No, HBO’s The Wire Could Still Be Made Today
Two of TV’s most gifted creators and writers hopped on a creatively spent bandwagon.
When did it become a rite of passage for spoiled creators, directors, actors, or fans to brag or bemoan about how their beloved film or series “wouldn’t be made today”? Whether it’s due to studio politics, evolving trends, or having an ax to grind with political correctness, every generation of filmmakers and fandom hold competitions for how oppressed their work is. Oh, how those dreamers want to dream.
Given the retrospective and institutional acclaim that HBO’s beloved crime drama series The Wire has received since initially garnering low Nielsen ratings, it was only suitable that its 20th anniversary is a call for celebration. The New York Times writer Jonathan Abrams interviewed creator David Simon and his writing partner Ed Burns. Still, while the majority of this interview is terrific in its creative introspection and faith in what made this series great through its five seasons from 2002 to 2008, there’s one major issue.
The New York Times writer Jonathan Abrams: “Would ‘The Wire’ be greenlighted if you pitched it today?”
ED BURNS: No, definitely not. HBO was going up the ladder at the time. They didn’t understand “The Wire” until the fourth season. In fact, they were thinking about canceling it after three. We caught that moment where networks were thinking, “Oh, we need a show for this group of people.”
But now, it’s got to be “Game of Thrones.” It’s got to be big. It’s got to be disconnected from stepping on anybody’s toes. I’ve watched a couple of the limited series on HBO, and they’re good shows, but they’re not cutting new paths. They are whodunits or these rich women bickering among themselves in a town. I don’t see anybody saying, “Hey, that’s a really great show.”
So, Mr. Burns, you’re a wealthy writer who was recently an executive producer and writer on David Simon’s new Baltimore-set crime drama miniseries, We Own This City, which HBO greenlighted, the network that you and Simon owe a lot of your success to, and premiered this late April. You have the privilege of not having to pay attention to what these new HBO series encompass, yet you have the nerves to lie and resort to this “woe is us” narrative to make The Wire appear more precious on its anniversary? No, we’re not buying it. HBO is still producing or distributing original content up to the present — a majority of which isn’t on the same epic scope as Game of Thrones or Westworld — so there’s a strong possibility The Wire could be made today, given that it was a precursor to the golden age of television dramas.
DAVID SIMON: No, because we didn’t attend, in any real way, to the idea of diversity in the writers’ room. I tried to get Dave Mills, who had been my friend since college, to work on “The Wire.” But that would have been organic. It was just a friend; it wasn’t even about Black and white. But other than David, who did a couple scripts for us, and Kia Corthron, the playwright, did one, we were really inattentive to diversity. That wasn’t forward thinking.
Why were we inattentive? Because it was so organic to what I’d covered and what Ed had policed. And then, I started bringing on novelists. The first guy was George Pelecanos, whose books about D.C. were the same stuff I was covering. And I happened to read his books, and I was like, “This guy probably could write what we’re trying to do.” And then he said: “Look, you’re trying to make novels. Every season’s a novel. We should hire novelists.” And so we went and got Price. If I had it to do over again, I would have to look at [the diversity of the creative team] in the same way that I looked at later productions.
It appears Simon defeated his answer and Burns’ self-pitying wrapped in a lie about HBO. So what if there were more diverse writers in a hypothetical reality where The Wire was greenlit in the late 2010s to early 2020s? The show’s quality wouldn’t be affected much, or perhaps it could’ve been even more significant, but this is beside the point. It’s remarkable that for someone who created one of the most socially pertinent and diverse shows of the 2000s that he would resort to the same thinly-veiled argument that many white filmmakers and executives have used in the past to exclude diverse voices and fuel many of the inflammatory conversations around diversity in entertainment.
By answering (or not) this question of whether or not The Wire would be made in the present, Simon and Burns are — willfully or not — also contributing to the myth that older entertainment is inherently better than new entertainment, which partly causes people to be ignorant to the fact that new original movies and shows outnumber sequels and superhero films by a wide margin, theaters, and streaming combined.
This pseudo-underdog-creator complex is a pervasive trend that has extended back to some other past films, with a direct example being Mel Brooks and Blazing Saddles. For every attention-mongering “You couldn’t make Blazing Saddles today!” meme that you’ve probably seen on your Twitter or Facebook feed, there are many more morally challenging and objectionable films and shows that have been released over the past decade. (Not limited to It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Tropic Thunder, Sausage Party, The Mule, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Jojo Rabbit, etc.). Director Todd Phillips, having recently graced theaters with his ultra-angsty hit Joker, complained about how he left comedy for fear of backlash from “PC culture.” “Go try to be funny nowadays with this woke culture,” Phillips said in a Vanity Fair interview. The irony is wealthy because, before Joker, he was the washed-up director (or is it auteur?) behind frat house comedies that usually amounted to middling critical success and commercial results.
There are probably many other cases of this, too, such as Elijah Wood lamenting about The Lord of the Rings trilogy not applying to today’s cinematic and internet climate (despite the success of epic blockbusters like Dune and The Batman) or Christopher Nolan theorizing how his Batman trilogy couldn’t amount to the same today due to pressure for more sequels in fewer years (as if this applies to all sequels), what little there is that is suitable to their arguments is outweighed by implicit intellectual superiority. There is no worse example of this trend than this new interview with David Simon and Ed Burns. Nothing can detract from what The Wire has cemented for television as an art form. Still, if they were going to try and be credible in playing the victim card with HBO’s new management and if The Wire could never have been made, they could have perhaps tried by contextualizing it within what HBO has been doing in the past several years. Their new miniseries could undoubtedly help put things into perspective.
