David Simon interview

Really great, great interview from Vice. "First, at the beginning of every season, we did a sort of retreat with the main writers, the guys who were going to be on staff the whole year. We’d discuss what we were trying to say, but we were really having a current-events/ideology/political argument. The writers didn’t all think the same. We weren’t in lockstep on the issues of the day, whether it was the drug war or public education or the media. So we had to discuss the issue as an issue first. Never mind the characters, never mind plot."

"What we were asking was, “What should we spend 12 hours of television saying?” And that’s a journalistic impulse. That was coming from the Wire writers who were journalists and, to an extent, the novelists who wrote for the show who write in a realistic framework, like researched fiction. People like Pelecanos, Price, and Lehane."

"One of the things we were saying was that reform was becoming more and more problematic as moneyed interests—capitalism, which is sort of the ultimate Olympian god—become more entrenched in the postmodern world. Reform becomes more and more problematic because the status quo is arranged in such a way as to maximize profit and to exalt profit—particularly short-term profit—over long-term societal benefit and/or human beings. "

"When capitalism triumphs unequivocally, labor is diminished. It’s a zero-sum game. People paid a much higher tax rate when Eisenhower was president, a much higher tax rate for the benefit of society, and all of us had more of a sense that we were included."

"We pretend to educate the bottom 10 to 15 percent of American society to join the ranks of the existing economy, but it’s all pretense. We’re not really giving them a good enough education to make that leap into the service economy. We’re really preparing them for the corner and ultimately for the prison complexes. And they may not be educated, but they’re damn sure not stupid. They get it. So if they get it, what do you fucking expect? They understand that they’re being built for the corners."

"Film is a synthesis, and television, since it’s ongoing, is a synthesis between what the actor brings and what the director brings and what the writer brings and what the crew makes you capable of in a given day. It’s very communal."

"A lot of what The Wire was about sounds cynical to people. I think it’s very cynical about institutions and their ability to reform. I don’t deny that, but I don’t think it’s at all cynical about people."

"It was pandering. It was prostitution of a kind. It was pornography, is what it was. The pornography of poverty. The stakes are too high for journalism to do that. I understand why politicians do it. I understand why police industries cook their stats. I understand why school administrators cook their test scores. I understand people in a bureaucracy doing that stuff because I expect so little of them at this point after years of being a reporter."

"But what’s common to all of them is that they’re looking for the fault lines in society. They’re using crime to do it because that’s where these things are readily apparent. It’s where money and vanity and fraud and intellect and cultural dissonance all manage to show themselves in very blunt and fundamental ways."

"New Orleans has created such unique cultural art in terms of music and dance, and it’s a very idiosyncratic culture, it shows the value of what the American melting pot is capable of. It does it in a way that is visual and musical and demonstrable, and it does it in the fucking street every day. Somehow this city is trying to find a way to endure while the political essence of the country doesn’t give a fuck. That, to me, is a fascinating dynamic."