Word: wire
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What this means is doing less with less and cutting corners to make it look like more, sometimes with disastrous results. The lie of "more with less" is, in a way, the heart of the series. "The Wire's basically about the end of an empire," says Simon. "It's about, This is as much of America as we've paid for. No more, no less. We didn't pay for a New Orleans that's protected from floods the way, say, the Netherlands is. The police department gets what it pays for, the city government gets what it pays...
Ironically, The Wire might well not exist without the kind of long-form journalism it's hard to pay for today. As a Sun reporter, Simon spent a year on Baltimore's drug corners in 1988 for an assignment that turned into a book and then an NBC series, Homicide. His next project, with former cop and Wire partner Ed Burns, became the book and HBO miniseries The Corner. But then, frustrated at being unable to fit the complexities of street life and the drug war into the news columns, he took a buyout and went into fiction full-time...
...Wire, Simon and a staff of top-shelf crime writers like Richard Price are free to make things up. But in a way, the show is a variation on old-fashioned populist reportage à la Studs Terkel. It elevates the lowlifes and mocks the highlifes. It's steeped in lived experience, with voices as distinctive and regional as a crab boil. Simon may be angry and intellectual--The Wire differs from most TV drama, he says, because it's based in Greek tragedy about fated individuals, not Shakespearean tragedy about heroic individuals--but his show doesn't play like...
...Wire is also TV's best--and nearly its only--drama about race and class. Because Baltimore is largely a city of black people, The Wire is a show largely about black people, all kinds. Black people are the criminals, and they are the cops and the politicians. What's more, they are the good cops and the lousy cops, the decent pols and the ones on the take, the vicious criminals and the sympathetic ones, and none of them (nor the whites) are wholly, simply good or evil. Season 5 explores how city hall and the media ignore murders...
Which may be why The Wire has drawn an African-American and working-class following. The series has rerun on BET, and Simon recalls riding the A train, which runs through Harlem, on a visit to New York City to edit the show: "There were guys on Monday morning hawking bootleg DVDs of the episode that was on HBO Sunday night. The part of me who has a little pirate hat on his head thought that was pretty cool...