Written Interview: Nick Hornby & David Simon

“The Wire” is the best TV series ever. And if you do a Google search of this site, you will find multiple posts about the series and its creator David Simon. Indeed a prized possession of mine is Simon’s 1991 book “Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets,” one of the best non-fiction works I’ve ever read and the basis of my second favorite TV series “Homicide: Life on the Streets.”

So I was thrilled when @webacion tweeted this interview Simon did with another of my favorite authors Nick Hornby (“Fever Pitch,” “High Fidelity,” “About a Boy”).

NICK HORNBY: Can I start by asking you something about the writing? How did you kick it off? All the seasons have had very unconventional shapes and paces to them, I think. Did you have something different in mind before you started, or did that happen during the creation of the series?

DAVID SIMON: I think what you sense in The Wire is that it is violating a good many of the conventions and tropes of episodic television. It isn’t really structured as episodic television and it instead pursues the form of the modern, multi-POV novel. Why? Primarily because the creators and contributors are not by training or inclination television writers. In fact, it is a little bit remarkable that we ended up with a television drama on HBO or anywhere else. I am a newspaper reporter by training who wrote a couple long, multi-POV nonfiction narratives, Homicide and The Corner. The first became the basis for the NBC drama of the same name; the second I was able to produce as a miniseries for HBO, airing in 2000. Both works are the result of a journalistic impulse, the first recounting a year I spent with the Baltimore Police Department’s Homicide Unit, and the second book detailing a year spent in a drug-saturated West Baltimore neighborhood, following an extended, drug-involved family. Ed Burns, my coauthor on The Corner and co-creator on The Wire, was a homicide detective who served in the BPD for twenty years and, following that for seven years, a seventh-grade teacher at a Baltimore public school. The remaining writers — Richard Price [Clockers], Dennis Lehane [Mystic River], and George Pelecanos [The Night Gardener] — are novelists working at the highest level of the crime genre. Bill Zorzi covered state and municipal politics for the Baltimore Sun for twenty years; Rafael Alvarez, another Sun veteran, worked as a merchant seaman and comes from two generations of port workers. So we are all rooted in a different place than Hollywood.

We got the gig because as my newspaper was bought and butchered by an out-of-town newspaper chain, I was offered the chance to write scripts, and ultimately, to learn to produce television by the fellows who were turning my first book into Homicide: Life on the Street. I took that gig and ultimately, I was able to produce the second book for HBO on my own. Following that miniseries, HBO agreed to look at The Wire scripts. So I made an improbable and in many ways unplanned transition from journalist/author to TV producer. It was not a predictable transformation and I am vaguely amused that it actually happened. If I had a plan, it was to grow old on the Baltimore Sun’s copy desk, bumming cigarettes from young reporters and telling lies about what it was like working with H. L. Mencken and William Manchester.

Another reason the show may feel different than a lot of television: our model is not quite so Shakespearean as other high-end HBO fare. The Sopranos and Deadwood — two shows that I do admire — offer a good deal of Macbeth or Richard III or Hamlet in their focus on the angst and machinations of the central characters (Tony Soprano, Al Swearengen). Much of our modern theater seems rooted in the Shakespearean discovery of the modern mind. We’re stealing instead from an earlier, less-traveled construct — the Greeks — lifting our thematic stance wholesale from Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides to create doomed and fated protagonists who confront a rigged game and their own mortality. The modern mind — particularly those of us in the West — finds such fatalism ancient and discomfiting, I think. We are a pretty self-actualized, self-worshipping crowd of postmoderns and the idea that for all of our wherewithal and discretionary income and leisure, we’re still fated by indifferent gods, feels to us antiquated and superstitious. We don’t accept our gods on such terms anymore; by and large, with the exception of the fundamentalists among us, we don’t even grant Yahweh himself that kind of unbridled, interventionist authority.

But instead of the old gods, The Wire is a Greek tragedy in which the postmodern institutions are the Olympian forces. It’s the police department, or the drug economy, or the political structures, or the school administration, or the macroeconomic forces that are throwing the lightning bolts and hitting people in the ass for no decent reason. In much of television, and in a good deal of our stage drama, individuals are often portrayed as rising above institutions to achieve catharsis. In this drama, the institutions always prove larger, and those characters with hubris enough to challenge the postmodern construct of American empire are invariably mocked, marginalized, or crushed. Greek tragedy for the new millennium, so to speak. Because so much of television is about providing catharsis and redemption and the triumph of character, a drama in which postmodern institutions trump individuality and morality and justice seems different in some ways, I think.

It also explains why we get good reviews but less of an audience than other storytelling. In this age of Enron, WorldCom, Iraq, and Katrina, many people want their television entertainments to distract them from the foibles of the society we actually inhabit. Which brings me to the last notion of why The Wire may feel different. The chumps making it live in Baltimore, or, in the case of guys like Price, Pelecanos, and Lehane, they are at least writing in their literary work about second-tier East Coast rust-belt places like Jersey City, northeast Washington, or Dorchester, rather than Manhattan, Georgetown, or Back Bay Boston. We are of the other America or the America that has been left behind in the postindustrial age. We don’t live in L.A. or go to their parties; we don’t do what we do to try to triumph in the world of television entertainment by having a bona fide hit, and meeting the pretty people and getting the best table at the Ivy. Shit, the last time George and I went to the Ivy on a road trip, we waited forty-five minutes for a table and then were announced as “The Pelican party.” We don’t belong there and we don’t need the kind of money or the level of zeitgeist required to belong there. We hang out in the Baltimores of the world, writing what we want to write about and never keeping one eye on whether or not it could sell as much as a drama that had, say, more white faces, more women with big tits, and more stuff that blows up or squirts blood real good.

Our impulses are all the natural reactions of writers who live in close proximity to a specific American experience — independent of Hollywood — and who are trying to capture that experience. And that too is an improbability, given how insulated the American entertainment industry normally is. I don’t mean this to come off as some snotty declaration of classist, pseudoproletarian pretension, but it is what it is. I live in Baltimore. How many yachts can I waterski behind in Baltimore harbor? Fuck it, I’m happy to be getting paid what I’m paid to make a television show about what I would normally write magazine articles and newspaper series and narrative tomes about. And the other writers feel pretty much the same.

So we are misfits, and while we hope the show is entertaining enough, none of us think of ourselves as providing entertainment. The impulse is, again, either journalistic or literary. Hope this helps and doesn’t sound as wrought and pompous as I think it does. Forgive us for actually thinking about this shit; we know it’s television, but we can’t help ourselves. But as you yourself probably know from your love of music, sometimes even three chords and the right guitar solo and a good chorus can be pretty much everything.

And what’s this? Simon is blogging?

I can’t wait for the return of “Treme,” which is also superb TV.

For more of the interview, go here.

HT to @webacion for sourcing the link.

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