Barbed Comments
Writer and executive producer of HBO’s The Wire David Simon takes time out to talk newspapers, television and hubris with Niall Kitson.

The last thing I ask David Simon as we part ways is what he thinks of Dublin. It’s a question asked more out of satirical intent than the need hear about Irish hospitality – the streets were particularly rubbish-strewn that morning and rain threatened at any moment. Not exactly the stuff Bord Fáilte brochures are made of. Nonplussed, Simon just shrugs at me. ‘I’m from Baltimore,’ he says.

It’s as fair an answer as any, better even. From his days as a reporter to his role as co-creator and executive producer of HBO’s acclaimed crime drama The Wire, Simon has spent his career painting a picture of a city struggling with harsh times. Heavy industry, hard drugs and stifling bureaucracy threaten his protagonists on either side of the law, making the halls of justice every bit as menacing as the deserted row houses of the slums or the street corners where drugs are dealt and scores settled. Truly, Charm City does not come off as a place you want to walk around alone.

Simon’s not in Dublin for refuge though, he’s here to talk storytelling; specifically he’s giving a masterclass in screenwriting, organised by Screen Training Ireland. A man noted for his opinions, I was steeled for an encounter with ‘the angriest man in television’. As it turns out perhaps the title ‘angriest man in print’ would be more apt.

After finishing college David Simon went to work in newspapers. Working initially as a ‘stringer’ (freelancer) for The Baltimore Sun, Simon worked his way into crime reporting where he would earn his crust from 1983 to 1995. During this time he completed his seminal book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets where he profiled the men and women of the Baltimore City Homicide unit. A winner of the Edgar Award in 1992, what set Simon’s work apart from other police procedural and true crime novels was an attention to detail, character and culture. By substituting the voice of the cops for that of the omniscient narrator, he had developed a new type of writing that imbued his subjects with a humanity heretofore not examined in crime fiction.

While the quick comparison to make would be with Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, the elements that constitute Simon’s book are not those of emotional bonds or ‘retrospective reporting’ but rather a rolling narrative where the reporter turns narrator and the subject matter takes the reins. As a book, Homicide is a daunting prospect, clocking in at over 600 pages. However, such is the authenticity and velocity of the work, the small details of urban slang and the procedural authenticity, it paints a picture of how a squad ate, drank and got in trouble just as much as (or sometimes even more than) the average Joe. Simon’s cops were a motley crew, overworked, underpaid but with enough tenacity and street smarts to successfully trace a hit-and-run killer with nothing more than a few flakes of paint on the corpse for evidence.

Simon could have gone back to crime reporting after the success of Homicide but for two reasons. Firstly, the book was adapted into the under-rated Homicide: Life on the Streets, (which was to run for seven moderately successful years) and, more pressingly, Simon felt increasingly uncomfortable with the direction the newspaper industry was taking. With analysis being squeezed out of publications in favour of hard news reporting and the continued migration to the web, Simon sees only a bleak future for the medium.

‘The problem with newspapers is that when they were fat [and had a lot of content] they didn’t improve,’ he argues. ‘Television’s siren-chasing would always beat us to the story but it was analysis that we could do really well.’ Since then, the internet has become the destination of choice for news coverage with rolling updates, which has hit both TV and newsprint severely. What’s worse for print, according to Simon, is that the decision to start giving away content for free has destroyed the commercial base, making it harder to turn a profit and leading to scaled-down product. Simon couldn’t take it anymore and in 1995 he walked out of the newsroom and into the writers’ room where Tom Fontana and Barry Levinson were show-runners on Homicide. They were more than happy to have him aboard.

It might have been expected that Simon would baulk at the gothic undertones, Jesuit philosophy and verité style the Fontana/Levinson partnership imbued his book with but, if anything, Simon was impressed with the way his work was being treated. From the outset Simon accepted he was not working on a serious issues show but on a prime-time network commodity built to a solid five-act structure. Elements from the book were used sparingly throughout the whole run of the show but Simon didn’t mind the liberties taken with his book so long as he learned, and grew comfortable with, the necessities of dramatic structure. ‘It was an entertainment,’ he says emphatically. ‘Working on Homicide was actually a liberating experience for me. It was like nailing the design for someone else’s house.’

While on Homicide Simon saw every part of the show at work, gaining experience not only in writing but producing and directing as well. Evading the ‘waiting room syndrome’ where writers would get locked away in a hothouse producing scripts, Simon got in on every facet of the product. ‘Tom [Fontana] said to me when he offered the job “I can’t pay you network money. I can only pay you Tom Fontana money. But you will get to learn everything”’– which Simon duly did.

At the same time, Simon was working on a second book with former detective Ed Burns about life on a street corner populated by drug dealers and addicts, the award-winning The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner City Neighbourhood. Simon took the next step and brought the story to television. Knowing the subject matter would be too dark for the networks to deal with he decided HBO, with its reliance on subscriptions over advertisers, would be the ideal place start. At the time HBO’s first drama series, Oz (also run by Fontana), was doing well and as a mini-series The Corner represented no great risk. The show went on to win Emmy awards for directing, best mini-series and best writing for a mini-series. The next step would be a full-length series chronicling the law and the city of Baltimore: The Wire.

In selling a cop show to a channel trying to offer something different to an audience uninterested in the CSIs of the world, the issue of the racial breakdown of the cast was raised. One of the arguments Fontana made about the lack of commercial success Homicide was that having ‘blackest cast on Television’ didn’t play well in the leafy suburbs of Middle America, a point on which Simon agrees. ‘It’s not that people were racist, it was just a feeling among whites that “this is not my story”. I think the current generation of Americans have grown up in a multi-cultural society, they’re used to the idea so I don’t think the old idea of racism affects things as much as it used to.’

America may have learned to stop worrying and love diversity but all the same HBO remained wary that a show largely about blacks, written by a white man could send out the wrong message to their viewers. Or worse, fail at delivering the right one. Emphasising the importance of the class, rather than skin tone, Simon enlisted the help of the (Oriental) Homicide writer/producer James Yoshimura, his (African-American) collaborator Ed Burns and college friend David Mills, hot off the set of ER. The panel was strong enough to put to bed any concerns of racial bias while offering a compelling prospect and the show was greenlit.

From the outset with The Wire, Simon made this show the way he wanted it, without compromise either in structure, casting or realism. In particular, the use of street slang could be seen as a turn-off for many viewers – maybe it has been. All the same, Simon is adamant there would be no compromises saying: ‘We made the show we wanted to make, regardless of the percentage of the cast make-up.’

It is this refusal to compromise that has allowed The Wire room to grow out from its roots as a sophisticated police procedural show to take in elements of trade union corruption, police department corruption, social engineering, politics and, in the fifth and final series, the impotence of the press. ‘It’s not so much of a cop show anymore. It’s more a portrait of a city,’ he explains.

What makes The Wire work as drama is not just the increasing complexity of Simon’s Dickensian metropolis, but the people who live, love and are crushed in it. In the first series the cerebral police Lieutenant Daniels puts together a team of cops to crack the Avon Barksdale’s drug-dealing network. So far so simple, until you throw in the self-destructive detective Jimmy McNulty, the ridiculously smooth kingpin Stringer Bell and the gay outlaw Omar Little. Outside of this nucleus, enter the politically savvy police lifer William Rawls, corrupt senator Clay Davies and the new mayor on the block Tommy Carcetti (played by Queer as Folk’s Aidan Gillen) – all of which have displayed elements of brutality and ambition, malevolence and kindness – or at least as they see them. Simon is not interested in creating loveable rogues in the Shakespearean mode like Tony Soprano. The lineage here goes back to the primal force of Greek tragedy and the horror of the inevitable. In The Wire every character is teetering on the edge, be it in their careers, their cases or their personal lives. Using the classical Greek mode, all human endeavour is brutally crushed by Olympian edicts from ‘upstairs’. Decisions made miles away by characters that will never meet have devastating effects on the ground – no more so than in the case of ‘Hamsterdam’ that forms the arc of the fourth season. Forget Hamlet and Lear, Baltimore is Promethean territory. ‘As in all Greek tragedy, hubris is the key and most of the characters in The Wire are tragic,’ Simon explains. ‘In Shakespeare, characters are the authors of their own misfortune. In our show there’s often nothing they can do to save themselves.’

Nor is there anything The Wire can do to save itself at this stage. After a ropey reception to series four it was argued a fifth season wasn’t even up for discussion. The fifth season, however, is to be the last and Simon is adamant there is no room for any last minute deals to bring the show back. Unlike Homicide, which got an ill-advised TV-movie conclusion, the end of The Wire will be complete and organic. Perhaps this is a good thing. Inevitably the last season has caught some flack as critics, uncomfortable with the level of ‘axe-grinding’ against the newspaper business, are beginning to see The Wire not as Simon’s show but as his mouthpiece. Not that he’s terribly bothered – Simon has always said his goal is to ‘tell the best story without cheating it.’ Five series, fifty-seven episodes and a lot of bullets later, The Wire is bowing out on its own terms, slinking back into the shadows from whence it came – the shadows of Charm City.