The Wire
Cleaning Up
TV Flash files “Cleaning Up” as hour 12 of 60 in the TV Flash guide — The Wire (2002–2008) on HBO, season 1, episode 12, aired 2002-09-01, 60 min.
From the desk
How this hour is filed
This leaf is S01E12: listed hour 12 of 60 in the The Wire guide, hour 12 of 13 in season 1. It aired 2002-09-01 (60 min). The listed hour before it is “The Hunt” (S01E11). Next is “Sentencing” (S01E13).
Catalog log
Broadcast listing — not a TV Flash recap.
"This is me, yo, right here." - Wallace Avon and Stringer meet with their attorney, Maurice Levy, to discuss a potential leak in the wake of the raids. Wallace goes back to the pit and asks to be let back in but Stringer has another plan. With the loss of their wiretaps the detail takes a fresh approach and installs a camera in Avon's club. They catch Avon discussing a drug run with D'Angelo and arrest him en route.
Viewer FAQ
Where does Cleaning Up sit in the The Wire guide?
S01E12 is listed hour 12 of 60 — hour 12 of 13 in season 1, season 1 episode 12.
When did The Wire S01E12 air?
Cleaning Up aired 2002-09-01 and is listed at 60 minutes.
Where should I start The Wire?
Episode one of season one. The show is a five-volume novel; skipping the corner season to “get to the good part” is how you miss the grammar.
In the series
Why this series still plays
Watch it as a civic novel that happens to be television: each season a new institution, the same city refusing to be solved. Characters function inside systems, not merch. Start at the corner; stay for the report card — and for a newsroom closer that still argues with the first wire.
Open on a street that is already an argument. The first hour of The Wire does not introduce a hero so much as a jurisdiction: a corner, a courtroom, a police department already lying to itself about what it can solve. David Simon and Ed Burns write Baltimore as a set of interlocking machines — drugs, docks, City Hall, schools, the newsroom — and then ask television to behave like a novel that refuses a narrator’s mercy. If you came for an antihero origin story, the text will starve you politely. If you came to…
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Idris Elba’s Stringer Bell is The Wire’s MBA language trying to colonize a street that will not be colonized — civic instrument, not brand extension. David Simon’s Baltimore treats institutions as leads; Stringer is the corner with a…
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Sonja Sohn’s Kima Greggs made The Wire’s detective work feel like a civic novel, not a merch cop show — David Simon’s Baltimore in five institutional volumes, the corner never the point. On TV Flash she is the badge inside the system:…
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