Tag: David Simon

We’re not going to take it anymore.

“What the drugs themselves have not destroyed, the warfare against them has. And what once began, perhaps, as a battle against dangerous substances long ago transformed itself into a venal war on our underclass. Since declaring war on drugs nearly 40 years ago, we’ve been demonizing our most desperate citizens, isolating and incarcerating them and otherwise denying them a role in the American collective. All to no purpose. The prison population doubles and doubles again; the drugs remain.”

On the eve of the final episode, the writers of The Wire — Simon, Burns, Lehane, Pelecanos, and Price — argue in favor of jury nullification as an act of civil disobedience against America’s failed drug war. “If some few episodes of a television entertainment have caused others to reflect on the war zones we have created in our cities and the human beings stranded there, we ask that those people might also consider their conscience. And when the lawyers or the judge or your fellow jurors seek explanation, think for a moment on Bubbles or Bodie or Wallace. And remember that the lives being held in the balance aren’t fictional.“

…Then we fight on that lie.

“The season is about how far individuals and institutions and society in general can go on a lie. And if you think that theme is hyperbolic and that lies…are too big and too outrageous to sustain themselves, I’d simply point to this ugly mess of a war we are in, why we are in it, what was printed and broadcast and declared by the nation’s elite and its top media outlets. You look at Iraq and how we got there and McNulty and Templeton are pikers by comparison.” David Simon talks with Newsweek about the rationale for Season 5 of The Wire. “The season is about the chasm between perception and reality in American life and how we are increasingly without the tools that allow us to recognize our true problems, much less begin to solve them.” Speaking of which, the penultimate episode, “Late Editions”, is now available on On Demand.

The Sun Also Spins.

“For Simon, this dispute basically comes down to the complexity of urban problems. As he sees it, the ‘Philly model,’ imported to the Sun by Carroll and Marimow [re: Klebanow and Whiting], ignored the decades of economic, racial, political, and social disconnects underlying that complexity. When it spurred reform, it was reform that could not match the intransigence of the underlying patterns. The reporting itself was formidable, Simon says, but to him, homelessness, addiction, and violence aren’t the central problems. ‘Those are all the symptoms of the problem,’ he says. ‘You can carve off a symptom and talk about how bad drugs are, and you can blame the police department for fucking up the drug war, but that’s kind of like coming up to a house hit by a hurricane and making a lot of voluminous notes about the fact that some roof tiles are off.’“

As The Wire 53 premieres on On Demand, some links on the journalistic controversies driving show creator David Simon’s animus this season. The CJR offered a long and interesting overview of the Simon v. Marimow/Carroll feud, and its partial roots in differing conceptions of urban journalism. An old 2000 City Paper piece suggests who Simon may have in mind in cub reporter Scott Templeton. And Simon himself recently discussed his old newsroom for Esquire, and got involved with Mark Bowden and Matt Yglesias over at The Atlantic. (Most links here via THND.)

“The postmodern institutions…those are the indifferent gods.”

“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.“

A huge find by way of Chris at Do You Feel Loved?: Margaret Talbot offers a long-form New Yorker profile on David Simon and The Wire. (If you haven’t yet seen Season 4, I recommend bookmarking this for now — it gives away many of S4’s major beats.) There’s also a good deal of spoilerish information on what to expect from Season 5, what David Simon wants to do next, and who’s singing this season’s version of “Way Down in the Hole.” (I’ll give that one away…Bubbles’ sponsor, Steve Earle — listen here.) “Simon makes it clear that the show’s ambitions were grand. ‘”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.’”

Bal’more farewell | Plug in!

“At 4:40 a.m., the assistant director called out, ‘It’s a wrap, it’s a wrap. We’re done. Forever.'” As birddogged by Listen Missy, David Simon & co. have wrapped shooting on the final season of The Wire (and NY Magazine parses the news for hints of what’s to come.) Do I need to say it again? If you don’t watch The Wire, you really, really, really should…from the beginning. I don’t know a single person who has watched the show and not become resolutely evangelical about it. Season 5 doesn’t air until January, so that’s plenty of Netflix time (1, 2, 3, 4) between now and then: “From the beginning when the show debuted in 2002, [Simon] saw it as a visual novel, with each season a distinct chapter exploring an aspect of inner-city life: The first season examined the drug trade; the second focused on Baltimore’s longshoremen; the third grappled with politics and the notion of reform; the fourth dug into education and the lives of the city’s children. This season, which begins airing Jan. 6, explores the media, featuring a morally challenged reporter played by Tom McCarthy, who wrote and directed the indie film ‘The Station Agent.‘”

Simon Says.

“Thematically, 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…The show is written in a 21st-century city-state that is incredibly bureaucratic, and in which a legal pursuit of an unenforceable prohibition has created great absurdity.“

Slate publishes a fascinating extended interview with Wire creator David Simon, which touches on, among other things, why there won’t be a Season 6 focusing on Latino immigrants, and what we can expect from Season 5. “Yes, the last season. The last theme is basically asking the question, why aren’t we paying attention? If we got everything right in the last four seasons in depicting this city-state, how is it that these problems — which have been attendant problems regardless of who is in power — how is it that they endure? That brings into mind one last institution, which is the media. What are we paying attention to?” I can’t say it enough — if you’re not paying attention to The Wire, you owe it to yourself to rent Season 1 and start playing catch-up next to immediately. It really is far and away the best show on television, perhaps ever. Certainly, it’s the savviest take on American politics ever put to the small screen.

Way Down in the Hole.

“What The Wire says, repeatedly, is that The System — government, business, law enforcement, everything that runs this country — is broken and that the guardians of The System are too committed to defending the status quo to even try fixing it. It’s not a case of corrupt or evil people choosing to ruin things for the rest of us; it’s people of all moral calibers making decisions within the established context of their own institutions (the police force, City Hall, drug corners) without regard to how they affect the world at large.” The Newark Star-Ledger‘s Alan Sepinwall previews Season 4 of The Wire. (Via The House Next Door.)

Marblehead & McNulty.

Hi y’all…sorry about the recent lack of updates around here. I was in Boston for a few days, where I enjoyed some meetings, a Fenway game, and a scenic excursion to the North Shore. Whatsmore, most of my free time of late has instead been spent catching up on back seasons of my most recent new-favorite show, The Wire. At any rate, updates should resume their normal schedule this week.