Last night I was at a PR event for the last season of The Wire, featuring episode 9, dinner, and a Q&A with the show's creator and executive producer, David Simon. Although I've been ratherdown on The Wire this season, I still think it's leagues ahead of other TV out there these days. The Wire, after all, depicts reality in a far more real way than any reality show or newspaper could ever hope to. That, he said, is the critique that Simon is making of the news industry in this season. While everyone is distracted by Scott Templeton, the Pulitzer-primed fabulist ("If you've worked in a newsroom long enough," Simon said, "you've known a fabricator."), they're missing out on the fact that everyone at the newspaper is missing the major stories in the city; drug lord Prop Joe's murder only made "page B3," as Simon said.
Simon publicly thanked HBO for allowing him to create The Wire, even though afterward he made reference to the struggle the show's writers had with executives allowing them season five. My colleague, Erica Williams, asked him about how he squared the fact that this was a show about the poorest of the poor, yet it broadcasts on a subscription-only premium cable network. Simon said he didn't really worry about that for one reason: bootlegged copies that flood the streets of Baltimore the day after the episode airs. In fact, Felicia "Snoop" Pearson once accosted someone on the street in Baltimore who was selling bootlegged copies. She called Simon, carefully reading off the serial number and asking what she should do. Simon laughed and told her to let the bootlegger go.
Simon openly admits he steals, from life, from other writers. Hampsterdam and the serial killer are totally made-up storylines, but much of the rest of the show is cribbed from life. Simon noted that in some ways his plots resemble those of the ancient Greeks; characters that are, from the outset, doomed. The characters are in a "rigged game" and the subversive act, as we saw with Bunny when he created Hampsterdam, becomes refusing to play in the rigged game.
For all my resistance to this season, I still admire Simon for what he has created -- it is something of a "moral imagination" for me, if not a direct. After all, he and the other writers created a new standard for themselves, one that sometimes even the creators of that standard cannot live up to.
A freshly christened blog called Stuff White People Like appeared to be written by a 20-year-old white woman, mainly because of this photograph.
Turns out it's actually written by this white dude:
The Assimilated Negro has an interview with him today. Turns out he's really, really white. The interview starts off like this:
The Assimilated Negro (TAN): testing ... TA Negro here.
Stuff White People Like (SWPL): hey. TA Negro makes me think of Teaching Assistant Negro. that's cash money... I used to be TA Canadian.
He says the inspiration for the site was the thought that not enough white people like The Wire. Apparently he didn't get the message that all the liberal hipster journalistsI know in DC love The Wire.
This week's Wire episode seemed to show a dichotomy in the skills of the writers. The story line on the drug dealers gets more compelling -- although gets less screen time -- while the story lines on the three other fronts, the mayor, the newspaper, and the police, gets less so.
Congrats to Kay and Jesse for getting linked to by Matt Yglesias in writing about The Wire. Yet, since I felt compelled to complain about negligence of The Wire when it was not on, I think I should throw in my two cents now that it's back. The backlash that's starting to build should come as no surprise to anyone who's listened to music: it's the classic stock market beahvior of hype. The Wire has just peaked in hype terms during its fourth season, and, now, by the law of hype, it has to have a downturn. There's always some factor, and in this case, the reason is simple: now journalists are the target, and they don't want their world to be portrayed this way. More in extended. Read More »
The Wire is pretty popular at Campus Progress. But did any of you -- Kay, Jesse -- watch it with inner city drug dealers and see thousands of dollars wagered on what will happen this season? Because Sudhir Venkatesh did, and has a post at the Times Freakonomics blog describing the experience.
Venkatesh is no stranger to inner city thugs; he studied and basically embedded himself with a crack gang in Chicago for years, and even did the job of the gang's leader for a day. He also was a co-author with Steven Levitt of the prostituion study I wrote about yesterday. Basically, Venkatesh is the most badass sociologist ever.
Last night's episode of The Wire may be working to confirm Jesse's theory of how season five will unravel the reputation David Simon has earned for himself. The episode began with a poorly acted monologue (these definitely don't seem to be Simon's strong suit, which anyone who has seen The Corner could confirm) at a Narcotics Anonymous meeting.
In the epic good journalist v. bad/lazy journalist subplot Simon seems to be developing, "New York Times or Washington Post, where else?" journalist Scott seems to have fabricated a boy in a wheelchair to add some color to his story on the Orioles opening season game. When his editor asked for more information about the boy, the executive editor -- yes, the same asshole that denied U Maryland wasn't meeting it's desegregation goals -- thought the article was a fine piece of writing and overrode the Gus's request for more information. Read More »
David Simon, the creator of The Wire, is brilliant. He's also a fascinating character, and someone who sees enemies everywhere and who amasses them at a high rate. I highly recommend checking out two recent profiles of him: one in The New Yorker, the other in The Atlantic. One of my favorite quotes comes in the latter, as he describes to an audience his time at The Baltimore Sun, where he started working straight out of the University of Maryland:
This is the place of H. L. Mencken, of Frank Kent, of William Manchester. It’s like you can touch things that you can be proud of. I just have to do good work for its own sake … I’m basically happy, and it’s like the least ambitious I am in my life. Until … it gets sold out of town. And these guys come in from Philly. The white guys from Philly. And I say that with all the contempt you can muster for the phrase white guys. Soulless motherfuckers. Everything that Malcolm X said in that book before he got converted back to humanity—no, no, he was right in the first place. These guys were so without humanity. And it was the kind of journalism—how do I describe bad journalism? It’s not that it’s lazy, it’s that whenever they hear the word Pulitzer, they become tumescent. They become engorged … All they wanted to do was win prizes … I watched them single-handedly destroy The Sun.
Just as nothing on The Wire is simple or easily pinned down, the same thing applies to the show's creator and his motivations: There are plenty of reliable sources who claim that Simon, while making some good points, has exaggerated some of the stuff that went on when The Sun came under new management. (The Atlantic piece covers this angle, and Simon's absolute hatred for the Pulitzer Prize.)
I think I disagree with Kay about some of the gender stuff in last night's Season 5 premiere of The Wire. For one thing, I took the critique of the managing editor who hires young women with "traffic-light eyes" who "can't write a lede" not to be an indictment of female writing ability, but rather the simple statement that the managing editor seems willing to hire young reporters based on their looks rather than their writing aptitude.
The much-anticipated season five premier of The Wire aired last night, and this season focuses on journalism. Spencer and Tom thought that this season will focus on the print v. online debate within journalism. Perhaps it's because I'm a young female journalist myself, but I picked up on perhaps an unintended topic: sexism in the newspaper industry. Granted, Simon's female characters are generally not only lacking but underdeveloped. I had hoped in an industry that's starting to become more flush with young female reporters, we'd see some interesting stuff. I guess I was wrong.
The first scene in which we view journalists, the three middle-aged male reporters are out on a smoke break. They talk about how the managing editor has a taste for hiring young 23-year-old women with "traffic light eyes" half of whom "can't write a lede." I highly doubt lede-writing is related to gender.
When the metro desk editor sniffs out a good story on the city council making a deal with , he gives credit to the lazy (male) city council beat reporter even though he didn't find the story. Another male reporter, who has nothing but ambitions to be at the New York Times or the Washington Post, comes to the metro editor and expects to be handed a story of the same caliber.
The female reporter, who was asked to run out on assignment to get a statement from the drug dealer at the strip club, insists that Baltimore is a good news town as she sips a drink at the bar out of a martini glass and seems content to stay at the Sun. Apparently she plays the role of the unambitious female reporter, with no desire to move on to the Times or the Post.
Perhaps the most frustrating scene depicted was when the managing editor killed a story on the University of Maryland not meeting its desegregation goals because his buddy was the dean of the journalism school and "race aside" the story needed more reporting to see how the school was "really perceived by minorities."
There isn't much to go on yet, but I wonder if this season will frustrate me when it comes to gender.
Via Chris Hayes: The Believer has a snippet of a Q&A with David Simon, creator of the HBO hit The Wire, online about his role as a writer. If you don't feel like purchasing the whole issue of The Believer, you can just go back and read Sam Rosenfeld's interview with Simon from last fall.
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