David Simon, Series Creator

David Simon is the creator of The Wire. He was a Baltimore Sun police reporter when he took a year off to write the book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, the book that inspired the hitr NBC show Homicide: Life on the Streets, for which he was a writer and producer. His next project was a book and subsequent six part HBO miniseries called The Corner. He talked with Marc about the critical reception The Wire has received, and what he thinks it has to teach Baltimore.

Choice quotes:

“The Wire to me is one of the funniest shows about the decline of the American empire that’s ever been written.”

“Politically, I am a pessimist at this point. I don’t believe we can actually even recognize our fundamental problems, much less begin to address them. And that is what the last season of The Wire was about…I’d love The Wire to be wrong about everything. This is not a gleeful pessimism, it’s a worried pessimism. And if The Wire is wrong, nobody will be happier than me.”

“Every single drama that is offered up for popular entertainment is on some level a political or cultural form of pornography, and I’m tired of it and it bores the hell out of me.”

“I apparently am the angriest man in television, which, I take that as a vague manner of praise, but I think it’s rather faint. The second angriest man in television, I believe, is by a kidney shaped pool with his cellphone in Bel Air somewhere, and he’s screaming because he doesn’t have enough points on the DVD’s.”