Feature
Reality bites
by Matt Nippert
From newspaper crime reporter to author and TV writer, David Simon has produced a compelling cache of true and fictional stories, including cult phenomenon __The Wire__, once described as “the greatest dramatic series ever produced for television”. Simon continues to create cutting-edge TV, but part of him still thinks he’s a newspaper man
In hindsight, David Simon should be a contented man. Over the past 10 years, he’s become something of an auteur of gritty urban television, creating Homicide: Life on the Street, The Corner and, most lauded, The Wire. The latter show in particular, ostensibly about a Baltimore police investigation into drug trafficking, drew reviews that went way beyond rave. The Los Angeles Times turned over an entire editorial to gush, President Barack Obama declared it his favourite show, gangster rappers were beating down Simon’s door to audition and Senator John Kerry invited him to speak at tangentially related congressional hearings.
All in all, a pretty good run. But if you had told Simon 20 years ago that he’d end his career writing television fiction, he’d have been gutted. “Jesus, what did I do wrong? How did I f--- up?” he says, on the phone from Baltimore. “I’d have thought my career had ended tragically, and that’s not hyperbole.”
Simon is calling from the office of Blown Deadlines, his production company, but back in the 1980s he was known for making deadlines. Inspired by the coverage of Watergate, he became a journalist, first with his high-school newspaper and later covering the saturated crime beat for the Baltimore Sun. A book and mini-series here, a newsroom strike there, and disenfranchisement began to set in. By 1995, he’d had enough. As he told Kerry’s Senate hearings on the future of newspapers in May: “I took a buy-out from the Baltimore Sun and left for the fleshpots of Hollywood.”
Yet despite now inventing his scenes, Simon is more able to comment on the issues that he covered daily for the Sun. Whether it’s drug decriminalisation, the parasitism of the internet, the folly of newspaper executives or economic and social meltdown, Simon has a platform to rant to a wide audience. And what high-quality ranting he is capable of: Simon calls his opus, The Wire, a “drama and a polemic”. In a 2007 speech, he described himself as “wholly pessimistic about American society” and The Wire as being “about the end of the American empire”.
And this lofty talk – he cites liberal critics Noam Chomsky, Arthur Toynbee and Edward Gibbon during the course of our interview – isn’t post-production self-justification. In his 2000 pitch to cable channel HBO to get the show made, he began by writing: “The Wire is a drama that offers multiple meanings and arguments. It will be, in the strictest sense, a police procedural set in the drug culture of an American rust-belt city, a cops-and-players story that exists within the same vernacular as other television fare. But as with the best HBO series, The Wire will be far more than a cop show, and to the extent that it breaks new ground, it will do so because of larger universal themes that have more to do with the human condition.”
Perhaps because of these ideals – successfully fulfilled, according to numerous critics – the show was never a ratings success during the course of its five seasons, which ended in 2008. (A fact not helped in New Zealand by TV2 screening the show after midnight on weekdays.) “But we’re okay with that – this is not me pissing and moaning,” says Simon. And the show has gone on to be a cult phenomenon on DVD.
What sustained the show, beyond over-arching themes of institutional malady and street-smart dialogue that almost demanded subtitles and a glossary, were a cast of characters played by mostly unknown and black actors who were as oversized as anything in The Sopranos and as real as anything seen in documentaries.
There was cerebral drug lord Stringer Bell, who sought to take his business off the streets and into real estate, only to be blindsided by resource consents and corrupt politicians. In between university night classes in economics, Bell tried running his crime empire according to Robert’s Rules of Order – but baulked when his underlings appointed a secretary to take minutes that could later be used as evidence of criminal conspiracy. And there was Bunk Moreland, a cigar-chomping homicide detective, who once reconstructed a crime scene using only the F-word, with assorted prefixes and suffixes.
Most notable, there was Omar Little – Obama’s self-professed favourite character – a shotgun-toting and scarred street barracuda with a moral code who made his living by robbing drug dealers. Little is wildly popular on and off the street, despite being openly gay. Little testified in court against a stone-cold killer early in the show, only for a slimy defence attorney to challenge him: “You are amoral, are you not? You are feeding off the violence and the despair of the drug trade. You are stealing from those who themselves are stealing the lifeblood from our city. You are a parasite who leeches off the culture of drugs …”
At this point, Little interjects, leaving the dirty lawyer gaping like a beached fish: “Just like you, man … I got the shotgun, you got the briefcase. It’s all in the game, though, right?”
Page 1 
