[3] Pisano wrote her own book, Samurai Widow (1990), to counter the image of Belushi portrayed in Wired.

In 2013, Tanner Colby, who co-authored the 2005 book Belushi: A Biography with Pisano, wrote about how Wired exposes Woodward's strengths and weaknesses as a journalist.

[4] While in the process of researching the anecdotes related in the book, he found that while many of them were true, Woodward missed, or didn't seek out, their meaning or context.

[5] Colby notes that Woodward devotes a single paragraph to Belushi's grandmother's funeral, where he hit a low point and resolved to get clean for the filming of Continental Divide, while Woodward diligently documented every instance of drug abuse over a period of many years that he turned up.

He was smart, you know, he wasn't just given his break, and he had to work for what he had, and Woodward completely skirts that, and it's a depressing, sordid, tragic book, he jumps around the issue of the police probe, and the fact that some of the people that were purveying drugs to John were friends of police force members in Los Angeles, and this is something that he wimped out on, and I've heard that he really didn't write most of the book, that it was John Anderson, his researcher, who put down most of the material on paper, and for my part I just think that it's very depressing summer reading.The book was later adapted into a critically panned 1989 feature film also called Wired, in which Belushi was played by Michael Chiklis and Woodward was played by J.T.