"You Can’t Make This Shit Up"

If, like any sensible human being, you’re counting down the days until the fifth and final series of The Wire starts airing on HBO in January, The New Yorker has a great article by Margaret Talbot about the show and it’s creator David Simon.


Simon makes it clear that the show’s ambitions were grand. “‘The Wire’ is dissent,” he says. “It is perhaps the only storytelling on television that overtly suggests that our political and economic and social constructs are no longer viable, that our leadership has failed us relentlessly, and that no, we are not going to be all right.” He also likes to say that “The Wire” is a story about the “decline of the American empire.” Simon’s belief in the show is a formidable thing, and it leads him into some ostentatious comparisons that he sometimes laughs at himself for and sometimes does not.