Profile on David Simon or Why "The Wire" Rocks

The New Yorker just released an article on David Simon, the creator of the Wire. I've been tooting the horn of the Wire for a while now, almost to the extent of a senile old man, but still, no one's really hearing me. The Wire is THE BEST TELEVISION SHOW EVER WRITTEN!!! I put my whole reputation on that. And I'm not talking about Desperate Housewives good or Gossip Girls good (am I really validating this show?). I'm talking about the smartest script ever written for a television screen. I'm talking smarter than any show I've ever watched or talked about including: The Sopranos, Smallville, Heroes, Weeds, 24, Studio 60 or any other show I can think of worth mentioning. It is actually so smart, it often gets overlooked by middle class America. Middle class America doesn't deal in smart. It deals in monotony, sticking to what works, and making sure their shows make a profit, without analyzing the adverse effects of bad television on the minds of its audience. The article is pretty long, and I can't really expect you to read the whole thing, especially without having the context of watching the show. We can't really expect anyone to read anything longer than 5 minutes because that's how big our attention span is these days. But I'll pull out things I like from the article.

“The Wire,” Simon often says, is a show about how contemporary American society—and, particularly, “raw, unencumbered capitalism”—devalues human beings. He told me, “Every single moment on the planet, from here on out, human beings are worth less. We are in a post-industrial age. We don’t need as many of us as we once did. So, if the first season was about devaluing the cops who knew their beats and the corner boys slinging drugs, then the second was about devaluing the longshoremen and their labor, the third about people who wanted to make changes in the city, and the fourth was about kids who were being prepared, badly, for an economy that no longer really needs them. And the fifth? It’s about the people who are supposed to be monitoring all this and sounding the alarm—the journalists. The newsroom I worked in had four hundred and fifty people. Now it’s got three hundred. Management says, ‘We have to do more with less.’ That’s the bullshit of bean counters who care only about the bottom line. You do less with less.”


You ever hear of a show that consciously is blaming the media for the sh*t that's wrong in the world? The most you ever hear is Justin Timberlake decrying for MTV to play more music videos. Even as noble as that effort was, it still got reported on the internet in tabloid fashion, which is contradictory to the actual point he was trying to make.

Viewers of “The Wire” must master a whole argot, though it can take a while, because the words are never defined, just as they wouldn’t be by real people tossing them around. To have “suction” is to have pull with your higher-ups on the police force or in City Hall; a “redball” is a high-profile case with political consequences; to “re-up” is to get more drugs to sell. Drugs are branded with names taken from the latest news cycle: Pandemic, W.M.D., Greenhouse Gas. “The game” is the drug trade, although it emerges during the course of the show as a metaphor for the web of constraints that political and economic institutions impose on the people trapped within them.

That's one of the dopest parts of the show. It forces you to understand the show's vocabulary. It also reinforces the point that speech is something organic. The inner-city urban environment uses a different vocabulary than the rest of middle class America. If we're going to understand their story, we gotta learn their talk, at least. I'm also a fan of slang, it's almost but not quite, like being bilingual.

Because Simon and his primary writing partner, Ed Burns—a former Baltimore homicide detective who was once one of Simon’s sources—are both middle-aged white men, people tend to assume that the dialogue spoken by the drug dealers and ghetto kids is ad-libbed by the black actors on the show.

They're white, and they get it more than some Black people do.

Simon is an authenticity freak. He said, “I’m the kind of person who, when I’m writing, cares above all about whether the people I’m writing about will recognize themselves. I’m not thinking about the general reader. My greatest fear is that the people in the world I’m writing about will read it and say, ‘Nah, there’s nothing there.’ ”

Fuck yeah for authenticity. How much authenticity is in Heroes? Can you really understand the emotional burden of having a superpower? The Wire is about real people.

“ ‘The Wire’ is dissent,” he says. “It is perhaps the only storytelling on television that overtly suggests that our political and economic and social constructs are no longer viable, that our leadership has failed us relentlessly, and that no, we are not going to be all right.”

Exactly!

Rafael Alvarez, a former Sun reporter whom Simon hired to write for the show, said, “You know how, in a Russian novel, the reader does the work for the first hundred pages, and then it turns and you’re lost in it? With ‘The Wire,’ it might be Episode 6 before it turns and you’re in.” The creators of “The Wire” would never say that their work is as good as that of Tolstoy or Dickens, but they can’t quite resist the comparison, either.

That's exactly how I felt when I watched it. The first episode was, "WTF is going on? I can't even understand what they're saying." By the 5th episode, I said, "This is getting a whole lot better." By the season finale, I exclaimed, "This is THE BEST TELEVISION SHOW EVER WRITTEN!!!" I mean, some of you must've read Harry Potter and thought the first couple of chapters when he's dillydallying in the real world was pretty boring until he got it on and poppin' in Wizardland.

This final season of the show, Simon told me, will be about “perception versus reality”—in particular, what kind of reality newspapers can capture and what they can’t. Newspapers across the country are shrinking, laying off beat reporters who understood their turf. More important, Simon believes, newspapers are fundamentally not equipped to convey certain kinds of complex truths. Instead, they focus on scandals—stories that have a clean moral. “It’s like, Find the eight-hundred-dollar toilet seat, find the contractor who’s double-billing,” Simon said at one point. “That’s their bread and butter. Systemic societal failure that has multiple problems—newspapers are not designed to understand it.”

We actually do need a television show to depict this for us. A lot of us just take in anything on print as truth these days. But maybe Britney isn't really that bad. Who knows?

The Wire is in it's 5th and last season this year. Please watch it. Bittorrent it, netflix it, or call me up, but do what you gotta do and make yourself smarter through watching television.

Oh yeah and he's also trying to write a pilot on a new show in New Orleans. Can't wait.