Although some admirers describe "The Wire" as Dickensian, creator David Simon credits Stanley Kubrick’s "Paths of Glory" for influencing the series. While Kubrick’s movie was a social critique on the power abuse that French generals inflicted on their underlings during World War I, Simon’s series shed a similar light on the failed top-down approach to control the War on Drugs in Baltimore.

In the "Paths of Glory," the villains in power give orders that were death traps for the lower-ranking soldiers, and punish those who refuse to obey them. Simon compared these villains to "The Wire’s" upper-management pair of Stan Valchek and William Rawls, who used their charges as pawns to get promoted, and when that failed, punished them as scapegoats.

Simon also explained that the "Glory" characters played by Adolph Menjou and George Macready "serve their role in the story" as villains, even if they were to "show you their warm fuzzy side". He brought up this point to counter the argument that the "The Wire" didn’t have real "bad guys," since the series often showed the nuanced sides of morally-compromised characters like Marlo.