The Wire: Redux

So yesterday I post this Great Scene, a wonderful bit of business from the HBO series “The Wire” in which the characters investigate a crime scene and their only dialogue is variations of the word “fuck.” Last night, I get an email from John (OutOfContext.com) with an interesting slant on the scene. Turns out John never was a fan of the show. In fact, he didn’t see his first episode until it was broadcast on BET. Note: The show is heavily edited for broadcast on BET and of particular relevance to this story, they cut out all F-bombs. So here’s John picking up the story:

“So I DVRed an episode off BET. It happened to be the episode that contained this week’s “scene” and it was that scene that caught my attention. Next time I talked to [some family relations], I mentioned that I had seen that episode and what a great scene I thought it was. I was especially struck by the fact that these guys knew each other and their work so well that they could communicate without dialogue and that it was done so well that I could understand what they were learning” [emphasis added].

Isn’t that interesting? Two completely different approaches to the scene. The first one, the characters drop F-bombs left, right, front and center — and I thought it brilliant. The second version, removing all the F-bombs, resulted in the characters going about their business without saying a word — and John thought that was brilliant.

Is there a writing lesson here? I suppose one thing is to remind ourselves that there is more than one way to write a great scene. Another thing: Make sure to stretch your imagination to include unusual approaches to dialogue. 

Anything else to learn here?

And as if on cue, today the creator of “The Wire,” David Simon, gets on his soapbox in this Guardian article “Newspapers last bastion against political corruption”:

Fictional corrupt politicians are a mainstay of The Wire, David Simon’s celebrated television series about life on the Baltimore streets. But the show’s creator says he fears a real-life explosion of rampant corruption in American political life if the newspaper industry, in which he worked for more than a decade, is allowed to collapse.

In an exclusive interview with the Guardian, the award-winning writer and producer launches a tirade against newspaper owners who, he says, showed “contempt for their product” and are now reaping the whirlwind. But he rejects the idea that newspapers should seek ways to embrace the new world of free information, arguing that they must urgently start charging money for content distributed online.

“Oh, to be a state or local official in America over the next 10 to 15 years, before somebody figures out the business model,” says Simon, a former crime reporter for the Baltimore Sun. “To gambol freely across the wastelands of an American city, as a local politician! It’s got to be one of the great dreams in the history of American corruption.”

Simon is a former reporter for The Baltimore Sun, so one would assume this issue is personal to him. But if newspapers start charging for access to content online, that’s the day I stop blogging.