wrote a fascinating piece in Scientific American recently, giving us great insight into why systems storytelling (called “sociological storytelling” here) is so effective†:
In sociological storytelling, the characters have personal stories and agency, of course, but those are also greatly shaped by institutions and events around them. The incentives for characters’ behavior come noticeably from these external forces, too, and even strongly influence their inner life.
The hallmark of sociological storytelling is if it can encourage us to put ourselves in the place of any character, not just the main hero/heroine, and imagine ourselves making similar choices. “Yeah, I can see myself doing that under such circumstances” is a way into a broader, deeper understanding. It’s not just empathy: we of course empathize with victims and good people, not with evildoers.
But if we can better understand how and why characters make their choices, we can also think about how to structure our world that encourages better choices for everyone.
By more richly detailing the world around the characters, systems storytelling helps us align ourselves more fully with the characters negotiating with that world. Traditional storytelling simply lacks the time and space to do this, as it’s often focused on an individual’s journey through a world.†† So…that’s the upside. The downside is that it’s hard, very hard, to do systems storytelling well. Simon and Koenig and Rockstar Games are masters of the craft. How can educators take advantage of this tool?
Well, one way is to build on something that already exists. Systems storytelling tends to be modular in many ways; it’s not necessary to start from zero to add to the narrative. It’s hard, for example, it’s difficult to find a show that’s spawned more academic activity than The Wire. Any number of the stories from, say, the Crimetown podcast can isolate drugs in society, regional economic development, City Hall politics, race, and more. Students can learn some of the basics of building a viable community while shooting mutants in Fallout. It’s gratifying to build off of masterful storytelling and properties with which learners are already engaged. Don’t shy away from that. Second, systems storytelling is often participatory, so educators don’t have to be the master architect. They can be an editor or curator of learners’ narratives! Storycenter uses this technique often; for example, they curated Ukrainian students’ stories of corruption in their country to build a narrative tapestry around an issue that 70% of their young people consider a top issue. We’ve tried to employ the technique with Street Fighting Entrepreneurship, telling the stories of very diverse founders facing universal problems. There’s a spectrum of sophistication in these examples, but the bottom line holds: it’s within reach.
The moment in The Wire that will always stay with me is from that radical Season 2. Frank Sobotka, a corrupt union rep from the docks has seen all of his lying and cheating blow up in his face. A slimy wheeler-dealer from City Hall informs Frank that his grain pier — the huge job that would keep Sobotka’s struggling stevedores in work — is dead, due to an FBI investigation. Now, Frank is dirty, he’s racist, he’s no hero. But as the last chance to keep his men working walks out the door, Sobotka says:
“You know what the trouble is, Brucey? We used to make s*** in the country. Build s***. Now, we just put our hands in the next guy’s pocket.”
It is at once poetic, and a crystal clear indictment of how the Working Man has been left behind in America. And it’s systems storytelling that allows the audience to buy in 100% with the many non-heros that populate the show. The first step in making progress is understanding that the other side is not evil, that there’s a compelling reason why they’re doing what they’re doing. That’s an education job, and we have a great tool to do it.
† A bit of a digression here. While I’m very thankful to Tufecki for the wonderful breakdown of sociological vs individual storytelling, I’d argue that Game of Thrones (Tufecki’s main target in the piece) was never sociological in architecture. GoT — like The Lord of the Rings or Star Wars or The Walking Dead — is still heavily driven by plot, with its characters consumed with things like throwing rings in mountains and sitting on metal chairs. Creating rich worlds and having a lot of characters may be a necessary condition of systems storytelling, but it is not sufficient. And I happen to think Season 8 of GoT was good!
†† To some, this argument may feel related to “systems thinking” — and it is! — but one of the persistent knocks on systems thinking is that it’s hard to come up with a method of making actionable decisions from such an analysis…story can be a way to do that…
Justin Wolske runs Caseworx and is EIR at Grid110, and would like to point out that hardly anyone actually watched The Wire when it aired, including himself…
