Since its premiere back in 2002, HBO’s The Wire has, over the course of five years, garnered a reputation as the only serious contender for The Sopranos’ title of greatest TV show of all time.
The final series aired on the small screen this year and will be out on DVD next month. Hot Press, in association with Canongate Books, HBO and Fox, will be acting as official media partner for a special screening of The Wire in the IFI on September 19 at 6.30pm.
The event will be attended by the series’ creator, executive producer and writer David Simon, who’ll be participating in a public interview, chaired by a representative from HP Towers.
Created, executive-produced and written by Simon, in collaboration with ex-detective Ed Burns, The Wire is a gritty, complex and no-punches-pulled depiction of the war on drugs in the city of Baltimore, as seen from multiple perspectives, including those of the detectives, the dealers, the lawyers and the politicians. It’s an ensemble piece with long story arcs more akin to the plotting of a novel than the usual show-by-show pay-off, and this ambitious structure, plus the opportunity to mine the labyrinthine chain-of-command machinations of the police department, has enabled Simon to attract the the services of such A-list crime writers as George Pelecanos, Richard Price and Dennis Lehane.
Irish audiences will recognise homeboy Aidan Gillen in the role of Councilman Thomas Carcetti. Speaking to Hot Press last year, the actor explained what drew him to the show.
“I thought it sounded like City Of Hope; it cuts into the cross section of the class tier of an American city,” he said. “The Wire really tells it like it is. You don’t see that many dramas on TV where you see eight-year-old kids on street corners selling drugs in Baltimore ’cos they’re treated with more leniency if they’re caught. David Simon was a crime journalist in the Baltimore Sun, which is a pretty good East Coast paper. He wrote a book called Homicide – A Year On the Killing Streets, a fact-based book, following this cop Jay Landsman around, and he made it into the TV series Homicide: Life On The Street. After that he hooked up with this guy who was an ex-cop called Ed Burns, not to be confused with the actor, and they hung out on a street corner for like a year or more, just hung with these blokes, and wrote a book about it called The Corner, which they also made into a six-part HBO series, a very successful and very honest look at the so-called war on drugs, which bled directly into The Wire.
“The first season of The Wire was sold almost as a cop show,” Gillen explained, “but it wasn’t about the cops being good and the criminals being bad. The whole thing takes maybe 48 episodes to tell the story, and because it’s HBO and the writers have been given leeway to do it their way, you can, as Ed Burns said in an interview, sow the seeds of something in episode 8 or 9 that might not come to fruition until episode 35. It’s written like a novel, and it’s not dumbed down in any way, so they did get people like Pelecanos and Richard Price and Dennis Lehane on board, because they could see the quality was fuckin’ amazing. And they’re first rate crime novelists, all East Coast as well. The Wire is a big ensemble thing and there are no stars in it, which is probably one of the best things about it. They go out of their way to get people you’re not gonna know to make it more real. I’m not a star in The Wire. Nobody is.”
There are, however, some notable cameos, not least one by Steve Earle in the role of a redneck recovered drug addict named Waylon.
“In other words I’m not acting!” Earle told us last year, as he was filming the final series. “There’s a character in it who’s actually based on a real person, called Bubbles, who was a pretty notorious snitch in West Baltimore who eventually got clean and became kind of an inspiration to other recovering addicts around town, and then he ended up dying of AIDS. But I play Bubbles’s sponsor. Whenever Bubbles decided to try to get clean over the arc of the show, they’d write me in. All my scenes are with Andre Royo, who plays Bubbles, so I’m grafting behind a really fine actor, and I get to say those words, and it’s really great writing. It’s interesting that it’s playing in Ireland, because Ireland might be the only place in Europe…there are definitely people in parts of Dublin that’ll relate to it.”
Speaking exclusively to Hot Press ahead of his appearance at the IFI next month, David Simon discussed many subjects, including the background to Homicide, the state of contemporary journalism, his new Iraqi War show Generation Kill, and, of course, The Wire itself.
“The models for the series were really novels,” he explained. “Richard Price’s Clockers had more influence on me than any television show, in terms of the structure, and going back and forth between multiple points of view, from the cops to the street. Thematically, we stole from the Greek plays. In a filmic sense and in terms of tone, I kept Paths Of Glory in my head. But structurally, it’s really about the multi-POV modern novel.”
Talking about the republication of Homicide, Simon said he now views it as a project which kickstarted his later career.
“It was the first time I tried writing anything longer than a magazine story,” he reflected. “It turned out well enough that my book editor signed me up for another one, and once my newspaper went south – we were bought by out of town ownership and carpetbagged – that book provided the opportunity to do meaningful work. And then absurdly, because there was absolutely no plan for it, the book sold to television.
“At some point, almost on a lark, because at the time I’d just finished the second draft of The Corner, I took a writing job on the TV series of Homicide. I thought, ‘I don’t know that I’ll actually get involved in television, but I’ll learn this skill set.’ That was 1995, and 13 years later I’m still in television. So everything sort of sprung from that one open-ended adventure of going into the homicide unit for a year.”
Wire obsessives will have a chance to attend a special screening of the show in the IFI in Dublin on September 19 at 6.30pm, along with a public interview with David Simon, conducted by Peter Murphy of Hot Press. Tickets are available from the IFI box-office and irishfilm.ie priced €9.20 and €10.20. Win tickets and read an exclusive interview with David Simon in our next issue out on September 11.
The fifth season of The Wire is on release now on DVD. Homicide – A Year On the Killing Streets (Canongate) has just been reissued.