While shooting a scene for The Wire in the Baltimore city morgue, cinematographer Uta Briesewitz noticed a large pile of photographs of African American men. They were, she said, “beautiful young men, and all dead. One had a bullet to the head. Another had two bullet holes to the chest. They were already cleaned up, so you just saw these black holes there. It was not messy. It was not bloody. All these men looked like they were sleeping. This was when it really hit home for me, what a tragedy this all is. It hit me really hard.”

Initially, the 60 episodes of The Wire from 2002 to 2008 were largely ignored by critics and award-givers alike. But for years now the series has been regarded as one of the greatest TV shows ever made. Its creator was the one-time Baltimore crime reporter David Simon. He worked with Ed Burns, a former Baltimore detective whose takedown of a drug kingpin using a wiretap was the basis of The Wire, and a team of writers that included the novelists Dennis Lehane, Richard Price and George Pelecanos.

Together with actors including Michael B Jordan, Idris Elba and Dominic West they crafted an immensely powerful series that was characterised by its remarkable realism and outstanding writing. Despite its naturalism, none of the dialogue was improvised. According to Wendell Pierce (who played Detective William “Bunk” Moreland), “they were on us about the words, man. Every piece is important. ‘All the pieces matter’. That was the mantra.”

Jonathan Abrams has talked to nearly everyone involved in making the show and this oral history is essential reading for any fan. President Obama said The Wire was his favourite show and the gun-slinging Omar Little (Michael K Williams) was the character he liked most. Complex, novelistic and moving, it was a highly original police drama. But as Lehane says, Simon “never saw it as a cop show”. As well as exposing the failure of the war on drugs and highlighting the plight of its forgotten casualties, his theme was political: the destruction of the working class and its replacement by an underclass. Like Brecht, Simon was not interested in heroes or villains, but in showing people the deeper social and economic causes of their suffering. He wanted to say to them: “This is the world. This is how it works.”

• All the Pieces Matter is published by No Exit. To order a copy for £11.04 (RRP £12.99) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.