The creator of "The Wire" called during a lunch break this week from the post-production facility where he and Ed Burns are finishing their HBO Iraq War miniseries "Generation Kill," currently scheduled to air in July. My call was instigated by my earlier posting this week, where I'd idiotically published (briefly) the name of the song that will air during Sunday's finale montage, which led to my boss's boss asking me if I'd ever written about the Lying Liar on the Wire who sports a Kansas City Star T shirt (online yes, for print no), and that led to my putting a phone call into the always engaging David Simon. In the course of our conversation we touched on his memories of KC, his feuding with journalists over the show's depiction of journalism this season ... and his real beef, which is with people who insist on uploading media screeners of "The Wire" to Internet file-sharing sites days, even weeks, before the episodes air on HBO.
So we started with the matter of the disreputable reporter, played by Tom McCarthy and known on fan sites as The Fabricator, sporting a Kansas City Star T. Why us, David?
“Absolutely no reason,” he said. “The Star was chosen totally at random. Tom McCarthy has a Midwestern look to me.”
So it had nothing to do with the journalistic quality around here?
Nope, he said. In fact, he could only recall one person that he knew during his years at the Baltimore Sun who had come from Kansas City, and that person “was a very good reporter,” he said. And he had a kind word for TV Barn.
Hey, even if he had meant to slime our town, or me, I would've basked in the compliment. After all, “The Wire” is arguably the greatest TV series to grow on American soil. And my job has been enriched the past five years writing about the Baltimore that Simon and his talented cast and crew have dreamed up, their tangled web of cops, criminals, politicians, stevedores, teachers, hustlers and victims.
This season, the show added a raft of new characters -- newspaper reporters and editors working at what, by all accounts, is a perfectly fashioned replica of the Baltimore Sun. And that has brought on Simon some of the most pointed commentary ever about his show, and charges that he went over the line with what amounts to a multi-episode tirade against corporate ownership of newspapers in "The Wire."
We've watched out-of-town editors of the fake Sun issue pink slips to its most senior employees, then urge the remaining staffers to do “more with less.” We've seen them push for Pulitzers, but turn a blind eye to obvious problems with one of their rising stars, whose best quotes fall apart as soon as the respected city editor Gus Haynes pokes at them. (We know he's respected because Clark Johnson plays him.) The people running the fictional Sun are plainly venal and stupid and unethical; worst of all, they are indifferent to the decline of a great newspaper and the great city it once served as its conscience.
For years, Simon has been saying all of these things about the real Baltimore Sun. He's called its out-of-town managers a bunch of “cheese-eaters” who “sucked all joy from the place,” then walked off with tainted prizes.
Well, it's one thing to say all that, another thing to immortalize it in highly realistic drama. This has pulled Simon into a running conversation with journalists, including some who rarely write about TV shows.
Meanwhile, all this attention has made the people still working at the newspaper in Baltimore a little nervous. One Sun reporter I know begged off being quoted by me for this story out of fear of even appearing in the same Google result as Simon. After the paper's TV critic, David Zurawik, critiqued how the paper was portrayed in the show, Simon replied online that he had nothing but respect for the current bunch of ink-stained scribes at the real Sun.
Mark Bowden, author of Black Hawk Down, wrote a long piece in the Atlantic calling Simon “The Angriest Man in Television,” prompting the angry man to write in and calmly declare, “I'm just proud to see serious people arguing about a television drama.”
But when Slate's David Plotz accused Simon of “obsession bordering on monomania” about his former employer, and used as proof a conversation he'd had with Simon at a wedding reception, Simon blew a fuse. He sent a long, profanity-laced defense to Slate arguing that, “given the basic ethics of newspapering, I don't know how not to be angry” at the state of the Sun.
Simon felt that Plotz sandbagged him. You could go to anybody he had interviewed in 15 years for the Sun, he told me, and "every one of them knew they were talking on the record to a reporter." By contrast, he said "over the course of three or four hours" at this wedding, he and Plotz had gotten real honest about the business of journalism, and Simon had assumed it was just two guys talking shop. (Plotz has characterized their conversations as "brief.")
“You write about schools, education, the police -- and you can't get off the entertainment pages,” Simon said. “But you write about other journalists, and they start screaming like cats in an alley.”
Simon knows not to complain too much. After all, any attention at all for “The Wire,” a chronically low-rated program, is welcome.
“I'm content with what I said,” he said. “I just wish the same degree of interest was there when we took on No Child Left Behind or the fraud of the drug war. (Journalists) don't give a damn unless it's about them. It's so onanistic.”
I agree, David! Textbook onanism. Now -- tell me again how much you like me and my city.
To my delight, Simon spent the next few minutes of his lunch break on the Warners lot emptying his mental notebook of memories from one visit to Kansas City in 2002.
“Arthur Bryant's burnt ends sandwich is something to die for," said Simon. "Buck O'Neil signed a book for me and a baseball for my son in the lobby of that museum. There used to be this remarkable mural” --
"27th and Prospect?" I asked.
"What's it look like?" he asked, and I described the Martin Luther King mural, which is actually at 47th and Prospect, but Alexander Austin has another masterpiece at 27th featuring victims of gang violence.
"Yes, that's it," said Simon. "And somebody had a huge billboard with red block letters: PROTECT ME FROM WHAT I WANT.” (That would be Jenny Holzer's sign that once hung outside the Artspace building at 45th and Main.)
“I had my picture taken below that,” Simon said. “My wife had it framed and put on my desk. That is my 21st-century mantra.”
If Simon has a bone to pick, it's with the idiots who post screeners of unaired episodes to file-sharing sites. He said it was “heartbreaking” to see the first seven episodes of this season online before any of them had been on HBO. He asked HBO to hold the final episode until Sunday night instead of offering it last Monday on its video-on-demand channel. But, he noted sadly, “The episode went up last week on the Internet.”
