No, The Wire is more properly a modern, televised extension of literary realism, like rolling up Balzac’s Comédie humaine with Zola’s Rougon-Macquart cycle, with some of the English writers thrown in: maybe more Bennett than Dickens, in certain ways, although Simon’s Baltimore grotesques are certainly Dickensian . . . when they’re not straight out of Poe. Add to that certain key moments of Stephen Crane and Frank Norris (and some others), and you’ve got yourself a working background to Simon’s epic cycle.
Dickens did publish serially, though, like a lot of nineteenth-century writers, so there is a fair comparison there: both forms, the nineteenth-century novel and twenty-first-century longform television serial, aspire to “bring the news” of the day to their audiences, and both occupy a central place in the cultural imaginary. So, notwithstanding your snark, you’re rather correct!
