The Wire has to be one of the greatest shows on television.
The Wire is a social/political show than it is entertainment. This belongs here.
Here's an interview/podcast of David Simon the creator of The Wire.
http://marcsteinerblog.wordpress.com/2008/03/04/3408-the-wire-podcasts-david-simon/The Wire podcasts: David SimonOur Wire podcast series continues with a forty minute interview with David Simon! Sunday is getting closer. In the meantime, hear what The Wire’s creator has to say about the show. Click
here for the complete audio interview (you can also right click and choose “Save Target As” to save the MP3 so you can put it on a cd or portable MP3 player.) Click
here to read the transcript.
since I doubt any of you will read or listen to it. I will copy/paste some of the juicy parts of the interview!
I can’t wait to see the final episode of this, and kind of reflect on that. Many people have The Wire is going to end up being one of these things that’s studied in colleges 20 years from now when you want to look at what urban America was like at the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st century. David Simon: Hopefully, it won’t be looked upon for its nostalgia. Hopefully some stuff is gonna get better, you know?
Do you think so? How does that live within you? David Simon: Listen, I don’t. I don’t. Politically, I am a pessimist at this point. I don’t believe we can actually even recognize our fundamental problems, much less begin to address them. And that is what the last season of The Wire was about. So, no, I don’t think it’s going to get better. But having said that, I live in Baltimore, and I also happen to be an American, and I’m with everyone else who’s waiting around to see the game on Saturdays, and you know, trying to figure out where you can get a good meal, and you know, looking at the price of gas at the tank, and Jesus, you know, I’d love The Wire to be wrong about everything. This is not a gleeful pessimism, it’s a worried pessimism. And if The Wire is wrong, nobody will be happier than me.
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And he hasn’t given up on that either. One of the other things that really fascinates me, I think the challenges of viewer’s psyche, the American psyche, watching The Wire, is the question of honor and humanity, and the levels on which it’s found, and where it’s not, and how it crosses all plains from the corner, to the police officers, whoever else you’re portraying, that’s something that really challenges, kind of, our notion of what honor, honesty, and humanity mean. David Simon: Right. I’m not interested in, like, labels of good and evil. Like, this guy’s a drug dealer so he’s evil. This guy’s a cop, so he’s good. Or this guy’s a politician, so he’s either good or evil. He’s either a good guy, a reformer, or a bad guy, a guy who needs to be thrown out of office. That whole dynamic is, this probably is hyperbole but I’m going to go for it anyway, that’s the pornography of American entertainment. That’s every cop show and every lawyer show. Every single drama that is offered up for popular entertainment is on some level a political or cultural form of pornography, and I’m tired of it and it bores the hell out of me. That’s not to say that there aren’t moments where it’s done so well that I want to stand up and cheer now and then. Give me Atticus Finch and Gregory Peck, and yeah, I’m in for a pound along with everybody else. But it’s done so badly so often that there’s nothing there anymore. It’s been almost eviscerated. And, we were after something else. We were trying to look at systems, and systemic failure. We were depicting an America that has become a “can’t do” country. We can’t resolve. We can’t get the intelligence right on Iraq. We can’t figure out what these guys are doing in flight schools all over the country. We can’t tell ourselves the truth about No Child Left Behind and look behind the stats. We can’t tell ourselves that our police department is making up stats so a guy can be elected governor. It’s like, whatever the task is, we will somehow find a way not to do it. That, to me, is America at the millennium, I’m sorry to say. I no longer believe that we are the “can do” harbinger of the world’s last best hope.
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Thanks a lot, man. David Simon: Sure, thank you. I gotta tell you this, too, and I know it didn’t come up in the interview, but this is the part that I’m totally loving this year, which is everyone’s paying attention to the fabricator, the fabricating reporter, because that’s the overt outrage in this story, but the real critique of the media that’s in this season of The Wire is that with the exception of a very good act of journalism on either end, you know, in the beginning episode, they dig the stuff out of the city council meeting. They do a good piece of adversarial journalism, and at the end, the Fletcher character writes a beautiful narrative piece about Bubbles. Between those bookends, The Baltimore Sun depicted misses every single story. You know what’s going on in the world. You know they’re cooking the stats. You know that No Child Left Behind third grade test scores are bullshit. You know how the Clay Davis prosecution was undercut. The viewer knows everything and they see just where the disconnect is with the eviscerated, half-gutted newspaper missing the real dynamic of the city, episode by episode. Down to not knowing who Prop Joe is, and running it as a brief. That’s the total theme. And here is the great moment of meta. I am the king of meta. With the exception of one or two guys who’ve been watching closely, it as tv, but the journalists are just freaking out, and, angry and petulant. They sound like a heard of cats in the alley. And not one of them is referencing that. And if you think about it, it’s so beautifully meta. All across the country, newspapers that have been killed by out of town ownership, are missing, are no longer covering their city in a viable way. That’s depicted, and nobody notices that it’s depicted.
But it’s so obvious, it’s not just, see, even in the middle, when you talk about, because most of the characters in the newsroom are honorable newsmen trying to do a job. David Simon: Absolutely, but between the economic preamble of the internet and the cutbacks and everything, and the fact that, the ambitions are so stunted and small trick, in terms of the Pullitzers and prize journalism.
When you look at what they’re capable of, in terms of sustained journalism, that’s the depicted tragedy. And nobody will talk, it’s not that they’re not arguing about it, they don’t even see it. Which is again, I thought the king of meta. They don’t see it because they don’t actually see it in the newspapers. If they did, they’d be freakin out, saying we don’t cover our cities anymore. That’s why people have turned away. So, I’m fascinated by the fact. I figured I’d pick an argument, and they’d argue over that depiction. They don’t even notice it.
That’s amazing.
David Simon: It’s a season about, we can’t even recognize our own problems, and the institution that’s supposed to recognize problems, can’t even recognize it’s own. They’re arguing about whether the fabricator is a fair portrayal, and whether the editor’s would, you know. Yeah I know guys, that’s the easy part. Look at how the newspaper connects or doesn’t connect to the city. The only guy who got it was a guy Brian Lowry who writes for Variety. He used to be at the L.A. Times, and now he’s at Variety, and I think it’s the distance of walking away from a newspaper, and standing a few steps away. He got it instantly. Everybody else is arguing about, you know, they’re arguing about character, they’re arguing about this scene or that scene. Why would, you know, Zurawick is about the cameos of Olesker. He’s like, you know, a little something about forest and trees, you know. They’re arguing about whether or not Alma would have driven down, why didn’t she just look at her first front-page byline on the website.
Those are such minor details. Actually, Dave and I talked about that on the air together.
David Simon: Oh, I never heard it.
Cause I thought that everyone had missed it. He and I really did disagree about the analysis of what that was about.
David Simon: Yeah, it’s amazing how forest and trees this thing is. I feel like I’m the king of meta. I really do. I’m loving it. It’s just beautiful. I’m really having a fun time with it. It’s making me giggle.
