Word: simonizes
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...team of Baltimore cops used in a season-long probe of a drug gang. At first blush, it sounded too conventional for the home of The Sopranos. A police drama on HBO? What's next? A sitcom about a friendly Martian? "We were the 'gritty cop show,'" David Simon, the former police reporter who created the series, recalls of some dismissive early reviews...
...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...
...next lucky group that gets to matter less is journalists. In the final season, Simon goes inside the fictionalized offices of his former employer, the Baltimore Sun. (He credits the newspaper for being "gracious" enough to let him use the name.) The idea, says Simon, is to ask, while continuing to lay out the problems that manifest themselves in bodies and police cases, "What were [the journalists] doing when Rome was burning? What were they paying attention...
What this means is doing less with less and cutting corners to make it look like more, sometimes with disastrous results. The lie of "more with less" is, in a way, the heart of the series. "The Wire's basically about the end of an empire," says Simon. "It's about, This is as much of America as we've paid for. No more, no less. We didn't pay for a New Orleans that's protected from floods the way, say, the Netherlands is. The police department gets what it pays for, the city government gets what it pays...
Renowned opera singer Simon Estes sang "Precious Lord, Take My Hand" for Washington, adding a robust, operatic vibrato to a spiritual he said was a favorite of Martin Luther King...