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| They call it the greatest TV series you've never seen. Now join the cult ... The Wire is an American classic. We talk to two stars from this side of the Atlantic, and help you catch up on the action Sarah Hughes, interviews by Katie Toms and Killian Fox Sunday February 11, 2007 The Observer Four boys in their early teens hang out in the dog days of summer, trying to have fun without getting sucked into the drug dealing that pervades every corner of their area of Baltimore. Across town, a councillor - a decent enough guy if you ignore his ruthless streak - schemes to be mayor while, back on the streets, police officers worn down with the hassle of their jobs take out their frustrations on the gang members hanging around on the corner. Welcome to the world of The Wire, America's most brutal, realistic and groundbreaking television drama. It is a world defined in shades of grey, where the cops are often flawed and the gangsters can be charismatic; where the good guys don't always win and the most that anyone can hope for is to struggle through to the end of the next day. 'We do have a bleak outlook,' admits David Simon, an award-winning journalist who co-created the series with former policeman Edward Burns. 'Life isn't always easy. People don't always redeem themselves. You know the three things American television is about: kicking ass, blowing things up and finding redemption. Our show doesn't deal with any of these - apart from the ass kicking. More seriously, we aren't saying that there's an easy way out; this is what life is like for a lot of people, but they're not the sort of people you normally see on television.' But then The Wire, which starts its fourth series on FX on Tuesday, is not a normal TV series. The New York Times described it as 'the closest moving pictures have come so far to the depth and nuance of the novel', while Salon.com's TV critic, Heather Havrilesky, described it as 'a Homeric epic of modern America'. It is arguably the most consistently brilliant US drama of recent times - certainly the most honest - yet it is only a cult success in America and little known over here. While programmes such as The Sopranos attract huge ratings and critical acclaim, The Wire can only be seen in the UK by those lucky enough to have FX. For Simon, the reason why his programme has failed to win large audiences in the US is obvious: 'People don't want to be reminded about real life,' he says 'They don't like the fact that our show doesn't deal in good versus evil and they don't want to look at this part of America. The only time any television executive from Los Angeles is likely to come to Baltimore is if his plane gets forced to land there when he's trying to get to New York.' So why start watching it now? Surely it's a bit late to catch-up. Not at all. Each series of The Wire concentrates on a different aspect of life in Baltimore. Certain characters return and storylines will resurface, but this is ultimately a series without heroes where the city itself takes centre stage. Where dramas such as 24 and Lost deal in high concepts and tangled plots, The Wire deals in character and dialogue first and allows the complex, always credible plot to grow out of that. You come to care about every character, no matter how minor. That you do so is largely down to the backgrounds of the writers. The Wire's writing staff includes some of crime fiction's most acclaimed practitioners, including George Pelecanos, Dennis Lehane and Richard Price. All three bring the gritty atmosphere and slow-burning characterisations of their novels to their episodes. 'We think of the show like a novel,' Simon says. 'We want the whole picture to slowly evolve. None of the writers had TV backgrounds and I think that shows in the way we write. We're not prepared to dumb down.' Unlike other series that are in thrall to ratings, The Wire has always kept to its own path. It was always planned to last five series, with each revealing an aspect of the city, from the machinations at city hall through the drugs business on the streets and the workers on the docks to the failing education system, which comes under the spotlight in series four. The final season will focus on the media, Simon explains. He hopes that in doing so it will provide some sort of answer to why cities such as Baltimore are left to crumble away from the public eye. Yet he admits that The Wire is likely to retain the tag of 'greatest television show you've never seen'. 'People won't realise how great it was until 20 years later,' he laughs. 'They'll look back and say only one programme captured what American life was like during that time, then everyone will be dying to watch it - except for the LA TV executives ... they still won't have a clue what's going on.' Aidan Gillen, who plays upstart politician Tommy Carcetti, talks about his complex character Aidan Gillen is tired of talking about Queer as Folk, the show that made his name. His brilliant, lust-inducing portrayal of sexually rapacious Stuart Alan Jones is still remembered after almost a decade, but now Gillen is captivating viewers as small-time Baltimore politician Tommy Carcetti in The Wire Gillen, a 38-year-old Irishman, came late to the show, joining in season three of a five-season run. He soon realised he was part of a groundbreaking series. 'It is one of the most intelligent and complex dramas coming out of America,' he says. 'It's not episodic; it's novelistic. Every season, there is a different theme such as union corruption, city politics or the education system. It's also a series that documents the black urban experience in America in depth, in honesty and without compromise. That's a big part of modern America, which seems to me to be marginalised on American TV and even in film.' While starring as Mick in Pinter's The Caretaker on Broadway, a role for which he received a Tony nomination, Gillen was approached by the late Robert Colesbury, the show's executive producer, to play Carcetti, whose complexities Gillen relishes. 'We follow Carcetti's journey as a minor player in city politics to a major contender in a mayoral election. He was a young guy who was considered an upstart, who saw an opportunity to do something, maybe effect some change. We see him open up and develop a conscience. I hope he's not just coming across as smarm. I'd say he's flawed, but driven.' Gillen bases himself between Baltimore, New York and London. 'My wife and children haven't moved to America. When I'm working in the States, I come back every couple of weeks to see my kids or they'll come over to see me. I've always gone where the decent role is.' So does he feel there is a British and Irish invasion of American TV? 'I don't know if it's any different than it's ever been. There's always going to be actors from everywhere heading to the States because there's work there. I'm not part of any national Irish team or anything.' Unlike many of his contemporaries working in the US, Gillen has embraced American roles and has the accent under his belt. Along with preparing for another season as Carcetti, he is currently rehearsing David Mamet's American Buffalo for the Gate Theatre in Dublin and last year filmed Blackout, an American indie thriller. 'I can see a pattern emerging,' muses Gillen. 'They're all American characters. I hadn't thought about that before.' Dominic West is obstinate Baltimore cop Jimmy McNulty. He explains how he developed his East Coast drawl 'Idon't know why British actors are getting big parts in American TV shows,' says Dominic West. 'Maybe it's because we're cheap.' West, 37, a seasoned theatre actor currently starring in Tom Stoppard's Rock 'n' Roll in the West End, was cast within days after he auditioned for the part of The Wire's insubordinate Baltimore cop Jimmy McNulty. 'They were desperate to find someone but I still don't know why the hell they cast me. I wasn't well suited to the part and my accent wasn't very good to start with. Perhaps they couldn't get an American actor to agree to live in Baltimore for five years.' Maybe it was West's British self-deprecation that clinched it. He's brilliant as the hard-working, hard-drinking McNulty, whose active moral compass and mulish nature propels him to the heart of the corruption, while everyone around him angles for an easy life and a promotion. It is, however, disconcerting to hear a rather theatrical English boom in place of McNulty's East Coast drawl. Three seasons on and he is beginning to get recognised for his work on this side of the Atlantic, where The Wire is shown on late-night cable slots. 'People in Britain are catching on now because they're watching the DVDs. In America I get stopped a lot. At first it was mainly black viewers who'd recognise me, because we didn't get much of a white audience to start with.' Part of the reason for the show's underexposure was its subject matter. 'No one writes about the American underclass,' West says. 'The Wire is one of the few shows that bothers to depict how the system fails these people.' Thanks to waves of critical acclaim, The Wire is reaching a wider audience. 'The critics have always backed it and loved it. The only criticisms have been that it's almost wilfully obscure and difficult to follow and the characters are too numerous, but it's not really a criticism that sticks because even the minor characters are so well drawn.' The experience seems to have worked favourably for West, who is appearing in two new Hollywood blockbusters, Hannibal Rising and 300, but he is unsure. 'I could have done a lot better without it. The work has been good and I've met great people, but career-wise it's complete suicide. I suppose I can convince people I can play a hard-nosed American,' he goes on, softening a little. 'Oh, and Zadie Smith told me how much she liked The Wire the other day. If people like that stop you in the street, maybe it's not such a bad thing.' · The Wire 4 starts on Tuesday on FX, 10pm |
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| Barbed wire Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 25/02/2007 The crime drama The Wire is tough, hard-bitten and relentlessly uncompromising. and so are the men behind it, writes Steven Daly At the end of the third series of The Wire, its creator David Simon discussed its future with Chris Albrecht, the chairman of HBO, the American television network best known for The Sopranos. The Wire is critically adored, but its ratings are modest, and with the final episode, Simon tied up a storyline that had been at the centre of the show's epic narrative from day one. Etonian Dominic West plays a hardbitten Baltimore cop in The Wire 'The audience hadn't grown,' he says. 'So Chris said, "We're never going to get better reviews - so why not pick our chips up off the table and call ourselves winners?" ' The fourth series of The Wire, which is based in Baltimore, made its British debut on the FX satellite channel recently; so how did David Simon dodge the bullet? 'I begged,' he says. 'I said, "Please look at these stories, these are good stories", and to their great credit they gave us more rope. It wasn't me saying, if I can just keep the show going, that's a victory in itself. We want to speak to that which interests us about this city we've created, this simulated Baltimore.' Simon appreciates that the idea of a television producer not motivated by money sounds dubious at best; but then again, so is the very existence of a show like The Wire, which costs HBO about $40 million per series. advertisement 'This is so improbable a notion,' says Simon. 'It could only happen from people who weren't from the industry.' Although he has been in television for several years, Simon, aged 46, still considers himself primarily a newspaper man. He was a long-time reporter at the Baltimore Sun, during which time he wrote two books: Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets and The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner City Neighbourhood, both of which became television series. The Corner can be seen as a dry run for The Wire. It focused on an impoverished inner-city neighbourhood and the devastation wrought by the drug trade. The Wire addresses the same theme on a city-wide scale, weaving together teeming narratives peopled by jaded street cops and their pension-grasping bosses, scuffling addicts and their ultra-savvy dealers, as well as a rich stratum of drug-lord philosophers and a top level of bureaucrats and scheming politicians who pretend to rule the whole blighted kingdom. Part of the show's strength is in its casting, which draws on largely unknown faces, including a substantial group of Baltimore residents with no previous acting experience. A great find is the local actor Robert F. Chew, who plays Proposition Joe, a Runyon-esque man-mountain who speaks mainly in arcane, almost Dickensian, locutions - and one of the many bad characters you end up rooting for in the moral limbo of The Wire. When Simon was at journalism school, his teachers would try to drive home the message that is supposed to be the mission of all reporters: to write for the average reader. 'I'm not writing for the average reader,' says Simon. You can say that again. In a typical episode of The Wire, you can expect to write off about 30 per cent of the dialogue, thanks to the uncompromising speed of the vernacular: of the street, the police locker-room, the dockside union hall and the corridors of power. And it's hard to think of any other television show that has dealt with the touchy subject of race in such a bracingly forthright manner: when a white mayoral candidate seeks the support of black community leaders, he is told that although his chances are slim. 'At least they get to see a beggin'-ass white man on his knees. Always a feel-good moment for the folks.' In airing The Wire, the HBO network echoes a classic period of BBC drama in the 1980s, when the corporation commissioned such uncompromising fare as Alan Bleasdale's Boys from the Blackstuff and Peter McDougall's Edinburgh heroin play Shoot for the Sun. 'With HBO, you can have these shows that exist as almost a fringe logic to the idea of mass entertainment,' says Simon. 'Nowadays, people treat the audience as if the audience knows best - and that's the end of art. Because you can't do anything artful by regarding the audience as a child that would, given its way, eat dessert every day and say "F--- it" to vegetables. There's no way to do anything purposeful by addressing yourself to your audience. You have to address yourself to your story. 'Our models are prose narratives, multi-point-of-view modern novels. This could be Clockers, this could be Bonfire of the Vanities. We're trying to do contemporary fiction on the largest scale possible.' The Wire can boast Clockers author Richard Price as part of its writing staff, which also includes the top-tier fiction writers Denis Lahane (Mystic River) and the modern-noir maestro George Pelecanos. 'We don't hire television writers,' says Simon. 'Part of the problem with American television, by and large, is that most of the people who make it live in New York or L.A., and they experience Manhattan or they experience West L.A. Their sense of the world is fairly confined - and what they acquire is largely from other films or television shows. The drug-dealers still sound like they've been handed down generationally from guys Popeye Doyle rousted in The French Connection, 35 years ago; and the same for police.' Simon and his taciturn co-producer, Ed Burns (an ex-detective and co-creator of The Corner), have assembled a writing rota that combines the prodigious talents of the aforementioned novelists with writers who have real-world experience. Even so, all writers on The Wire are encouraged to do first-hand research into whatever subjects they're assigned to tackle. Today, Burns and Simon are in an all-day story meeting with the writer Bill Zorzi, planning out episodes for the fifth series, due to start filming in March. Zorzi's long stint as an editor and senior political writer at the Baltimore Sun will inform a new plot-line about the media and politics. When Zorzi came on board during The Wire's third series, he found himself having to adjust to a new mode of writing. 'I had to learn a new language,' he says. 'I had been on the street as a reporter and as other things, but I wasn't a drug-dealer. There was a fairly sharp learning curve. Then you just start to hear the voice in your head.' Simon's office, which overlooks Baltimore harbour, is set in the kind of faceless building that would seem more fitting for a company such as Wernham Hogg than for a television show. The only hint of the magic that happens here is the huge story-board that almost covers an entire wall; the board is divided into a grid covered with yellow, white and blue Post-It notes, each colour representing plot-points and storylines within the various social milieus that are woven through the stories. As an example of what goes into the writing of The Wire, Simon refers back to the second series, in which one storyline involved workers and union members at Baltimore's port. 'A lot of us didn't know the port, so we went down there and hung around with the people who worked there,' says Simon. 'If we didn't know the answer to something, we'd ask them: "How does this work? How does that work?" I was very comfortable asking stupid questions - it's a good journalistic tool.' If money isn't a motivating force for Simon, the quest for verisimilitude certainly is. 'If I'm writing a story about detectives, I don't want detectives to see it and go, "This guy sucks. He doesn't get it",' he says. 'Same with drug-dealers or longshoremen or politicians. I'm not writing to appease them; they might not like what I've written - but it's enough for me if they just say, "He gets it." If the rest of the people don't follow, f--- 'em. But I get scared. I'm always waiting for the other shoe to drop, for someone to say, "I know what The Truth is, and this ain't it - you missed.'' In all of his encounters with local cops, union officials and politicians, Simon has been gratified to find that no one has said this. The black community, too, has awarded him a gold star. However incongruous the notion may be, this balding, middle-aged white dude in his plaid shirt and shapeless jeans is a hip-hop icon. Then again, The Wire's popularity is not necessarily something that David Simon and Ed Burns have been able to, as they say in corporate America, 'monetise'. According to Burns, 'One of the actors said to me, "Yo, everyone watches this show in New York." And I said, "That's funny, because there are six million people in New York - and about six of them watch the show." He thinks about it for a second and says, "Yeah, I guess that's because they all get it on pirated DVDs." ' Simon was sitting on a New York underground train one night when a man came from the next carriage, selling copies of the previous night's show on DVD. Burns smiles and says, 'That's good'. Legitimate DVDs of The Wire are selling well, but under the terms of the Writers Guild's blanket agreement with the television networks, the show's creators do not get a taste of that revenue stream. 'We're salaried employees,' says Simon. Half an hour later, as he samples a cold buffet beneath the fluorescent lights of the production company's lunch room, Simon jokes with colleagues about his post-Wire employment prospects. 'Don't worry about me,' he declares, with mock bravado. 'Guys like me will always have a job: I can still give you 40 inches on a three-alarm fire in 20 minutes.' As violent and nihilistic as the first three series of The Wire often were, the show's fourth outing takes us to even darker terrain. This time, the central drug-world plotline involves a dealer called Marlo Stanfield, a gimlet-eyed youth who makes predecessors such as Avon Barksdale and Stringer Bell look like Paddington Bear by comparison. 'When we started with Avon and Stringer, we gave them ties to a world that was more traditional,' says Ed Burns. 'When you get to Marlon and [his lieutenant] Chris, they have no idea. It's a different culture. They've been trained for one America - you can't drag them into the other America.' The new season of The Wire sees a raft of characters introduced for a storyline that was conceived by Burns several years ago. Although Burns looks like a benevolent Irish cop, from central-casting, the 61-year-old has a personal history that would seem implausible for any fictional character. As a 22-year-old graduate, he was drafted into the US Army and sent to Vietnam, where he served in the Infantry. Upon his return to Baltimore, Burns spent 20 years as a police officer (or 'a police', as they say in the show) before putting in a seven-year stint as a teacher in an inner-city school. By having one of its original cop characters, Roland 'Prez' Pryzbylewski, make the switch from law enforcement to education, this time The Wire shifts its focus to the city's high schools and the way its less fortunate pupils often find surrogate families within the world of drugs and violence that swirls around them. Burns left the teaching profession in 2000, and when he recently returned to Baltimore's schools to research the new series he was dismayed by what he saw. 'The kids want what the older kid got, at a younger age,' he says. 'It starts trickling down. Next thing you know, you've got eight- and nine-year-olds making $20 a day for sitting on a gun. You go into kindergarten and the kids are unbelievable: in fact, New York City expels more kids from pre-kindergarten and kindergarten than they do from the rest of the school system.' Burns gazes out onto Baltimore harbour, where a derelict pier sits opposite a new marina full of gleaming high-price speedboats. The city's post-industrial phase seems to be generating plenty of money for some people, even though Burns says he doesn't know exactly where that money comes from. 'Who could own these things?' he wonders out loud. As far as inner-city Baltimore goes, Burns says, 'Anybody who could, has gotten out. There are no functioning families left; the number of kids in Baltimore has dropped by 25,000 since I was teaching.' For the creators of The Wire, America's so-called 'War on Drugs' has been a pointless exercise that has only pernicious effects on the lives of everyone involved. 'In places like Baltimore - and Baltimore's not unique - drugs are effectively legal,' says Simon. 'Huge amounts of money are spent on this prohibition; and an inordinate amount of time, effort and treasure is expended on the policy. And yet, every day, depending on your estimate, 40,000 or 50,000 people are getting high on heroin or cocaine in Baltimore alone. By the numbers, the drugs have won - it's over except for the waste, the tragedy and the violence.' He admits that The Wire often takes a 'diagnostic' approach to Baltimore's civic politics, and the show's most obviously diagnostic storyline was inspired by the former Baltimore mayor Kurt Schmoke, who was universally vilified for suggesting, in the late-1980s, that the legalisation of drugs might be an idea worthy of serious debate. In The Wire's third season, the fictional police chief Major Howard 'Bunny' Colvin grows so frustrated at the futile War on Drugs that he allows street dealers to operate with impunity in a derelict corner of the city. Crime statistics fall dramatically, but when the Baltimore media catch on to Colvin's experiment, local police and politicians predictably turn on him. Burns points out that when widescale drug use is entrenched for generations, as it is in Baltimore, the very nature of the problem changes. 'It's not just an economy, it's a culture,' he says. 'It dominates the landscape emotionally, socially, politically and psychically in places like West Baltimore. The same way that, say, steel-making did in Birmingham, Alabama, or like aircraft-building in Seattle.' Simon understands that it's a privilege to be allowed to address such issues in a television drama. 'We've been allowed to exist in this little margin,' he admits. And just in case he's in danger of sounding a little precious, he adds a caveat: 'Of course, for any television show to address this stuff is just pissing in the wind.' The HBO cable network is able to pursue an ethos of 'give the public what it needs, not what it wants' not through any noble Reithian ethos, but because subscribers keep signing up to the service for $20 a month. 'HBO has inverted the money logic of the business,' says Simon. 'At least for this brief shining moment, they don't necessarily care about ratings. It's beautiful. Of course, at any moment the window may shut: HBO could say, "We need another Sopranos, and clearly you aren't the guys to go to for that.'' ' Perhaps, predictably, the most popular season of The Wire was the second, which featured the greatest number of white faces. 'Two-thirds of the cast is African-American; that eliminates a certain number of viewers,' says Simon. 'There's a cultural dissonance - "This is not my show." If you were going to design a show to acquire a mass audience, this is not what you would do. You would resolve every episode; the women would have bigger tits and longer legs; we'd blow more shit up. The Wire is not a cop show, and it's not really about the drug war. 'Our intent is to use Baltimore as a stand-in for urban America. This is who we are; it's what our problems are, and why we can no longer solve our own problems. You look at Iraq, you look at our social policies: we ooze hypocrisy from every pore, it's hilarious. A lot of good material to write about, but it's a hard place to accept on its own terms at this point. 'The end of the American Empire, that's the ur-text.' Simon pauses. 'By the way,' he says, with faux off-the-record gravitas. 'If any of the characters were talking the way we're talking now, the show would suck.' The Wire is on FX, Tuesdays 10pm |
| QUOTE (Outta Sight @ Mar 5 2007, 09:55 AM) |
| I missed the third episode :cry: For some reason, during Friday night/Saturday morning, about half a dozen recorded programmes just dropped out of my planner :blink: :( I can live with missing the rest of them but I'm gutted I didn't get to see The Wire :tear: |
| QUOTE (Outta Sight @ Apr 24 2007, 03:48 PM) |
| Still enjoying it, Tom? |
| QUOTE (Outta Sight @ May 8 2007, 10:07 AM) |
| My Sky+ is playing up again and I haven't been able to watch this week's episode yet. I'm hoping it will be fixed in time to catch a repeat <_< Finale next week, isn't it? :unsure: |
| QUOTE (Fangy and grrr @ May 9 2007, 04:03 PM) | ||
I haven't watched it yet but I'm pretty sure the finale was last night. :( I think Sleeper Cell S2 starts in its place next week. |
| QUOTE (willowroolz @ May 9 2007, 04:07 PM) |
| I've just added season 1 to my Amazon rental list. It had better be good :snooty: :lol: ;) |
| QUOTE (Outta Sight @ May 10 2007, 09:53 AM) | ||||
Yes, it was the finale last night :( Haven't watched it yet though. I never got to see last week's episode so I've missed about 3 or maybe 4 out of this season :tear: At least I get to see the finale :thumbsup: Can't wait for Sleeper Cell, until a couple of weeks ago I hadn't even realised they'd made a season 2 :blink: :thumbsup: |
| QUOTE (Fangy and grrr @ May 10 2007, 08:44 PM) | ||||||
Well the good news is that they were running trailers throughout the finale saying they were repeating it in July ( the voice over actually said they were showing it all from the beginning but they were only showing clips of S4 so I'm asuming they are only repeating S4 ). The finale was brilliant :thumbsup: but god it was brutal as well. :tear: |
| QUOTE (Outta Sight @ May 15 2007, 10:22 AM) |
| Noooooooooooooooooooo, not Bodie as well :cry: And Michael being the one to do it :tear: I actually gasped "no" out loud when he did it :blush: And will we find out what happens to Randy? :shrug: Poor Carver :wub: is going to be devastated. The good outcome was obviously Namond getting a new home and a chance with the Colvins :thumbsup: Although what was that with the car passing by :ponder: Nice to see the team being re-assembled for the final series :thumbsup: |
| QUOTE (Fangy and grrr @ May 28 2007, 06:56 PM) |
| It turns out that it wasn't Michael who killed Bodie :o I was arguing about it with someone and they showed me the HBO episode guide and they were right it was some other member of Marlo's crew. :rolleyes: |