Word: simonal
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Ironically, The Wire might well not 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...
...Wire, Simon and a staff of top-shelf crime writers like Richard Price are free to make things up. But in a way, the show is a variation on old-fashioned populist reportage à la Studs Terkel. It elevates the lowlifes and mocks the highlifes. It's steeped in lived experience, with voices as distinctive and regional as a crab boil. Simon may be angry and intellectual--The Wire differs from most TV drama, he says, because it's based in Greek tragedy about fated individuals, not Shakespearean tragedy about heroic individuals--but his show doesn't play like...
Which may be why The Wire has drawn an African-American and working-class following. The series has rerun on BET, and Simon recalls riding the A train, which runs through Harlem, on a visit to New York City to edit the show: "There were guys on Monday morning hawking bootleg DVDs of the episode that was on HBO Sunday night. The part of me who has a little pirate hat on his head thought that was pretty cool...
...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...
...Simon's progressive politics, The Wire betrays a kind of small-c conservative nostalgia for hard work and honor, for shoe-leather police work, for reporters who pound the pavement, even for criminals who try to follow some kind of code. The Wire offers a bird's-eye critique of society, but it doesn't look down on individuals. Its heroes are flawed, fated people who try even without hope, who teach kids with horrid home lives, who try to kick unshakable addictions, who do the hard labor of investigations even when their bosses punish them...