Talking With the Creator of One of TV's Best and Smartest Shows

I though Spike Lee's documentary was great . . . I was angry when Katrina happened, and then I was angry for a long time afterwards, and then I stopped being angry because there was other shit going on. But I'm as angry now after watching the documentary, as I was when Katrina was happening. When Bush has to take the plane down to 8,000 feet so he can get a good look, and he says, "It must be twice as bad on ground." Twice? You think? Twice? Did you read a piece that E.L. [Doctorow] wrote?

No . . .

Doctorow wrote a column for the East Hampton paper, and somebody picked it up and went around the country. I was sent it on e-mail. Doctorow basically said this son of a bitch can't feel. It was an assault on the president's soul, and it was absolute effrontery to journalism, but Doctrow's truth couldn't be beat. Bush cannot feel. Bush can't say the shit he says, he can't do the things he does, and feel.

Do you worry that Bush represents a lot of Americans? That we've lost something as a people?

There are people living in Baltimore County who haven't been downtown in ten years. Or twenty years.

Is that fear?

That's no interest. Fear in a different race.

Do you think racism is a reason The Wire doesn't get the ratings that it might?

I'm not saying racism. I'm saying race. There are people who, when they turn on the television set, they see that many African-American faces, talking and acting and staring back at them, and demanding their attention, they pick up the remote and they change the channel thinking, "This is not my show, this is somebody else's story." This last season of The Wire almost didn't get made because I was squeezed between a fanciful and well-done story about four beautiful women bored to shit on their suburban court and fucking their way through episodes and an American gladiator sport that's enjoyed to a national obsession.

What's The Wire's fifth season going to be about?

For the last theme in the show, we want to address the mass media. We're really going to examine the media culture and not in that stupid way where it's just a hungry pack of hounds thrusting microphones, if you've ever been a reporter, you know it's so much more subtle and nuanced than that. Sensationalism is not the problem. Attention Deficit Disorder might be. But everybody picks the low end of journalism as if that's the problem, my fear is that there's no high end anymore. There's not a lot of huge intellects running media organizations and those that are, are preoccupied with shit that doesn't matter.

So what questions will the last season be asking?

Why is it that it's so hard for everyone to focus on these problems? What are we paying attention to? What gets our focus, and what doesn't? And why? The Wire spends a lot of time pointing its finger at this institution and that institution, and deconstructing a lot of the dysfunction slice by slice. But the last finger to point is at our selves. So to quote the great line from Pogo: "We have met the enemy, and he is us." That's kind of where we're going with the last season. If this is really what ails us, and if this is really what needs to be addressed, where the fuck are our heads at as a people?

>>This is web-only companion to our article about The Wire's David Simon in the current issue of Rolling Stonemagazine, on newsstands until October 5th.