The Wire masterminds

13/08/2009

David Simon, George Pelecanos and leading Harvard professor on why The Wire is best

David Simon

There are no half-measures for David Simon, the single-minded creator of The Wire. Television critic Ken Tucker calls him, only half-witheringly, “the most brilliant Marxist ever to run a TV show”.

Simon himself concedes The Wire, a show plotted by outsiders angry at the failures of social policy and the limitations of the traditional cop show, was never supposed to happen. The most daringly ambitious drama in TV history has its roots in the books the former Baltimore Sun journalist wrote after he quit the newsroom in disgust at cutbacks and the aimlessness of his bosses. 

Homicide, an unsparing account about his year with Baltimore’s detectives, became an HBO mini-series and laid the foundation for an even more ambitious project. “I had to accept that the truth won’t always set you free when it comes to drama,” Simon tells The Big Issue. “Life is anti-drama. In an act of storytelling, you’re obliged to entertain. A season of Homicide was interconnected episodes, like a short story collection. But I wanted to do something bigger. When it came to writing The Wire, it seemed conceivable to do Ulysses. It was the next logical step in the medium – something more like a visual novel.”

The literary comparisons are not as highfalutin as they might sound to the uninitiated. Critics have, not unfairly, summoned up the ghosts of Tolstoy, Dickens and the Greek tragedians to explain The Wire’s vast canvas and concern for the fate of helpless individuals pulled this way and that by larger, inexorable forces. A recent Guardian readers’ poll found it the greatest TV programme of the decade.

“I’m not sure why the show is so popular with British audiences,” says Simon. “It’s a very dark and dystopian vision of America – maybe that plays better in the UK. There is a great deal of affection for human beings in The Wire. It’s only cynical about institutions and policy.” Despite the show causing a stir with Baltimore’s police officers, dealers and councilmen, Simon remains downbeat about the prospects of change.

“We live in one of the most schizophrenic cultures in the modern world. Half the adult men of colour in this city are unemployed. The problem is as bad as it’s always been and the other half endures as if it doesn’t live right next door,” he says.

“In America, we don’t need everyone in employment to run our economy, which leads to the denigration of human beings and an underclass, and so they created their own powerful economic engine. Our capitalism works really well, but if it’s not mitigated by social policy then you’ve got Baltimore. The Wire is really a show about the America that got left behind.”

Having completed Generation Kill, a seven-episode HBO series on the war in Iraq based on journalist Evan Wright’s dispatches, Simon is working on yet another faultline in the American psyche: New Orleans.

Titled Treme, the drama will focus on the musicians’ neighbourhood in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina. The producer has enlisted a familiar coterie of crime writers, journalists and well-known local faces. Simon, a frequent visitor to the city and major fan of New Orleans music, insists he will tackle the project with the same seriousness of purpose.

 “It’s basically a post-Katrina history of the city. It will be rooted in events that everybody knows. What it’s not going to be is a happy stroll through David Simon’s record collection. It should not be a tourism slide show. If we do it right, it will be about why New Orleans matters.”
In a way that few could ever expect from a television show, The Wire accomplishes an extraordinary task. Over the course of five seasons, the show reveals the systemic inequality that constrains the lives of the urban poor.

According to its creator and chief writer David Simon, the show initially set out to expose the drug war as a fraudulent attack on the urban poor and communities of colour. Subsequent seasons sought to examine the role of other social forces in creating and maintaining inequality.

White middle-class stereotypes of inner-city blacks often reflect the American belief system on poverty and welfare – namely that people fail to succeed in life because of personal inadequacies. Indeed, Americans remained strongly disposed to the idea that individuals are largely responsible for their economic situations. 

The portrayals in The Wire are anything but shallow caricatures of the urban poor. Instead, the characters were consistently drawn with sincere complexity. The Wire develops morally complex characters on each side of the law, and with its scrupulous exploration of the inner workings of various institutions (including drug-dealing gangs, the police, politicians, unions, public schools and the print media), viewers become aware that individuals’ decisions and behaviour are often shaped by, and indeed limited by, forces beyond their control.

Anyone who watches season four will come away with a clear understanding of how the public school system has failed these students and why the atmosphere in these schools is so devastating. Quite unlike the Bush-era approach to the urban poor, which utilises a simplistic delineation between good and bad, right and wrong, and assigns blame in all the wrong places, the show impressively disentangles the complex structure of urban inequality and exposes its systemic roots.

There are undoubtedly many issues Simon and his colleagues did not address. The real problem is that only one hour a week was set aside to examine the pressing issues of social inequality for a few months each year on a single premium cable network. The Wire is a valuable source of political education that must accompany effective attempts at reform.

by Adam Forrest

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Street-wise thinking

Professor William Julius Wilson, Harvard University sociolgist, explains why The Wire enhances our understanding of a divided America

In a way that few could ever expect from a television show, The Wire accomplishes an extraordinary task. Over the course of five seasons, the show reveals the systemic inequality that constrains the lives of the urban poor.

According to its creator and chief writer David Simon, the show initially set out to expose the drug war as a fraudulent attack on the urban poor and communities of colour. Subsequent seasons sought to examine the role of other social forces in creating and maintaining inequality.

White middle-class stereotypes of inner-city blacks often reflect the American belief system on poverty and welfare – namely that people fail to succeed in life because of personal inadequacies. Indeed, Americans remained strongly disposed to the idea that individuals are largely responsible for their economic situations. 

The portrayals in The Wire are anything but shallow caricatures of the urban poor. Instead, the characters were consistently drawn with sincere complexity. The Wire develops morally complex characters on each side of the law, and with its scrupulous exploration of the inner workings of various institutions (including drug-dealing gangs, the police, politicians, unions, public schools and the print media), viewers become aware that individuals’ decisions and behaviour are often shaped by, and indeed limited by, forces beyond their control.

Anyone who watches season four will come away with a clear understanding of how the public school system has failed these students and why the atmosphere in these schools is so devastating. Quite unlike the Bush-era approach to the urban poor, which utilises a simplistic delineation between good and bad, right and wrong, and assigns blame in all the wrong places, the show impressively disentangles the complex structure of urban inequality and exposes its systemic roots.

There are undoubtedly many issues Simon and his colleagues did not address. The real problem is that only one hour a week was set aside to examine the pressing issues of social inequality for a few months each year on a single premium cable network. The Wire is a valuable source of political education that must accompany effective attempts at reform.

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George Pelecanos

George Pelecanos, best-selling crime novelist, wrote some of the most celebrated episodes of The Wire. He explains what made the show work and why he wanted to kick his colleague’s ass…

The Wire was lightening in a bottle. I worked on the show from the first season, but it wasn’t until the third season that I figured out all that it could be: the complexity of the stories, the way we could bring so many aspects of society together. I have to give David Simon credit because he had it all figured out in his head from the beginning. At first I thought I was just going to work on a cop show.

We always tried to be honest. We tried to show that if we took the money spent on the disastrous ‘war on drugs’ and spent it on education, treatment, and preparing young people for the world, we might give people a reason to get up in the morning other than drug addiction.

In the writers’ room, we would always discuss the problem of potentially glamorising the violence. I don’t want to get too much away, but in the scenes where characters you’ve been following are murdered, their deaths are sudden. It’s a let-down in a sense, because the music doesn’t swell and nothing happens in slo-motion.

There was a healthy competition between the writers. When Richard Price joined the team (author of Clockers) I wanted to show him what I could do. I like the guy, but I’d tell him: “I want to kick your ass.” I’m working with David Simon on the HBO series Treme, and I’m developing a film project, but I don’t think I’ll get the chance to work on a television show as complete as The Wire ever again.