The Wire

Lunch with the FT: David Simon
By Peter Aspden



On a blustery, bright spring day by the Thames, David Simon strolls into the River Café with an easy, unassuming stride, turning not a single head as he makes his way to our table. Only a mid-grey bomber jacket, emblazoned with the logo of the television series Homicide: Life on the Street gives any clue as to his identity.

Neither the name, nor the face, of Simon mean very much in this quietly chic corner of west London. We sit down and order the house prosecco, mixed with campari and blood orange. It’s an auspicious start. Simon is not known for the levity of his banter or for small talk, but he seems relaxed and in good humour.

As the sun filters through the window and we relax into our aperitifs it is hard to imagine that I am sitting opposite a man who has written some of the bleakest, hardest-hitting stories of modern times.

Simon is the creator, executive producer and head writer of The Wire, the HBO television series about Baltimore’s drugs war that has redrawn the very boundaries of what television drama can achieve. He is nothing less than America’s great tragedian, holding a mirror before a society that considers itself, almost above all else, to be decent, fair and honourable.

But those values are nowhere to be found in this relentlessly downbeat series that has overturned most of television’s conventional wisdoms with a sharpness and intensity that has won it some of the highest plaudits for a TV show.

The Wire’s plotlines are difficult to follow, it concerns itself with the urban poor, most of its cast are African-American, and it offers a withering critique of a country that generally prefers to dwell on the lighter side of life, at least when it sits in front of the television.

The Wire will have none of the trite improbabilities that carefully pilot most movie and television dramas towards their wholesome dénouements. It speaks of a society that is riven, rabid with corruption and frequently wrong-headed. Nothing if not ambitious in its scope, each series treats a different aspect of American society in its overarching narrative: starting with the drug scene, then taking on unemployment, local politics, education and ending with the media.

Simon notes with some wry amusement that it was this fifth and final series of The Wire, released on DVD in the UK in September, that caused the most controversy during its recent US run. Despite the horrendous litany of social ills posited by the first four series, there is, he observes, nothing journalists love more than talking about journalism.

“There has been a wonderful petulance about it,” he says. “The whole dynamic of critiquing a culture from the point of view of middle management is fun and games when it is applied to the school system or city hall. But the idea that a news-gathering institution can be dysfunctional, or led by bad priorities, is somehow appalling.”

Simon knows of what he speaks: it was his experience as a crime reporter on the Baltimore Sun that informed his scripts, first on Homicide, then The Corner (both books that were turned into TV series) and The Wire. He parted company with the Sun because, he says, of the unwillingness of the paper (and journalism generally) to deal with the difficult issues.

“I had an idealised view of acquiring a true story, delivering it, and the more complicated it was, the better. But what I valued was not valued by the newspaper’s management, and what they valued I did not. It was time for a divorce.” Much of the bitterness surrounding Simon’s disillusionment with the written press naturally found itself on the show.

Hoppers, soldiers and corner boys: a guide to ‘Wire’speak
The Wire is not an easy series to watch. The plot lines are uncomfortably complex, as is the morality. But what really slows down the novice viewer is the language. There are no concessions, and I watched the first episode understanding little of what was going on, writes Isabel Berwick.

Over time, your ear becomes attuned to the Baltimore street talk, and the police slang, and it all becomes a complex, almost beautiful, interplay of words and motives and actions.

But things change – just as you have got used to the corner talk in series one, series two focuses instead on the lives of the mainly white longshoremen.

In series three, we are back on the wire (the police phone taps listening in to the dealers) and trying to make out what’s going on. The language of The Wire is like its theme tune – the haunting “Way Down in the Hole” – always the same song, but performed by different artists for each series.

For those who may still be struggling with those early doubts, here’s a basic Baltimore primer. And if you are watching on DVD you can always switch on the subtitles.

Burners: cheap disposable mobile phones used by the drug dealers to talk to each other. The police listen in on their wire.

Corner boys: the lowest rung of the dealing chain, small kids who are attached to a corner gang. They are lookouts and go-betweens.

The Game: the business of drug dealing.

Hoppers: the smallest kids, also called “l’il hoppers”. Streetsmart tinies. Some of them just hang around because there’s little else to do and some of them are loosely attached to whoever is dealing on that corner.

Mos def: most definitely.

Police: Pronounced “poh-leece”. What the police call themselves. Never the police. A fair police officer who is trying to do the right thing is called “good poh-leece”.

Re-up: to get a new supply of drugs for sale from someone higher up the supply chain. “I need to re-up.” Or used as a noun for a new stash, “a re-up”.

Soldier: a loyal crew member, or also an enforcer; someone willing to kill for his (or her) boss.

Up on the wire: to have tapped a dealer’s phone.

Yo: noun used by police to describe corner boys (”See that yo over there?”).
I ask him if that divorce was when he first thought that truth-telling was more effectively and eloquently done through drama rather than reporting. “Not at all. I saw myself growing old with the Baltimore Sun, writing a book every couple of years, but always coming back to reporting.” But his scripts were highly acclaimed, and the lure of television proved too tempting. I say the first time I watched The Wire, it reminded me of Shakespeare. Simon is not in the least cowed by the grandiose comparison, but corrects it.

“We stole from the earlier dramatic tradition of the Greeks. Shakespeare began the process by which thinking men and women exerted some degree of control over their actions, markedly changing their ends. Hamlet and Macbeth are concerned with the interior psychological construction of their characters. They are more Tony Soprano than The Wire.

“The Wire transposed the idea of Greek tragedy by using institutions in place of the Olympian gods. And those institutions are our political and economic constructs.

“Now some people don’t want to watch that, to be told that the game is rigged. It is disturbing news. But those that do watch it will respond to the profound pessimism of the show. The people who watched Antigone or Medea were comfortable with that degree of pessimism. That was the ancient view of the world. And I’m not so sure it is so wrong in the 21st century.” Simon found himself immersed in the works of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides as the series’ first season unwound. “We stole big,” he confesses. “If you steal, steal big.”

He is all too aware of the subversiveness of his world view. “We were saying that the problems we dealt with were the very product of how we interpreted our democratic ideals. They gave Socrates hemlock for that shit.” But for every non-viewer – The Wire’s ratings have been ridiculously low for a show that has received such acclaim – there has been a critical superlative. How did he feel when it was reported that The Wire is Barack Obama’s favourite television show?

“I see that as a crass appeal for my vote,” he says, deadpan. “It might work.” I say Hillary Clinton’s favourite show, according to the same article, is American Idol.

“Shame on her.” But Simon won’t be tempted further. “I’m not endorsing anybody. But I’m definitely not endorsing a Republican.” His views on politicians hover between cautious benefit-of-the-doubt and outright cynicism.

He is, in the meantime, resigned to The Wire remaining something of a cult success. “It is not an easy show to watch. It will not reward its characters, or its viewers, cheaply. And Americans are very used to be rewarded quickly and cheaply.”

We pause for Simon to remark that the food is “light and smart”, before plunging into our heavy themes again. Why is his work so bleak?

“I think it’s funny,” he answers improbably. He reads the incredulity on my face. “I think it’s the funniest drama ever written about the decline of the American empire. How’s that?”

Why doesn’t he write a boy-meets-girl story? “No, I wouldn’t be any good at it.” He says he has problems with female characters. “My strongest female character so far is a lesbian [Kima Greggs, one of The Wire’s police officers].” So where does a viewer find hope in his stories? “In the actions of individuals. In those characters in The Wire who rear up on their hind legs against injustice. The mere act of standing up and speaking for something that is right is a fundamental human victory, even if nothing comes from it.” The Wire’s darkest hour came at the end of the fourth series, which focused on education, when only one out of the four children at the heart of the story was rewarded with possible redemption. The final episode, recounting the demise of the other three, was devastating, I say.

“Children in jeopardy – it is guaranteed to bring out the most melodramatic and tortured reaction from viewers,” he replies. But Simon was guided, as ever, by facts.

“Out of the five children who featured in The Corner [his documentary account of a group of kids working a street corner], one is alive today, struggling but drug-free, one has a drug problem, one is in prison and two have been shot dead. We followed the mathematics with restraint and precision.”

Noise levels at the next table, featuring a large group of 20 to 35-year-olds, are rising. I tell Simon that it is a group of young architects from Richard Rogers’ office nearby.

These are the builders of our tomorrows, I say. “They have that look about them,” he says a little dismissively. “Still, better than a bunch of TV writers. We’d be throwing food around by now.”

Simon is in London completing work on his next big seven-part TV series, Generation Kill, based on the book by Rolling Stone journalist Evan Wright, who was embedded with the US Marines who did reconnaissance during the 2003 invasion of Iraq. It is on HBO and premieres in the US in July. It is the story, says Simon, of a group of young soldiers who “begin to experience a war that is totally unlike the one they [trained] for. It is how war confounds them.” I imagine it will provoke a strong reaction, I say. “Who knows, now that we have paid off the Sunnis, told them to quieten down, and then let them have a nice little civil war as soon as we have got through the next election? I’m being cynical now,” he adds unnecessarily.

It goes almost without saying that Simon is a fierce opponent of the Iraq war. “All we have done is to set up the next round of brutality. We have created a Lebanon.”

I ask if he will ever leave Baltimore, the city that is so vividly drawn in The Wire and where he still lives with his wife, Laura Lippman, a novelist. He must have a complex relationship with the city he has examined so forensically? “Very complex. There are two Americas, and I live in the America that is viable. But it’s only 20 blocks from the other America. I am not despised, and I am not loved.”

I ask if he ever plans to leave television, a medium whose nature he has helped transform. “Not as long as this big crack pipe that is HBO is still in my mouth. I can’t do network. I can’t do stuff that is stopped every 13 minutes so you can get some information on new feminine hygiene products.”

Has HBO ever told him to lighten up? “No, never. Not even as a joke. They [gave] me all the rope with which to hang myself. And I [gave] them a show that is so dry, so ornate, so complex, so dark, that even the vaunted power of HBO to sell drama to America has been sorely tested.” And he lets out a rare laugh.