At the Wire's End
( Paul Schiraldi/HBO
)
Transcript
BOB GARFIELD:
The HBO series The Wire ended last weekend. Its audience was small, even by HBO standards, but its devout following picked apart every detail over the five seasons, in the belief that it was one of the most important shows on television.
It was created by David Simon, a former reporter at The Baltimore Sun, and Ed Burns, a former Baltimore detective and inner city schoolteacher. Together, they brought a level of realism to what was equal parts entertainment and critique of urban America. The series began its first season as a crime drama set in Baltimore with a sophisticated portrayal of the police department and of a drug organization, as in this scene, which feels like a lesson in real life police procedure.
[CLIP] [BEEP]
ACTOR:
Non-pertinent. How’d do you log that non-pertinent?
ACTOR:
No drug talk.
ACTOR:
They use codes that hide their pager and phone numbers, unless someone does use a phone. They don’t use names, and if someone does use a name, he’s reminded not to. All of that is valuable evidence.
ACTOR:
Of what?
ACTOR:
Conspiracy. We’re building something here, Detective. We’re building it from scratch. All the pieces matter.
[END CLIP]
BOB GARFIELD:
And all the pieces of Baltimore matter to The Wire’s creators, so later seasons anatomized labor unions, city hall, public education and finally, in its last season, the city newspaper.
OTM’s Mark Phillips has gone just a week without his favorite show, and he’s already in withdrawal.
MARK PHILLIPS:
There are basically two categories of people, those who love The Wire and those who’ve been admonished for not watching it. If, by some miracle, you don’t fit into either category, you do now. I’m telling you. You have to watch The Wire. It was called the greatest show on television ever for the past five seasons by almost everyone who’s anyone in the media.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG:
The interesting thing is that it’s not only critics who love it, it’s that journalists love it inordinately.
MARK PHILLIPS:
Jeffrey Goldberg is national correspondent for The Atlantic. He also participated in a back-and-forth conversation about The Wire for Slate’s TV Club.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG:
And I think people in our profession love it because it’s about a subject that we care a great deal about, which is life in urban America. So here you have this very intelligent show that’s grappling with these questions that many reporters have grappled with at different parts of their careers, and so it’s like seeing the newspaper on TV sometimes.
MARK PHILLIPS:
Or a novel or a sociological study - there have been a lot of analogies. It’s the kind of thing Wire creator David Simon tried to do as a reporter for The Baltimore Sun for 12 years, depict the city in all its complexity as an emblem for what ails urban America.
But in 1994, as The Baltimore Sun was downsizing, Simon took a buyout with dozens of other journalists and left the newspaper world.
DAVID SIMON:
I felt I was being discouraged from looking outside whatever the given small box, small trick of the preconceived story was, and at that point, I had to look at it and say, you know what, it’s – you know, nobody in this business is thinking big, man!
MARK PHILLIPS:
The Wire provided a way for Simon to think big. Instead of a simple battle of good versus evil, it’s a crime drama that gives us extremely human characters, chewed up over five seasons by various institutions, in whose teeth it seems impossible to both succeed and do the right thing.
This is perhaps clearest in the fourth season, the critics’ favorite, when the school system lets down smart, good kids who really want to do right.
[CLIP]
MALE ACTOR:
I, I still have a lot of kids who can barely handle whole numbers.
FEMALE ACTOR:
You don’t teach math. You teach the test. North Avenue’s all about the Leave No Child Behind stuff getting spoon fed.
MALE ACTOR:
And what do they learn?
[END CLIP]
MARK PHILLIPS:
Preparing for standardized tests cuts off the small but meaningful progress the cop-turned- schoolteacher has made with his students. It’s an argument against No Child Left Behind, standardized tests and poor funding, but it also points to a problem more profound.
[CLIP]
FEMALE ACTOR:
[SIGHS] You can tell the days by their faces. The best day is Wednesday. That’s the farthest they get from home, from whatever’s going on in the streets. You see smiles then. Monday is angry. Tuesdays they’re caught between Monday and Wednesday, so it could go either way. Thursdays, they’re feeling that weekend coming. Friday is bad again.
[END CLIP]
MARK PHILLIPS:
Simon uses the final season to show the media’s role in Baltimore’s malaise, and created a fictional newspaper called the - The Baltimore Sun. The paper is considering a series on how public education is failing the children of Baltimore, but city editor Gus, a stand-in for David Simon, is frustrated with the narrow vision of his boss.
[CLIP]
ACTOR PLAYING GUS:
You want to look at who these kids really are, you got to look at the parenting or lack of it in the city, the drug culture, the economics of these neighborhoods. I mean, it’s like you’re up on the corner of a roof and you’re showing some people how a couple of shingles came loose, and meanwhile a hurricane wrecked the rest of the damn house.
ACTOR:
Look Gus, what I want to look at is the tangible, where the problem and solution can be measured clearly. I, I don’t want some amorphous series detailing society’s ills. If you leave everything in, soon you’ve got nothing.
[END CLIP]
MARK PHILLIPS:
David Simon.
DAVID SIMON:
What he’s saying is, we want some waifs who have been cruelly misused by a indifferent and venal school system. And what Gus was saying was, what’s happening to children in the city is more profound than that, and we’re not getting our heads around it because we are trying to bite off what we think we can win a prize with.
MARK PHILLIPS:
And by “prize,” he means Pulitzer.
DAVID SIMON:
What is the currency by which newspapers and newspapermen are judged? I would say the Pulitzers are the ultimate currency. And if you present ideas that in their complexity do not lead themselves to a “gotcha,” you are not going to serve the interests of a prize culture.
TONY BARBIERI:
I think there’s nothing at all wrong with wanting to get recognition for great work.
MARK PHILLIPS:
Journalism professor Tony Barbieri worked 34 years at the real life Baltimore Sun.
TONY BARBIERI:
Especially if you’re a regional newspaper that’s doing great work and you want people to know about it, and along the way, call attention to the problems that you’re writing about.
But as far as it being a corrupting influence, it’s like anything else; if you let it corrupt you, it can.
MARK PHILLIPS:
And according to the fifth and last season of The Wire, it does. At the center of David Simon’s Baltimore Sun is Scott Templeton, a reporter whose ambition leads to a habit of making up quotes and eventually whole stories. In this scene, he’s challenged by city editor Gus, who’s overruled by the prize-hungry boss.
[CLIP]
ACTOR PLAYING GUS:
I mean, I’m not saying that this kid isn’t everything you say he is but Scott, damn, as an editor I need a little more to go on if I’m gonna fly this thing.
ACTOR PLAYING TEMPLETON:
I resent the implication.
ACTOR PLAYING GUS:
I’m not implying anything. I’m on your side, but the standard for us has to be –
[OVERTALK]
ACTOR PLAYING THE BOSS:
Scott! Just finished your story, good read. I’m putting it out front. I think you’ve really captured the disparity of the two worlds in this city in a highly readable narrative. I wouldn’t change a word.
[END CLIP]
MARK PHILLIPS:
As the tale of the lying journalist unfolds, it’s hard not to see The Baltimore Sun plotline as a way for David Simon to settle scores with former colleagues. He’s publicly blasted his former editors at The Sun, both of whom are well respected, not just by the Pulitzer Prize Committee but by the journalist community at large.
Yes, detectives, union bosses, lawyers and politicians all lie throughout The Wire, but usually for what they believe is the greater good. The lying journalist character is inspired by nothing but ambition. Critics say it lacked the subtlety and depth that they had come to expect from David Simon’s characters. Jeffrey Goldberg:
JEFFREY GOLDBERG:
What he did with the schools we were expecting to do with journalism. And when he decided to focus on a serial fabricator, rather than some of the, let’s say, deeper more systemic issues, or some of the issues that honest reporters face every day, that was disappointing.
MARK PHILLIPS:
Disappointing and distracting. Isn’t the character reminiscent of Jayson Blair, a red herring for the problems that really ail the American newspaper, for instance, electronic media and budget cuts?
DAVID SIMON:
What’s happening with the Internet and what’s happening with newspapers is the economic preamble to the story that we portrayed in The Wire.
MARK PHILLIPS:
David Simon.
DAVID SIMON:
What we’re interested in is not the mechanics of what’s gone wrong. What we’re trying to say is, given that preamble, how are people behaving?
MARK PHILLIPS:
It’s hard to believe that journalists are responding to the threat of the Internet by making things up, but Simon insists the problem is widespread, and that The Sun had its own fabricator when he was there.
But when critics focus on the lying journalist in the fifth season of The Wire, Simon says they’ve missed his real media critique.
DAVID SIMON:
In every episode, what’s being depicted is a newspaper that’s actually not connecting with the problems that exist on the ground. It’s not noticing that the police department has been cheating stats for years and making crime go away. It’s not noticing that the third grade test scores are being hyped so that No Child Left Behind is not exposed for what it is.
That’s the critique, [LAUGHS] and very tellingly, almost perfectly, I think, with the exception of maybe one or two guys out there, everybody missed it.
MARK PHILLIPS:
Jeffrey Goldberg is one of those one or two guys who didn’t miss it.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG:
And I think it’s a kind of profound statement about the limits of journalism. What they’re saying to us is that most of the things that happen we don’t know, and even the people who are supposed to know the most, namely reporters, don’t know very much at all. And that’s a very interesting insight.
MARK PHILLIPS:
Perhaps, but pretty obvious to anyone who watched the first four seasons of the show; The Wire was fiction but it was loved precisely because it offered viewers, including journalists, a weekly dose of reality that felt truer than much of the news.
I think there still is a place in newspapers for reporters to get to the heart of complex issues and that David Simon is overly pessimistic about the state of journalism. But if he’s right, maybe the consolation will be more great TV series by ex-reporters, specifically at 9 o’clock on Sundays, ‘cause I don’t really have anything to do then anymore.
For On the Media, I’m Mark Phillips.
The HBO series The Wire ended last weekend. Its audience was small, even by HBO standards, but its devout following picked apart every detail over the five seasons, in the belief that it was one of the most important shows on television.
It was created by David Simon, a former reporter at The Baltimore Sun, and Ed Burns, a former Baltimore detective and inner city schoolteacher. Together, they brought a level of realism to what was equal parts entertainment and critique of urban America. The series began its first season as a crime drama set in Baltimore with a sophisticated portrayal of the police department and of a drug organization, as in this scene, which feels like a lesson in real life police procedure.
[CLIP] [BEEP]
ACTOR:
Non-pertinent. How’d do you log that non-pertinent?
ACTOR:
No drug talk.
ACTOR:
They use codes that hide their pager and phone numbers, unless someone does use a phone. They don’t use names, and if someone does use a name, he’s reminded not to. All of that is valuable evidence.
ACTOR:
Of what?
ACTOR:
Conspiracy. We’re building something here, Detective. We’re building it from scratch. All the pieces matter.
[END CLIP]
BOB GARFIELD:
And all the pieces of Baltimore matter to The Wire’s creators, so later seasons anatomized labor unions, city hall, public education and finally, in its last season, the city newspaper.
OTM’s Mark Phillips has gone just a week without his favorite show, and he’s already in withdrawal.
MARK PHILLIPS:
There are basically two categories of people, those who love The Wire and those who’ve been admonished for not watching it. If, by some miracle, you don’t fit into either category, you do now. I’m telling you. You have to watch The Wire. It was called the greatest show on television ever for the past five seasons by almost everyone who’s anyone in the media.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG:
The interesting thing is that it’s not only critics who love it, it’s that journalists love it inordinately.
MARK PHILLIPS:
Jeffrey Goldberg is national correspondent for The Atlantic. He also participated in a back-and-forth conversation about The Wire for Slate’s TV Club.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG:
And I think people in our profession love it because it’s about a subject that we care a great deal about, which is life in urban America. So here you have this very intelligent show that’s grappling with these questions that many reporters have grappled with at different parts of their careers, and so it’s like seeing the newspaper on TV sometimes.
MARK PHILLIPS:
Or a novel or a sociological study - there have been a lot of analogies. It’s the kind of thing Wire creator David Simon tried to do as a reporter for The Baltimore Sun for 12 years, depict the city in all its complexity as an emblem for what ails urban America.
But in 1994, as The Baltimore Sun was downsizing, Simon took a buyout with dozens of other journalists and left the newspaper world.
DAVID SIMON:
I felt I was being discouraged from looking outside whatever the given small box, small trick of the preconceived story was, and at that point, I had to look at it and say, you know what, it’s – you know, nobody in this business is thinking big, man!
MARK PHILLIPS:
The Wire provided a way for Simon to think big. Instead of a simple battle of good versus evil, it’s a crime drama that gives us extremely human characters, chewed up over five seasons by various institutions, in whose teeth it seems impossible to both succeed and do the right thing.
This is perhaps clearest in the fourth season, the critics’ favorite, when the school system lets down smart, good kids who really want to do right.
[CLIP]
MALE ACTOR:
I, I still have a lot of kids who can barely handle whole numbers.
FEMALE ACTOR:
You don’t teach math. You teach the test. North Avenue’s all about the Leave No Child Behind stuff getting spoon fed.
MALE ACTOR:
And what do they learn?
[END CLIP]
MARK PHILLIPS:
Preparing for standardized tests cuts off the small but meaningful progress the cop-turned- schoolteacher has made with his students. It’s an argument against No Child Left Behind, standardized tests and poor funding, but it also points to a problem more profound.
[CLIP]
FEMALE ACTOR:
[SIGHS] You can tell the days by their faces. The best day is Wednesday. That’s the farthest they get from home, from whatever’s going on in the streets. You see smiles then. Monday is angry. Tuesdays they’re caught between Monday and Wednesday, so it could go either way. Thursdays, they’re feeling that weekend coming. Friday is bad again.
[END CLIP]
MARK PHILLIPS:
Simon uses the final season to show the media’s role in Baltimore’s malaise, and created a fictional newspaper called the - The Baltimore Sun. The paper is considering a series on how public education is failing the children of Baltimore, but city editor Gus, a stand-in for David Simon, is frustrated with the narrow vision of his boss.
[CLIP]
ACTOR PLAYING GUS:
You want to look at who these kids really are, you got to look at the parenting or lack of it in the city, the drug culture, the economics of these neighborhoods. I mean, it’s like you’re up on the corner of a roof and you’re showing some people how a couple of shingles came loose, and meanwhile a hurricane wrecked the rest of the damn house.
ACTOR:
Look Gus, what I want to look at is the tangible, where the problem and solution can be measured clearly. I, I don’t want some amorphous series detailing society’s ills. If you leave everything in, soon you’ve got nothing.
[END CLIP]
MARK PHILLIPS:
David Simon.
DAVID SIMON:
What he’s saying is, we want some waifs who have been cruelly misused by a indifferent and venal school system. And what Gus was saying was, what’s happening to children in the city is more profound than that, and we’re not getting our heads around it because we are trying to bite off what we think we can win a prize with.
MARK PHILLIPS:
And by “prize,” he means Pulitzer.
DAVID SIMON:
What is the currency by which newspapers and newspapermen are judged? I would say the Pulitzers are the ultimate currency. And if you present ideas that in their complexity do not lead themselves to a “gotcha,” you are not going to serve the interests of a prize culture.
TONY BARBIERI:
I think there’s nothing at all wrong with wanting to get recognition for great work.
MARK PHILLIPS:
Journalism professor Tony Barbieri worked 34 years at the real life Baltimore Sun.
TONY BARBIERI:
Especially if you’re a regional newspaper that’s doing great work and you want people to know about it, and along the way, call attention to the problems that you’re writing about.
But as far as it being a corrupting influence, it’s like anything else; if you let it corrupt you, it can.
MARK PHILLIPS:
And according to the fifth and last season of The Wire, it does. At the center of David Simon’s Baltimore Sun is Scott Templeton, a reporter whose ambition leads to a habit of making up quotes and eventually whole stories. In this scene, he’s challenged by city editor Gus, who’s overruled by the prize-hungry boss.
[CLIP]
ACTOR PLAYING GUS:
I mean, I’m not saying that this kid isn’t everything you say he is but Scott, damn, as an editor I need a little more to go on if I’m gonna fly this thing.
ACTOR PLAYING TEMPLETON:
I resent the implication.
ACTOR PLAYING GUS:
I’m not implying anything. I’m on your side, but the standard for us has to be –
[OVERTALK]
ACTOR PLAYING THE BOSS:
Scott! Just finished your story, good read. I’m putting it out front. I think you’ve really captured the disparity of the two worlds in this city in a highly readable narrative. I wouldn’t change a word.
[END CLIP]
MARK PHILLIPS:
As the tale of the lying journalist unfolds, it’s hard not to see The Baltimore Sun plotline as a way for David Simon to settle scores with former colleagues. He’s publicly blasted his former editors at The Sun, both of whom are well respected, not just by the Pulitzer Prize Committee but by the journalist community at large.
Yes, detectives, union bosses, lawyers and politicians all lie throughout The Wire, but usually for what they believe is the greater good. The lying journalist character is inspired by nothing but ambition. Critics say it lacked the subtlety and depth that they had come to expect from David Simon’s characters. Jeffrey Goldberg:
JEFFREY GOLDBERG:
What he did with the schools we were expecting to do with journalism. And when he decided to focus on a serial fabricator, rather than some of the, let’s say, deeper more systemic issues, or some of the issues that honest reporters face every day, that was disappointing.
MARK PHILLIPS:
Disappointing and distracting. Isn’t the character reminiscent of Jayson Blair, a red herring for the problems that really ail the American newspaper, for instance, electronic media and budget cuts?
DAVID SIMON:
What’s happening with the Internet and what’s happening with newspapers is the economic preamble to the story that we portrayed in The Wire.
MARK PHILLIPS:
David Simon.
DAVID SIMON:
What we’re interested in is not the mechanics of what’s gone wrong. What we’re trying to say is, given that preamble, how are people behaving?
MARK PHILLIPS:
It’s hard to believe that journalists are responding to the threat of the Internet by making things up, but Simon insists the problem is widespread, and that The Sun had its own fabricator when he was there.
But when critics focus on the lying journalist in the fifth season of The Wire, Simon says they’ve missed his real media critique.
DAVID SIMON:
In every episode, what’s being depicted is a newspaper that’s actually not connecting with the problems that exist on the ground. It’s not noticing that the police department has been cheating stats for years and making crime go away. It’s not noticing that the third grade test scores are being hyped so that No Child Left Behind is not exposed for what it is.
That’s the critique, [LAUGHS] and very tellingly, almost perfectly, I think, with the exception of maybe one or two guys out there, everybody missed it.
MARK PHILLIPS:
Jeffrey Goldberg is one of those one or two guys who didn’t miss it.
JEFFREY GOLDBERG:
And I think it’s a kind of profound statement about the limits of journalism. What they’re saying to us is that most of the things that happen we don’t know, and even the people who are supposed to know the most, namely reporters, don’t know very much at all. And that’s a very interesting insight.
MARK PHILLIPS:
Perhaps, but pretty obvious to anyone who watched the first four seasons of the show; The Wire was fiction but it was loved precisely because it offered viewers, including journalists, a weekly dose of reality that felt truer than much of the news.
I think there still is a place in newspapers for reporters to get to the heart of complex issues and that David Simon is overly pessimistic about the state of journalism. But if he’s right, maybe the consolation will be more great TV series by ex-reporters, specifically at 9 o’clock on Sundays, ‘cause I don’t really have anything to do then anymore.
For On the Media, I’m Mark Phillips.
Produced by WNYC Studios