David Simon article in the New Yorker


This is easily the best article about "The Wire" thus far. It's from last week's New Yorker and it's an absolute must-read for Wire fans. The article is written as a profile of David Simon and gives us a better understanding of how the show came into being. The focus on the relationships between Simon and Burns and Simon and the other writers of the show is really spotlighted here.

One long-standing question I've had is how all of the show's writers - nearly all of whom are middle-aged (and probably quite affluent) white guys - are able to capture the dialogue of low-income black Baltimoreans so convincingly. Here's a quote from the article:

Gbenga Akinnagbe, the actor who plays a drug dealer’s henchman named Chris Partlow, said, “This is David’s domain. He gets the streets of Baltimore better than we do.” The novelist Dennis Lehane (“Mystic River”), whom Simon hired to write several scripts, agrees: “When you hear the really authentic street poetry in the dialogue, that’s David, or Ed Burns. Anything that’s literally 2006 or 2007 African-American ghetto dialogue—that’s them. They are so much further ahead of the curve on that.”

The article says so many things about so many aspects of the show. The author calls Simon an "authenticity freak," which seems accurate. I could go on and on but you might as well go read it for yourself.

- In personal news, I moved to Los Angeles six weeks ago.