Word: copping
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...wire is something that connects. All The Wire's characters face the same forces in a bottom-line, low-margin society, whether they work for a city department, a corporation or a drug cartel. A pusher, a homicide cop, a teacher, a union steward: they're all, in the world of The Wire, middlemen getting squeezed for every drop of value by the systems they work for. "Every day, they matter less as individuals," says Simon...
...exist without the kind of long-form journalism it's hard to pay for today. As a Sun reporter, Simon spent a year on Baltimore's drug corners in 1988 for an assignment that turned into a book and then an NBC series, Homicide. His next project, with former cop and Wire partner Ed Burns, became the book and HBO miniseries The Corner. But then, frustrated at being unable to fit the complexities of street life and the drug war into the news columns, he took a buyout and went into fiction full-time...
...tragedy about fated individuals, not Shakespearean tragedy about heroic individuals--but his show doesn't play like a tract or a thesis. It's full of memorable characters, like Omar (Michael Kenneth Williams), the principled bandit who robs from drug dealers; Detective Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West), the boozy, dogged cop trying to work cases the city won't pay for; and Bubbles (Andre Royo), the recovering junkie fighting his addiction like Sisyphus pushing a boulder of dope up a mountain...
Simon believes the focus on minorities has kept the show's ratings down. "When people say it's not a 'water-cooler show,'" he says, "that's about the whitest thing they can say." The show is also dark, metaphorically, by the standards of nearly every previous TV cop show. "On commercial TV, there's no f______ way you can say, 'This is America, and we're not all right anymore,'" says Simon. "Not if every 12 minutes you have to say, 'Hey, we're sorry we brought you down, but check out the new iPods!'" And the show...
...gallows humor and hustles. In the first scene of Season 5, detectives use a low-tech scam to work a confession from a perp: they load a photocopier with papers reading TRUE and FALSE and convince him it's a lie detector. "The bigger the lie," says a cop, "the more they believe...