The Wire Page 4

  “Bob’s an executive producer.”

  A title which, in Hollywood terms, is often synonymous with asshole. Price was truly thrown, later confessing out of Colesberry’s earshot that this was the only production he knew in which you could not discern someone’s job title by the way he behaved.

  For all of us who worked with him, part of the fun was pushing Bob out of the background – where he had long labored as the right arm of so many talented and noted directors – and bringing him into the light, where he belonged.

  When The Corner won an Emmy for best miniseries, Nina, David, and I were determined that Bob should accept the award. And on The Wire, we pressed him into a small cameo as Detective Ray Cole, a shambling, hapless sort who symbolized the workaday ethos of the homicide unit.

  Bob assumed he was on the hook for maybe a line or two of dialogue, but with great delight the writers began churning out more moments for Ray Cole, most of them comic and at the character’s expense.

  Finally, and most importantly, we pressed Bob to do the one thing for which he had seemingly spent a lifetime preparing: the last episode of the second season was not only produced, but directed, by Robert F. Colesberry. Among other moments, he is the true author of that ending montage of dying industry seen through the eyes of Nick Sobotka – all that spare, brutal imagery, edited together in such a way as to imply the anger of the story as a whole.

  When Bob, only fifty-seven, died in February 2004 from heart surgery complications, it seemed to all of us on the show nothing less than an outrage. His best was yet to come, or so we had all assumed.

  In the ensuing three years, we did the best we could to maintain the template that Bob Colesberry brought to The Wire. And to that end, we continued forward with many of the same veteran directors that Colesberry chose in those first two seasons, and indeed, with Bob’s wife Karen Thorson handling post-production duties, familiar as she is with what Colesberry would want the film to be. Whatever we got wrong in Seasons Three, Four, and Five, he was unable to prevent, and whatever we got right can safely be credited to the man.

  Lastly, we meant no offense.

  We staged The Wire in a real city, with real problems. It is governed and policed and populated by real people who are every day contending with those problems. The school system we depict is indeed the school system in which Ed Burns taught. The political infrastructure is that which Bill Zorzi covered for two decades. The newspaper on which we centered some of the final season’s story is indeed the newspaper at which I labored and learned the city.

  The mayor does not love us. Nor does the police commissioner, nor the school superintendent, nor the publisher of the Baltimore Sun. Nor should they. If I had their jobs, I would regard The Wire and its antecedents – Homicide and The Corner – as a necessary evil. And, ignoring for a moment the film industry that burgeoned here over the last decade, I would more often than not wonder what is so damned necessary.

  In our defense, the story is labeled as fiction, which is to say we took liberties in a way that journalism cannot and should not. Some of the events depicted in the 60 hours of The Wire actually occurred, a few others were rumored to have occurred. But many of the events did not occur, and perhaps the only distinction worth making is that all of them could have happened – not only in Baltimore, but in any major American city contending with the same set of problems.

  Certainly, we do not feel that the shots taken were cheap ones. The police department in Baltimore really did cook the crime stats so that the mayor could become governor. The school system truly does fail to graduate the vast majority of students, and faculty are, in fact, teaching the standardized test rather than attempting to educate children. Unionized labor and the dignity of work are disappearing from the city’s landscape, and the war against the only industry remaining in many neighborhoods – the drug trade – has indeed become a brutal farce. And, yes, Baltimore’s surviving newspaper spent the last two decades reducing its staff and content, and concentrating its remaining resources on the petty frauds of “impact” journalism and the prize culture. They actually did abandon comprehensive coverage of the city and now miss nearly every story that actually matters to the life of Baltimore.

  It is a harsh critique, no doubt. But for the most part, we live in this city. By choice. And living here, we see what is happening in Baltimore for better and for worse, and we speak to such things as those with a vested interest in the city’s improvement and survival. Speaking as Baltimoreans, we quite naturally found it appropriate to reference our known world in these stories.

  But, in fairness, the stories are more universal than this; they resonate not just in West Baltimore, but in East St. Louis, North Philadelphia, and South Chicago. And judging from the continuing reaction to this drama overseas, it seems these stories register as well in cities the writers were in no way contemplating when we began the journey. Perhaps Baltimore isn’t any more screwed up than some other places. If it were the case, then these stories would only have meaning for people here.

  The Wire depicts a world in which capital has triumphed completely, labor has been marginalized and monied interests have purchased enough political infrastructure to prevent reform. It is a world in which the rules and values of the free market and maximized profit have been mistaken for a social framework, a world where institutions themselves are paramount and every day human beings matter less.

  “World going one way,” says Poot, reflective, standing on his corner. “People going another.”

  Many may regard these stories, in their universality, to be cynical and despairing of humanity as a whole. I am not so sure. The problems of this new and intimidating century are worthy of some genuine despair, certainly. And a supposedly great nation that cannot keep a single low-lying city behind functional levees hardly seems capable of grasping the challenge of, say, global warming. Considering that the Netherlands has for generations successfully kept most of itself out of the North Sea, the American institutional response to its problems thus far seems to justify a notable degree of cynicism.

  But in all of these Baltimore stories – Homicide, The Corner and The Wire – there exists, I believe, an abiding faith in the capacity of individuals, a careful acknowledgment of our possibilities, our humor and wit, our ability to somehow endure. They are, in small but credible ways, a humanist celebration at points, in which hope, though unspoken, is clearly implied.

  True, the stories themselves don’t exalt the bricks and mortar and institutions of Baltimore; nor do they spare American policing, or education, or politics or journalism much in the way of criticism. But they at least reckon with the city honestly, and they are written with a homegrown affection that should be readily apparent even to viewers in London, or Mexico City, or Beijing. Watching The Wire, true citizens of my city will smile when they see the mallet hit a crab claw, or when an a-rabber’s cart trundles past in the background; those foreign to Baltimore will miss many a reference, but not, I believe, the overall sense that they are learning about a city that matters.

  If the stories are hard ones, they are at least told in caring terms, with nuance and affection for all the characters, so that whatever else a viewer might come to believe about cops and dealers, addicts and lawyers, longshoreman and politicians, teachers and reporters, and every other soul that wanders through The Wire universe, he knows them to be part and parcel of the same tribe, sharing the same streets, engaged in the same, timeless struggle.

  David Simon

  Baltimore, Md.

  July 2009

  LETTER TO HBO

  Date: June 27, 2001

  To: Chris Albrecht,

  Carolyn Strauss

  From: David Simon

  Re: The Wire

  So, why do this?

  Let me be direct about addressing what I believe to be HBO’s predominant concern, to wit: HBO has succeeded in the past by creating drama in worlds largely inaccessible to network television, worlds in which dark themes, including
sex and violence, can be utilized in more meaningful and realistic ways than in standard network fare. So, why do a police show when the networks trade in such? And if we are to do a police show, how does The Wire differ from what viewers have before encountered?

  The past is a prescription for the past only. What HBO has accomplished with The Sopranos, Sex and the City, Six Feet Under, and Oz is to seize a share of the drama market by going to places where no network could compete. This was sound programming and it has achieved, for HBO, a cultural resonance and viewership.

  But, creatively, I would argue that you guys are at a crossroads now: either you continue to hew to this formula to the exclusion of other ideals, or you find a different – perhaps even more fundamental – way to differentiate your programs. If you continue to seek worlds inaccessible to other networks, it will, creatively, become a formula of diminishing returns. The networks can’t or won’t do sex, serious, thoughtful violence (now there’s an oxymoron I like), and character-based dramas in which characters are fundamentally, or drastically, flawed. Having achieved with prisons, drug corners, criminality, and the young and sexually active, HBO has, I would argue, gone about as far as it can in bringing fresh worlds to television.

  At the same time, this formula has – by default – ceded the basic dramatic universe of politics, law, crime, medicine, to the networks. In the past, this was wise. These things were the networks’ bread and butter, and they are at their most competitive in the hour-long ensemble drama.

  But The Wire is, I would argue, the next challenge to the network logic and the next challenge for HBO. It is grounded to the most basic network universe – the cop show – and yet, very shortly, it becomes clear to any viewer that something subversive is being done with that universe. Suddenly, the police bureaucracy is amoral, dysfunctional, and criminality, in the form of the drug culture, is just as suddenly a bureaucracy. Scene by scene, viewers find their carefully formed presumptions about cops and robbers undercut by alternative realities. Real police work endangers people who attempt it. Things that work in network cop shows fall flat in this alternative world. Police work is at times marginal or incompetent. Criminals are neither stupid nor cartoonish, and neither are they all sociopathic. And the idea – as yet unspoken on American TV – that no one in authority has any reason to care what happens in an American ghetto as long as it stays within the ghetto is brought into the open. Moreover, within a few hours of viewing, the national drug policy – and by extension our basic law enforcement model – is revealed as calcified, cynical, and unworkable.

  In the first two episodes, the impulse to assert control over one housing project in one city – a microcosm for what America is trying to do in every one of its cities – results in threatened careers, murdered witnesses, a near-riot in which a fourteen-year-old child is nearly killed. All of this brings no one any closer to a solution. These are costs paid for their own sake, and, slowly, viewers discern that unlike every other cop show that they have been raised on, this one refuses to play the card of good versus evil. We want McNulty to succeed, yes. But we also feel for D’Angelo, trapped by an equally malevolent bureancracy. We feel, too, for Daniels, leading an investigation no one wants, but resent his unwillingness to commit. And though we have been taught to despise someone like Bubbles, no one consistently shows more fundamental humanity.

  The argument is this: it is a significant victory for HBO to counterprogram alternative, inaccessible worlds against standard network fare. But it would, I will argue, be a more profound victory for HBO to take the essence of network fare and smartly turn it on its head, so that no one who sees HBO’s take on the culture of crime and crime fighting can watch anything like CSI, or NYPD Blue, or Law & Order again without knowing that every punch was pulled on those shows. For HBO to step toe-to-toe with NBC or ABC and create a cop show that seizes the highest qualitative ground through realism, good writing, and a more honest and more brutal assessment of police, police work, and the drug culture – this may not be the beginning of the end for network dramas as industry standard, but it is certainly the end of the beginning for HBO. The numbers would still be there for CSI and such; the relevance would not. We would be stepping up to the network ideal, pronouncing it a cheap lie, and offering instead a view of the world that is every bit as provocative as The Sopranos or The Corner. But because that world of cops and robbers is so central to the American TV experience, The Wire would stand as even more of a threat to the established order than a show that was marginalized because it offered a world (prison, gangsters, sex) where some viewers are reluctant to tread on any terms.

  I know the basic fear and I share it: some critic somewhere watches ten minutes of The Wire and says, it’s good, but it’s a cop show. Guess what: it’s not HBO. It’s TV.

  It’s for that reason that I have spent so long thinking about the exacting structure and the inherent message of these episodes. The journey through this one case will ultimately bring viewers from wondering, in cop-show expectation, whether the bad guys will get caught, to wondering instead who the bad guys are and whether catching them means anything at all. This could be a remarkable journey and a brave one for HBO. But the payoff is enormous. You will not be stealing market share from the networks only by venturing into worlds where they can’t, you will be stealing it by taking their worlds and transforming them with honesty and wit and a darker, cynical, and more piercing viewpoint than they would ever undertake. You leave them the warm fuzziness of West Wing and Providence and little else.

  I also know that there is concern that because the full maze of the wire and electronic surveillance scenes is not employed up front (it is far better that the best police work – rather than a given as in all other cop shows – must be first earned by the struggle to merely identify and isolate the Barksdale gang in the first episodes), a less than discerning critic might wonder how this is different from other police shows. I can only answer: go scene by scene. Read this dialogue. These cops are behaving, thinking, surviving, and struggling with issues as no predecessors on TV ever have. These drug dealers are more complex than anything the networks can imagine. An example: from Episode Two, as additional manpower is brought into the case and we learn that it is not only a gathering of menials and incompetents – but is meant to be such. Has any such scene occupied the screen time of CSI or NYPD Blue? Or the drug dealers discussing chicken nuggets, until their own sense of their stunted place in the world overtakes them: have criminals ever been allowed this kind of sadness or complexity on a network show?

  As with The Corner, most critics will be discerning if the quality is there. But, more than that, I would argue that we can eliminate the risk entirely by filming the full season, so that all the ironies and all of the darkness and the entire point of the undertaking is utterly apparent. And for this first season at least, we can offer the critics the entire package or most of the package at the premiere so that no one could possibly miss the point. This strategy worked on The Corner. Anyone armed with only the first ten minutes of that miniseries could have concluded that it was a stereotypic ghetto drama. Instead, the critics had four episodes before the first one aired – and with that much material to see that we were after fresh ideas and bigger game, they did not turn away. If we do this right – and we will – the critical response will be that HBO has turned its gaze to a standard of television fare: the cop show. And the cop show can never be the same.

  Episode Three should be polished by week’s end. I wish I could have sent it with Two, but I had some personal circumstances that prevented me from finishing last week. Indeed, I am concerned that because Two contains much of the setup for what follows, the full sense of what Three does in terms of upending this universe may not be clear. If you still have doubts, wait until Three arrives and then scan the first three. And if that doesn’t convince you, Four and Five will follow. I’m going to keep honing this story until you admit that it needs to be told and that HBO, for obvious reasons, is the place to te
ll it.

  This is a smart series. It is good storytelling. And it could be the best work on television that I’ve done so far. Pull the trigger, guys. As with The Corner, you will only be proud.

  David Simon

  BARACK OBAMA: WIRE FAN

  Barack Obama’s march into history has been as unconventional as it has been unlikely. It began on a seven-degree day in front of the Old State Capitol in Springfield, Illinois, the place where Abraham Lincoln delivered one of his most famous speeches against slavery. Here he was, less than a century and half later, a first-term senator, a black first-term senator, announcing his candidacy for presidency of the United States.

  Thousands of supporters braved the cold to cheer Obama that frigid February morning in 2007, but there was also an abiding sense that his journey seemed a bit quixotic. How did a man who had been a US senator for just over two years, a state senator for seven years, a law school instructor, a civil rights lawyer, and a community organizer, find the audacity to run for president of the United States?

  Even now that he occupies the White House, many people remain slightly dazed by his victory. Not just that he won, but also how he won.

  All along, Obama promised to bring change to Washington. It was an annoyingly vague declaration, which he nonetheless demonstrated throughout his campaign and now as president. In ways big and small he flouted old political conventions and dared to do things on his own terms, rewriting the rules as he moved along.

  He shattered fundraising records, using the Internet to build an army of grassroots supporters and take in more contributions than any presidential candidate before him. Born to a white mother and Kenyan father, Obama self-identified as an African American. It is safe to say that is not the best brand for winning elections in a country where fewer than one in nine citizens is black and polls find significant numbers of people who still hold negative racial stereotypes.