The Wire: Season 5 premieres Sunday, January 6th on HBO.
Q: Now that The Wire is finally winding down, how do you feel?
David Simon: It's been six years of storytelling, and we've put in a lot of effort to create this universe, so to say goodbye is certainly bittersweet. But we got to say what we wanted to say, and it's time to tell other stories.
Q: Was the five-season arc something you had envisioned from the beginning, or was it a season-to-season process of developing the series?
Simon: We had pretty much decided by the middle of the second season what we would like to cover in terms of this city we were slowly creating.
Q: In the beginning, did you have any idea the material would be so rich or diverse?
Simon: Yes. I'd covered Baltimore [as a reporter] for a dozen years, and Ed Burns had policed it for 20, and taught in its schools for another seven, and we live here. We knew what was here - it was just a matter of convincing HBO to give us enough room.
Q: Can you summarize what The Wire is trying to say?
Simon: I suppose that what we are trying to say, as a last consideration, is that if The Wire is at all correct in its portrayal of an American city, its problems and its inability to even fully acknowledge - much less attend to - its problems, then what exactly are we paying attention to? When the drug war went awry for generations, when the factories closed and the working class was hollowed out, when the police departments and the school systems all began critiquing themselves with fraudulent crime statistics and test scores, and when our political leaders exalted themselves with non-existent achievements, how exactly did we see ourselves?
Q: Do you think your depiction of Baltimore has had any effect on the life of the real Baltimore?
Simon: Not at all. It's a television show, and as much as I would like people to pay attention, I don't have any illusions about the institutions or systems correcting themselves because we issued a critique.
Q: Why did you focus on the media, and more specifically, newspapers, for the fifth season?
Simon: Newspapers, which for the duration of the American experiment have been the primary means of monitoring government and other imposed authority, are now being eviscerated nationwide. The people who once held us all to some basic account are being laid off, bought out and attrited from newsrooms. And newspaper managers - who have so much contempt for their own product that they give it away for free, misreading the internet as advertising for the product, when it was the product itself - they tell us they are going to do more with less. You do less with less, that's why they call it less.
It made sense to finish The Wire with this reflection on the state of the media, as all the other attendant problems of the American city depicted in the previous four seasons will not be solved until the depth and range of those problems is first acknowledged. And that won't happen without an intelligent, aggressive and well-funded press.
Q: The Wire is often hailed for its uncompromising depiction of timely issues, but that kind of praise doesn't necessarily convey how much fun the show can be.
Simon: We think about the issues, of course, but we try not to be didactic. It's important first to let the characters breathe. The show is very confident in its own sense of story and its sense of character and its own sense of humor. It's a very funny show in many ways - sometimes in that "Dr. Strangelove" kind of way. If you walk in anybody's footsteps, you'll see that people have a way of laughing at the world, and at themselves.
Q: How do you think The Wire will be viewed five or ten years from now, as people continue to discover it on DVD?
Simon: I think it will have a shelf life. It has survived by critical attention and by word of mouth. And I think that word of mouth will continue.
Q: Was it always your goal to do five seasons of The Wire?
Nina Kostroff Noble: That was always David's conception. While the original vision was to explore a different part of the city each season, the scope of the show has expanded each year. The characters from the Barksdale story [season one], for example, proved to be so compelling and interesting that they stayed with us through season three.
Q: What were some of the biggest logistical challenges?
Noble: With all the stories being interconnected, there was a lot of history to keep track of by season five. It became quite a juggling act! Once the story arcs were set, there weren't many changes you could make without unraveling the whole thing. Sometimes actors would request changes in certain scenes, but we didn't always have the flexibility to accommodate them.
Q: On the other hand, maintaining consistency in the characters and story lines has made the show more believable.
Noble: I think that's where the integrity of the show comes from. David and I believe that all these characters exist out there somewhere in the world once we've introduced them. There's a florist in season two who turns up again in season five.
Q: The diversity of the characters has been a noteworthy feature of the series as well.
Noble: One of the most interesting things to me is how far-reaching the impact of the show has been. Because of the different characters and story lines, different groups have related to The Wire in different ways. We've been covered in everything from hip-hop magazines to education publications.
Q: What were the high points of working on The Wire?
Noble: There's so many things I enjoyed about working on the show. I really liked reading a script, filming it and then seeing the finished product, seeing the magic in the performances. The best thing about my job is going to work every day and not knowing what's going to happen. During this last season, we usually had two units shooting at the same time, which was quite a challenge, but we had a team of incredibly committed people that were always willing to go the extra mile. We've all worked just as hard on bad shows, so it gave everyone a sense of accomplishment to be involved in something we could be proud of. I feel tremendously proud of the work we've done.
