With The Wire final season premiere approaching rapidly (the episode is already on HBO OnDemand and the first two are on BitTorrent), news outlets everywhere are covering and reviewing the show. My favorite article — because it’s something different and critical for a change — is a profile of David Simon by Mark Bowden in the Atlantic Monthly. He starts out slow with a comparison of fiction and nonfiction in telling stories:
Fiction can explain things that journalism cannot. It allows you to enter the lives and motivations of characters with far more intimacy than is typically possible in nonfiction. In the case of The Wire, fiction allows you to wander around inside a violent, criminal subculture, and inside an entrenched official bureaucracy, in a way that most reporters can only dream about. And it frees you from concerns about libel and cruelty. It frees you to be unfair.
But then you get to the part describing Simon’s vindictiveness and how it has shaped him, which adds some depth to the earlier fiction/nonfiction comparison. Worth a read.
Also of note is that the full text of The Believer conversation between Simon and Nick Hornby has been put online.
Long profile of David Simon and The Wire in the New Yorker this week. Haven’t read it yet, but digging in now.
Update: Ok, all done. I thought this observation about the two main groups of fans of the show (urban poor and media critics) was canny:
Sometimes the fan base of “The Wire” seems like the demographics of many American cities — mainly the urban poor and the affluent elite, with the middle class hollowed out.
The last bit of the article talks about a new show that Simon’s thinking of doing for HBO about New Orleans musicians.
Show creator David Simon talks with author Nick Hornby (High Fidelity, etc.) in the The August 2007 issue of The Believer. The entire interview isn’t available online but one of the three best bits is:
My standard for verisimilitude is simple and I came to it when I started to write prose narrative: fuck the average reader. I was always told to write for the average reader in my newspaper life. The average reader, as they meant it, was some suburban white subscriber with two-point-whatever kids and three-point-whatever cars and a dog and a cat and lawn furniture. He knows nothing and he needs everything explained to him right away, so that exposition becomes this incredible, story-killing burden. Fuck him. Fuck him to hell.
Simon goes on to talk about the overarching theme of The Wire: the exploration of the postmodern American city and the struggle of the individual against the city’s institutions. Many of his thoughts on that particular subject are contained in this Dec 2006 interview at Slate. But in talking with Hornby, Simon draws a parallel between these city institutions and the Greek gods:
Another reason the show may feel different than a lot of television: our model is not quite so Shakespearian as other high-end HBO fare. The Sopranos and Deadwood — two shows that I do admire — offer a good deal of Macbeth or Richard III or Hamlet in their focus on the angst and machinations of their central characters (Tony Soprano, Al Swearingen). Much of our modern theatre seems rooted in the Shakespearian discovery of the modern mind. We’re stealing instead from an earlier, less-traveled construct — the Greeks — lifting our thematic stance wholesale from Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides to create doomed and fated protagonists who confront a rigged game and their own mortality.
But instead of the old gods, The Wire is a Greek tragedy in which the postmodern institutions are the Olympian forces. It’s the police department, or the drug economy, or the political structures, or the school administration, or the macroeconomics forces that are throwing the lightning bolts and hitting people in the ass for no reason. In much of television, and in a good deal of our stage drama, individuals are often portrayed as rising above institutions to achieve catharsis. In this drama, the institutions always prove larger, and those characters with hubris enough to challenge the postmodern construct of American empire are invariably mocked, marginalized, or crushed. Greek tragedy for the new millenium, so to speak.
The NY Times still deals in the Shakespearian and tells us the story of Donnie Andrews and Fran Boyd (thx, nirav), whom Simon and The Wire co-creator Edward Burns introduced to each other. Andrews was the inspiration for the popular Omar Little character on the show and Boyd was depicted in a previous Simon/Burns collaboration called The Corner. The Times also has their wedding announcement.
And finally, some news about season five. Sadly, instead of 12 or 13 episodes, the final season of the show will only consist of 10 episodes. The shooting of the final episode wrapped on September 1 and the season will premiere on Jan 6, 2008 (both facts courtesy of a Washington Post article about the end of the show). The season 4 DVD should be out a month or two before that. Two actors from Homicide: Life on the Street (based on a book by, you guessed it, David Simon) will appear in the final season: Clark Johnson (who also directed the final episode) and Richard Belzer, who will reprise his Homicide role as Detective John Munch.
Generation Kill is the newest project for HBO from David Simon and Ed Burns, creators of The Wire. It’s a 7-hour miniseries based on Marines fighting in the Iraq war. “Gritty mini will look at the early movements of the 1st Reconnaissance Battalion and depict the complex challenges faced by the U.S.-led mission even in the war’s early stages.” (via crazymonk)
Fantastic interview with David Simon in Slate. If you’re a fan of The Wire and caught up on season four, I really recommend reading this. When Simon was asked what the show was about, he said: “it’s about the very simple idea that, in this Postmodern world of ours, human beings — all of us — are worth less. We’re worth less every day, despite the fact that some of us are achieving more and more. It’s the triumph of capitalism.”
Because of his open source programming connection, Hans Reiser’s arrest for his wife’s murder was big news in that community. After his wife disappeared, Reiser bought 2 books on murder, including David Simon’s Homicide. Simon is the creator of The Wire.
Short Rolling Stone interview with The Wire’s David Simon, part of a longer interview from the magazine. “I thought Katrina was literally America having to pause for a moment and contemplate the other America that somehow, tragically, Americans forgot. It’s like America looking across the chasm saying, ‘Oh, are you still here? Oh, and you’re wet. And you’re angry.’”
Each week at Slate, writer Alex Kotlowitz and Steve James (director of Hoop Dreams) dissect the week’s episode from the fourth season of The Wire. Warning: they are unabashed fans of the show. AOL recently interviewed The Wire creator David Simon. (via dj) Negro Please is posting fourth season episode synopsiseses summaries…here’s 4.2.
Update: Season four of The Wire scored a 98/100 on Metacritic, the highest score for a TV show on the site.
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