David Simon, "The Wire" creator: Mr. Media Interview Today, it’s January 26, 2007, and I am sitting across from David Simon, creator of the critically-acclaimed and Peabody Award-winning HBO series, The Wire. We are speaking at The Inn at the Bay in St. Petersburg, Florida, where Simon spent the last week working with students at Eckerd College. The fiftieth episode and fourth-season finale of The Wire aired just a few weeks ago, and the fifth season goes into production in March, so Simon is hopefully enjoying a vacation of sorts.

I am an admitted late-comer to The Wire, having seen my first episode just last September in a New Jersey hotel room. I was struck by the show’s tension and extraordinarily tight script and character development, which has often been overshadowed by better-known HBO shows, such as The Sopranos and Deadwood. If you like those shows and you haven’t already caught The Wire, you should consider it assigned viewing. Fortunately, the first season of The Wire is now airing on the BET channel, so us late-comers can start catching up.

If you haven’t seen The Wire, you may still be familiar with David Simon’s work. A former Baltimore Sun crime reporter, he is the writer that the Baltimore Chamber of Commerce no doubt loves to hate, having co-authored (with Edward Burns) the Baltimore-based book, The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner City Neighborhood, and the subsequent HBO series, The Corner, and providing the inspiration and a number of scripts for the Baltimore-based NBC show, Homicide: Life on the Street. Another of his Baltimore-based true crime books, Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, was the basis for Homicide.


BOB ANDELMAN/Mr. MEDIA: So David, what is it about Baltimore? Why do you hate it so much?

DAVID SIMON: Actually, I live there. I live in the city. I have great affection for it. I am invested in the city’s future in the same way as other people who are its boosters. I just feel compelled to comment on that which I covered as a newspaper reporter and as an author and these elemental problems that are at the core of our urban experience. We are not going to solve the dilemmas and the crises and the problems of the city without first addressing them intelligently, and that really is the impulse behind The Wire and behind all of the work, and so I don’t feel as if I am targeting Baltimore or any city per se, but I am aggressively making an argument about the problems that are confronting cities.

ANDELMAN: Could it be any city that….

SIMON: It could be, although I think the problems are paramount in post-industrial places like Baltimore, where the manufacturing base has disappeared and where a large under-educated, under-skilled population is without meaningful work. I think if you look at places like in the Rust Belt – Baltimore, Cleveland, St. Louis, Chicago, Philadelphia, these are places that are experiencing the most profound problems not only with crime and intractable drug culture but also with almost an existential crisis of the population.

ANDELMAN: It’s an interesting place, right? The hour tolling behind us.

SIMON: That’s right.






ANDELMAN: And is the city really as interesting as someone watching these shows would think, or are you compacting so much that it just seems tenser and more exciting? Exciting may not be the best word for it.

SIMON: Listen, life is, honestly, anti-drama, and if you chart people’s lives on a day-to \-day basis, I think it probably doesn’t add up to anything that could be a stage play or a teleplay or a screen play, so there is a certain dramatic hyperbole that is required in any presentation of theater, but we are really trying to root it in the real. These are all events that either have happened and that were either covered by myself or policed by my partner in writing, Ed Burns, who was a homicide detective for twenty years, or occurred to him when he was teaching school in the city school system for seven years, or were covered by Bill Zorzi, who covered city government for twenty years for the Baltimore Sun or… I could go on. It really is rooted in the experiences of the writers as either journalists or authors or people contending in Baltimore. But some of the events didn’t occur in exactly the way and shape and precision that we are describing, and we are taking some license. There is some fictionalization, and ultimately, there is almost a comfort in that, in that you can almost be more honest in a way about what you feel about events when you are not beholden to any kind of argument or dialectic with real people. In some ways, some of the most honest things I felt I have ever written about the city have been in a fictional sense.

ANDELMAN: The thing that really struck me the first time I watched it, and this week, I will admit, I have watched twelve episodes, it’s been sort of a marathon week…

SIMON: Hard week for you.

ANDELMAN: Well, I don’t want to say it’s been fun, because you would interpret that the wrong way by the type of show, but it’s been very interesting. The street corner dialogue, the drug-dealing dialogue, who’s writing that stuff? It’s an incredible…

SIMON: It’s all scripted. One of the things I am a little bit resentful for is we have a remarkable cast of African-American actors who are utterly unacknowledged by the industry. They are never nominated for anything. They are never regarded as having created any characterizations or achieved any sense of craft for what they are doing. It’s almost as if they think we turn the camera on people, and they just were being; that’s the way they are. And in fact, these are incredibly professional actors who are reading from a script. The dialogue is from the world that Ed policed, that I covered as a crime reporter in Baltimore for twelve years that is very common to us from having spent time in West Baltimore. We are who we are. I am sure we miss things because we are a couple of white guys, but what we catch we catch because we have good ears, and we are careful and pay attention and we are patient listeners.





ANDELMAN: And that’s the thing. I mean, I sit here across from you, and we are about the same age, we both have the same follicle challenges, and I look at you, and I listen to you talk, and I think about the incredible dialogue. The dialogue that I have been listening to so heavily this week before we met, the thing that really struck me is that you or I, I, as much as I like to think of myself as a pretty good writer, I couldn’t write as crisply as that dialogue on the street. I could write the stuff in the political situations, I think, and in the police station, and the classroom, but that corner stuff…

SIMON: But you could if you were exposed to it for day after day and if you… It really is the result of years of reporting. Even when we tried to acquire a new world in The Wire that we don’t know anything about, we are pretty rigorous about taking what time we do have and diving in and trying to acquire everything we can. In the second season of the show, we spent a great deal of time at the Port of Baltimore dealing with the world of longshoremen and stevedores. We hired one other former Sun reporter, Raphael Alvarez, whose family is in the maritime tradition and who knows the Port very well, and that was valuable, and Raphael was a great aid, and we leaned hard on him, but the rest of us all threw ourselves at the actual ILA, the union, and at the Maryland Port Authority and at the Steamship Trade Association and asked for all of the help we could get in the months leading up to production and the creation of the scripts, because we didn’t know enough to write that world. And that’s something that just doesn’t happen if your impulse is to create an entertainment. The average Hollywood television production is going to involve a bunch of people who will pick a story line, and then their research will consist of consulting other Hollywood productions. They will be writing the version of what other Hollywood TV shows say drug dealers sound like or stevedores sound like, or they will be channeling, it it’s stevedores, they will be channeling On The Waterfront, which is a great movie, but it’s certainly about half a century old…

ANDELMAN: Literally that old, yeah.

SIMON: And classic. I have watched it time and again, but they will not endeavor to go out into the world and acquire what I would regard as sufficient authority to speak in these voices, and it would bother me not to. I would be scared. I would be frightened of my own ignorance.

ANDELMAN: The conversation, the dialogue in The Wire puts you in that place as much as the same aspects of The Sopranos puts you there, or even Entourage or Deadwood. That’s the thing that… You start watching that, and you get caught on that, and you’ve just gotta keep listening.

SIMON: Right. I think what distinguishes premium cable at its best in terms of drama is writers who are absolutely committed to creating a world not as an artifice for entertainment but as an artifice to speak to larger themes and to do it in such a way that the universe is entirely credible. I believe that David Chase and his crew know these guys in North Jersey. By that, I know they are fictional, but they know that world, and they have it surrounded, and to the extent that he has created a universe around Deadwood, I think David Milch and his people have done the same thing. Partly that’s because you don’t have to play toward the lowest common denominator of television on premium cable. People are paying for it. They are going to sit there in their chairs, they are going to want to catch the nuance, they are going to want more nuance, whereas in television, in broadcast, my episodes are fifty-eight minutes, theirs are forty with commercials, and every twelve minutes, there is a break, and they start to sell you some soap, and you get up to go to the bathroom, and you get up to go to the refrigerator, and you might come back, and you might miss three minutes, and then you are busy unwrapping the ice cream bar, and pretty soon you have missed three scenes of dialogue. Television is a pretty passive experience in American culture. It is a tool not of provocation but of relaxation, and if that’s the nature of it, then nobody’s going to be able to tell an intelligent story, but premium cable has sort of changed the equation. And the other way it’s done that, not just by getting rid of commercials, but you can catch The Wire four or five times a week on HBO. You can catch it on demand at your leisure, in your time, and you can eventually buy the DVDs. At that point, it’s no longer a scheduled event, and if you miss one episode, or if you get a phone call in the middle of one, you are still going to be able to catch up on it if you choose, and that’s revolutionary for television.



©2007 by Bob Andelman. All rights reserved.

Labels: Baltimore, David Simon, HBO, Homicide: Life on the Street, The Corner, The Wire

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