All the Pieces Matter E-Book

Jonathan Abrams

• Herausgeber: No Exit Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 646

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

The definitive oral history of the iconic and beloved TV show The Wire, as told by the actors, writers, directors, and others involved in its creation Since its final episode aired 10 years ago, the acclaimed crime drama The Wire has only become more popular and influential. The issues it tackled, from the failures of the drug war and criminal justice system to systemic bias in law enforcement and other social institutions, have become major topics in the national conversation. The show's actors, such as Idris Elba and Dominic West, have gone on to become major stars. Its creators and writers have developed dedicated cult followings of their own. Universities use the show to teach everything from film theory, to criminal justice and sociology. It is arguably one of the great works of art America has produced in the 21st century. But while there has been a great deal of critical analysis of the show and its themes, until now there has never been a definitive, behind-the-scenes take on how it came to be made. With unparalleled access to all the key actors and writers involved in its creation, Jonathan Abrams tells the astonishing, compelling, and complete account of The Wire, from its inception and creation through its end and powerful legacy.

Leseprobe

ALL THE PIECES MATTER

The definitive oral history of the iconic and beloved TV show The Wire, as told by the actors, writers, directors, and others involved in its creation

Since its final episode aired in 2008, HBO’s acclaimed crime drama The Wire has only become more popular and influential. The issues it tackled, from the failures of the drug war and criminal justice system to systemic bias in law enforcement and other social institutions, have become more urgent and central to the national conversation. The show’s actors, such as Idris Elba, Dominic West, and Michael B. Jordan, have gone on to become major stars. Its creators and writers, including David Simon and Richard Price, have developed dedicated cult followings of their own. Universities use the show to teach everything from film theory to criminal justice to sociology. Politicians and activists reference it when discussing policy. When critics compile lists of the Greatest TV Shows of All Time, The Wire routinely takes the top spot. It is arguably one of the great works of art America has produced in the 21st century.

But while there has been a great deal of critical analysis of the show and its themes, until now there has never been a definitive, behind-the-scenes take on how it came to be made. With unparalleled access to all the key actors and writers involved in its creation, Jonathan Abrams tells the astonishing, compelling, and complete account of The Wire, from its inception and creation through to its end and powerful legacy.

About the author

Photo: Nicola Borland

JONATHAN ABRAMS is an award-winning journalist who writes for Bleacher Report. He is the author of the New York Times bestselling Boys Among Men. He was previously a staff writer at Grantland, the Los Angeles Times, and the New York Times and is a graduate of the University of Southern California.

@jpdabrams

Praise for All The Pieces Matter

‘Jonathan Abrams recounts the saga of The Wire in an oral history that delivers a chronological account of the show’s genesis and its evolution. It’s a book that is sure to delight ardent fans – Washington Post

‘The Wire counts, for many critics, among the two or three finest TV dramas ever made. It is also, as becomes clear from Jonathan Abrams’ excellent oral history of the series, All the Pieces Matter, sui generis: There will never be another TV show quite like it’ – Paste Magazine

‘The Wire — TV’s best drama ever — now has a worthy history in All the Pieces Matter’ – Dallas Morning News

‘From the moment The Wire ended, all I have wished for is one more season. Jonathan Abrams has given us something just as valuable – the complete story of how something this wonderful, rich, and intricate came to be. I treasured every episode of the show, and I loved every word of this book. All The Pieces Matter is a must-read for any fan of The Wire, or anyone who wants to know how great art is made’ – Michael Schur, creator of Parks and Recreation, Brooklyn 99 and The Good Place

‘The definitive dissection of television’s most politically meaningful invention’ – Chuck Klosterman, New York Times bestselling author of But What if We’re Wrong? and I Wear The Black Hat

‘Lovers of HBO’s The Wire rejoice: journalist Abrams delivers a comprehensive study of what goes into creating an acclaimed TV show. Abrams indisputably has created a thorough examination of The Wire’s conception, production, and lingering cultural afterlife’ – Publishers Weekly

‘The Wire is, in all likelihood, the greatest television show in history. It was perfectly written, perfectly casted, perfectly acted. And I didn’t think it could be any better than it is. And yet, somehow, All The Pieces Matter, which allows an unprecedented peek behind the show’s curtain, does exactly that. Imagine getting to talk to Da Vinci before a brush stroke, or getting to talk to LeBron James mid-flight before dunk. That’s what this book is. Jonathan Abrams is a marvel’ – Shea Serrano, New York Times bestselling author of The Rap Yearbook

‘The best book ever written about the art and business of television’ – Matt Zoller Seitz, New York Times bestselling author of TV (The Book) and The Wes Anderson Collection

‘Delves deep into the show’s creation and enduring legacy through interviews with the actors, writers, and producers who brought the show to life. Whether it’s Dominic West reflecting on the allure of his character Detective James McNulty or actor Michael B. Jordan discussing the lasting impression of being in an ensemble cast of primarily black actors, Abrams underscores the indelible mark the show has left on actors and audience alike. Weaving all the interviews together is the enduring connection between the city of Baltimore and the creators of the show’ – Library Journal

‘Meticulous. Relentless. Occasionally hilarious. The same adjectives you’d use to describe The Wire can also be applied to Jonathan Abrams’ essential oral history of the series. As it turns out, the most humanistic drama in television history was itself rife with compelling characters, complex politics and an excess of whiskey. Abrams tracks down the stories behind every beloved episode with the tenacity of Omar shopping for breakfast cereal’ – Andy Greenwald, host of The Watch and Talk the Thrones

‘The Wire has thoroughly saturated popular culture in a way few television dramas ever have. In their own words, the people involved have given Jonathan Abrams a look at how it happened. You come at a show like this, you best not miss. Abrams doesn’t’ – Charles P. Pierce, author of Idiot America

‘All the Pieces Matter will enrich first watches of The Wire, re-watches of The Wire, and even occasional watches of key scenes from The Wire on YouTube. It’s an amazing companion to the series, no matter your level of familiarity’ – Todd VanDerWerff, Critic at Large for Vox

‘Filled with revealing information from the participants, intriguing tidbits, and show trivia, this compendium will have fans scurrying back to their DVD sets’ – Kirkus

Praise for The Wire

‘Arguably the greatest television programme ever made’ – Telegraph

‘The Wire is unmissable’ – Guardian

‘It’s one of those shows that comes along every ten or twenty years that redefines a genre’ – Dominic West

For Danielle and Michelle, big sisters who unfortunately knew how to put their little brother in his place

Author’s Note

This book is not an episode-by-episode companion of The Wire – though the pages are filled with spoilers – but, rather, an oral history that hopefully provides an illuminating retrospective from the creators, actors, and others involved in its making. No one anticipated that the show would experience the enduring afterlife it has, but many at the time realized they were working on a project of precision and purpose.

I tried interviewing as many people involved with the show as possible for this book because – what’s the saying? – all the pieces matter. Thankfully, nearly everyone happily obliged.

In the interest of streamlining memories and anecdotes, I’ve removed many of the hitches that we all use in speech (‘you know,’ ‘um,’ and ‘like’). Those occasions are rare, though, and I believe the spirit and meaning of every conversation is preserved. Each quote from an actor is offered with his or her character’s name and occupation. Some of the characters’ job titles changed as the show advanced; for example, Councilman Tommy Carcetti became Mayor Carcetti. In those instances, the characters are introduced with the job titles for which they are most well known.

The positions of those behind the camera are also listed with their quotes. Some people held multiple roles, moved up ranks, or changed jobs as the show aged. For example, Anthony Hemingway began as an assistant director before directing episodes in the show’s later run. In the case of those behind the scenes, the person is listed with his or her most prominent job title.

Preface

Wendell Pierce addressed an expectant audience at Columbia University. The eager crowd had filed inside Cowin Auditorium in April 2016, ignoring a bitter New York City day that stubbornly refused to recognize winter’s end. Pierce sat inside, surrounded by some of his contemporaries from The Wire, including Jamie Hector (Marlo Stanfield), Sonja Sohn (Det. Kima Greggs), and Felicia ‘Snoop’ Pearson. The background of the actors reflected the sizable range of those who appeared in the trailblazing HBO show. Pierce is New Orleans through and through. Yet he was no stranger to New York, having attended the Juilliard School’s Drama Division. In The Wire, he depicted William ‘Bunk’ Moreland, a dedicated, competent detective who struggled to balance his work and his personal life. Pierce discussed his experience of sharing scenes with Pearson, who played an androgynous killer and had never acted prior to The Wire. ‘The first night Snoop came onto the set, Snoop sat in the director’s chair with David [Simon] on one side, Ed [Burns] on the other,’ Pierce recalled. ‘She’s trying to be cool. I’ll never forget, there was a shootout scene and she said, “Motherfuckers don’t shoot like that.” I thought it was great, and it shows you how you take your personal experience and bring it to the show. If you’re gonna be authentic, you’ve gotta be authentic.’

Pearson laughed with a husky rasp, relaying another story from one of her nascent days on set, when an assistant director cautioned that she shot the prop guns with too much accuracy. ‘Snoop is an amazing woman,’ Pierce continued. ‘You hear that profile and then you engage with this charming, talented, incredible person, and it’s this cautionary tale that she’s allowed herself to be onstage. Understand that you may never look at any kid who may be going down that wrong path as anything other than a full, loving human being and if you want to change that course, embrace that before you embrace any idea of ignorance or negativity. Understand that there’s that humanity there, and she’s a living example of why the show tapped into people’s psyches and why the show has created an examination of policy, an examination of the influence of art changing people’s lives in a practical way at universities across the nation. You didn’t see no damn show about Gilligan. These are people’s lives and the examination of the dysfunction in our American culture that was on display in The Wire has changed people’s lives.’

From its deliberate pacing to its desolate portrayal of Baltimore’s blight and all points in between, The Wire strove for realism. Those earnest efforts confused many during the show’s sixty-episode life span from 2002 to 2008. HBO had produced groundbreaking, original television prior to The Wire, with shows such as Oz and The Sopranos.The Wire was something different, though. Its creator, David Simon, originally frowned upon the entertainment business. He envisioned the television show as a novel, with the postmodern institutions of Baltimore representative of Greek gods. The show plopped the viewer into the middle of a vast universe without an explanatory guide. The plot was complicated, and the dialogue may as well have been in another language. The series shifted focus each season. Too many characters lived in its space, and Simon brought forth no obvious heroes. Few watched the show when it aired. Award voters mostly ignored it. The Wire faced cancellation almost annually. ‘First, we thought it was a silo, because people weren’t watching the show when it was on,’ Pierce told the crowd. ‘We thought we were doing a good show. But it was really in a silo and it wasn’t until maybe the third year when we were coming back and noticed, “Hey, people are starting to check on the show.”’

No show has aged as gracefully. The Wire stood the test of time after only intermittently being acknowledged while on air. ‘How many shows are being taught?’ said Darrell Britt-Gibson, who played Darius ‘O-Dog’ Hill. ‘That’s its impact. It’s left a lasting impression on the culture, and hopefully it continues to do so with the next generation and the generation after that. It’s a timeless piece of art.’ The panel at Columbia University took place as part of a weekend conference on The Wire. Academics and professors convened, hosting panels that discussed the fictional show’s various real-life intersections of subjects such as mass incarceration, narrative journalism, and religion and politics in the inner city. Columbia University is not the only college to host discussions on the show – or even the lone Ivy League school, for that matter. Yale and Harvard are among the many universities that have featured conferences or classes that examine the show’s enduring impact. ‘I actually went to a university to speak about The Wire in Utah,’ said Seth Gilliam, who portrayed Sgt. Ellis Carver. ‘I talked to kids who were excited to be discussing the subject matter that The Wire brought up. I don’t know a lot of cop shows that have this far-reaching impact almost a generation later.’ The Wire simultaneously exposed America’s sores and, somewhat accidentally, evolved television.

1

AN ARGUMENT OF DISSENT

Who the fuck is this guy? Ed Burns thought after David Simon introduced himself in the winter of 1984. The moment would mark the beginning of a collaboration neither could have foreseen, one that would mature into a groundbreaking book and culminate in a revolutionary television show. But first impressions? Burns joked – well, partly anyway – that he hoped to arrest Simon. Somehow, Simon had finagled his way beyond security and into the Drug Enforcement Administration offices as Burns readied material for a grand jury preparing to bring an indictment against Melvin ‘Little’ Williams, a disciplined drug trafficker who had successfully flummoxed Baltimore law enforcement for years. Simon told Burns that he was a reporter for The Baltimore Sun and had permission to follow the case. Burns and his partner, Harry Edgerton, both Baltimore police detectives, had finally pinned the elusive Williams through the use of a wiretap. Simon expressed interest in being able to listen in on the wire. ‘I’d love to take you in there, but if I do, that’s a ten-year offense and I’d love to lock you up,’ Burns said. He stiff-armed Simon’s request, but agreed to meet with him later to discuss the case.

Who the fuck is this guy? David Simon thought after meeting Burns a second time. Not much time had passed when they greeted one another at the Baltimore County Public Library branch in Towson. Simon had already surmised that Burns did not behave like any typical detective he had come across. He now eyeballed the book titles Burns prepared to check out, Bob Woodward’s Veil: Secret Wars of the CIA and The Magus, by John Fowles, among them. ‘I read all the time, and it impressed him,’ Burns recalled. ‘I don’t think David reads anywhere near as much as I do, but a cop reads? My God. I know a lot of cops who read. It was no big deal, but David was a good guy and he had a passion.’

That passion unfurled into the canvassing five-part series that Simon wrote on the making and inner workings of Williams as a Baltimore drug trafficker kingpin. For Simon, his life’s purpose had been achieved by working at a newspaper. His father, Bernard, had once been a journalist who devoted the bulk of his working days as a public relations director for B’nai B’rith, the oldest Jewish service organization in the world. His mother, Dorothy, spent time working for an organization that aided students from underachieving public schools to find better education. Simon attended the University of Maryland, where he wrote for the student newspaper, The Diamondback. He joined the Sun after graduating, reporting on crime. To him, being a newspaperman and bringing accountability to influencers meant something. ‘I grew up in a house where we argued politics,’ Simon recounted. ‘We argued sociology. We argued culture. We argued. It was not personal. Arguing was how you got attention in my family.’ One of Simon’s enduring memories is debating politics with his two uncles as a boy, the moment climaxing with him flatly telling his uncle Hank that he was in the wrong. ‘Who knew he had a brain?’ Uncle Hank retorted.

Reading Simon’s 1987 Sun series, entitled ‘“Easy Money”: Anatomy of a Drug Empire,’ is akin to viewing the organs of The Wire’s first-season wiretap investigation. Williams was a self-made entrepreneur who imported the bulk of Baltimore’s heroin influx as the city’s honest economic opportunities shifted and dwindled. ‘An imperious, intelligent man who chooses words with care,’ Simon wrote. ‘Melvin Williams refuses to be stereotyped. Street sales of narcotics were routinely punctuated by murderous violence, but Williams was a family man, devoted to an eleven-year marriage and two young daughters.’

Williams conducted most of his business through his number two, a consigliere named Lamont ‘Chin’ Farmer. Farmer orchestrated both a simple and intricate communication system involving the use of beepers. He also headed a print shop and took business courses at a community college, à la Idris Elba’s Stringer Bell.

Simon’s series meticulously captured Williams’s life and downfall – not only as a drug kingpin, but also as a respected figure in the community, where, as Simon wrote, ‘he was hailed as Little Melvin, the Citizen, speaking at the request of National Guard officials during the 1968 riots, urging a restless crowd to go home.’ Burns appreciated that Simon showed all facets of the case and offered a depiction of Williams that was beyond a caricature. ‘When the case came down, he wrote a very good article because he went out and saw some of the gangsters and it was a most balanced article,’ Burns said. ‘I liked that.’

Simon spent Christmas Eve 1986 on an overnight shift with the Baltimore Police Department Homicide Unit for another story shortly before the series on Williams debuted. During that night, a detective mentioned that someone could write a damn good book if they documented the department’s happenings for a year. With the permission of Police Commissioner Edward Tilghman, Simon gained complete access to be a fly on the wall with the unit, despite the objections of some of the department’s personnel. ‘A captain had a vote,’ said Jay Landsman, then a homicide detective sergeant, who also lent his name and acting abilities to The Wire. ‘He took a poll of who wanted to do it and who didn’t. Twenty-eight out of thirty of us, including myself, voted against it. We worked murders in the ghetto. You lived in a gray area with that. It doesn’t always look pretty. Everything we did was legal, but it was kind of how were they going to interpret it? So, naturally, since they had a democratic election and we all voted against it, they gave him the go-ahead.’

Simon took a leave from The Baltimore Sun, becoming a ‘police intern’ in January 1988. Members of the department playfully hazed him until he proved game for the task. He gained enough insight into the minds of the squad members that some later acknowledged that he had accurately captured words and feelings they had never verbally expressed. Houghton Mifflin published Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets in June 1991. The book, like the series on Williams, is peppered with scenes later extracted for The Wire. In it, Simon provides a penetrating portrait of how the detectives attempted to unravel murder cases and the humanistic toll it took on them. ‘It was daily that we told him if he printed anything we didn’t like, we would kill him,’ Landsman said. ‘But he grinned at everything. As it turns out, we weren’t as bad as we thought we would be portrayed by David.’

Ed Burns, working another prolonged investigation, scarcely figured in the book. He was already grappling with the limits of how little one outside-the-box thinker could influence a lurching institution. ‘We were like family,’ Landsman said. ‘But [Burns] was the biggest pain in the ass in the world. He once said everybody in police should have a bachelor’s or master’s degree. I said, “Then we’d all be like you. That would be hell, because you’re an asshole.” It was all in fun, but he played to his own drummer. When you really needed something done, you had to just put your foot down on it. But he was tenacious as hell, a little bit gullible. Like that informant Bubbles that he had. I wouldn’t believe Bubbles as far as I could throw him. A broken clock is right at least twice a day, and I guess that’s the two times he gave Burns good information.’

Burns left the police force, having knocked his head against his superiors for much of his two decades as a patrolman, plainclothesman, and detective. He was about to start his new life as a middle school teacher when Simon proposed a collaboration. Simon’s book editor, John Sterling, suggested that the proper follow-up to Homicide would be observing a drug corner in Baltimore for a year and depicting the story’s previously undocumented other side of addicts. Burns agreed to contribute, and the two settled on the intersection of West Baltimore’s Fayette and Monroe. For weeks, Burns spent his days gaining the confidence of dealers and users, while Simon worked at the newspaper before taking a second leave. ‘The badge can get you under that yellow tape, but it can’t get you into their shooting galleries and places like that,’ Burns said. ‘I could sit down on the third floor of a shooting gallery with five or six guys pumping all around me, a prostitute working out in the bed over there, and have a conversation. Every once in a while, they take the syringe off [from behind] their ear, get a little hit, put it back on, and it would be a conversation where you knew that these people were aware of what was going on and how they had been sucked into this trap.’ As he had in Homicide, Simon displayed a perceptive ear in deciphering the corner’s dialogue. He had to learn the appropriate jokes to laugh at, when to show concern, when to blend in, or when to pop up with a question. Homicide was heavily saturated with cop jargon – a red ball, a whodunit, dunkers. The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood was published in 1997 and introduced the reader to a new vocabulary, with words such as testers, the snake, and speedballs. The piercing narrative focused on the McCullough family and their efforts to function as a unit even as they dealt with the toll drugs extracted from them. Gary McCullough, the father, had been a businessman who fell into the throes of addiction once his marriage to Fran Boyd crumbled. Boyd, also addicted to drugs at the time, still tried mapping a better life for her sons. They included DeAndre McCullough, who, at the age of fifteen, had already begun peddling drugs. (DeAndre would go on to work on the set of The Wire and portray Lamar, Brother Mouzone’s dim associate, before his death at the age of thirty-five in 2012.) Some, including a few inside The Baltimore Sun, accused Simon of ennobling and romanticizing drug dealers and users. In truth, the book offered a voice to those who had been left behind as forgotten casualties of the war on drugs.

Simon originally did not think much of the deal when the Baltimore-born director Barry Levinson bought the rights to Homicide and plotted to develop it into a TV show for NBC. Simon passed on an offer to write the show’s pilot – he just hoped that a television show would help sell a few more copies of the book. He accepted a subsequent offer from showrunner Tom Fontana to write another episode and teamed with his college friend David Mills to author an episode that would premiere the show’s second season in 1994. The episode, titled ‘Bop Gun,’ guest-starred Robin Williams and won a Writers Guild of America Award for Best Screenplay of an Episodic Drama. The experience left Simon unsated. Only half of what he and Mills had written, Simon estimated, prevailed in the final script. While Mills departed for Hollywood soon after, Simon returned to the newspaper, satisfied to spend the rest of his working days arguing with his feet up and bumming cigarettes off younger reporters. But the paper, his paper, started feeling more unfamiliar. It had been purchased in 1986 by the Times Mirror Company. Buyouts cut into the depth and experience of the newsroom. Simon felt that the new top editors placed an unwarranted emphasis on claiming journalism prizes rather than covering the mundane issues plaguing Baltimore.

Simon accepted a buyout, jumping full time to the staff of Homicide. Under Fontana and producer/writer James Yoshimura, he learned how to transfer his journalistic skills into writing for television. It was Fontana who mentored Simon, telling him that a writer becomes a producer in order to protect his words. Some of the cast and crew dreaded whenever Simon arrived on set. They knew they would be pelted with questions, and they tried avoiding eye contact with him. ‘It was questions with wardrobe,’ said Jeffrey Pratt Gordon, who worked in the art department of Homicide before acting as Johnny ‘Fifty’ Spamanto in The Wire’s Season 2. ‘It was questions with the cinematographer. He was asking everybody questions, and a lot of the times that he asked the questions is right when we’re sort of in the middle of doing stuff. What’s this guy poking around for? What’s this guy always asking questions about?’ It was only years later that he surmised Simon had been educating himself in every aspect of filmmaking. Still, television did not entirely appeal to Simon. He had left the newspaper but remained an arguer, one ready to rail against the status quo. The Washington Post tried hiring him, and he mulled over the offer. It was not until Fontana showed him something else that he had been working on, a pilot for a prison drama shot for HBO named Oz, that Simon visualized television as a worthwhile megaphone. Oz painted a grim world where the initial concerns would not consist of who won and who lost or cleanly separate the bad guys from the good guys. Simon contemplated whether something like The Corner could be adapted for television. Through Fontana, he gained an audience with HBO. He pitched them on what would have been The Wire, telling Burns, ‘If HBO’s interested in this world, we could write a fictional show.’ The HBO executives Chris Albrecht, Anne Thomopoulos, and Kary Antholis looked at one another. ‘Just do the book,’ Antholis said. ‘Just do the characters in the book. You have six hours. It’s a miniseries.’ HBO, Simon thought, would need a black writer associated with the project. He floated the possibility of attaching David Mills. The name appealed to the executives but left no place for Burns. Instead, Simon asked Burns to begin outlining the fictionalized world. ‘I didn’t like what happened because David was not forthcoming,’ Burns said. ‘He believed he needed a black writer on the show. They wanted me to do another script as if there was going to be seven episodes instead of the six, which was totally not going to happen. They took me out to a restaurant and they fumbled through this, “We were thinking about this and that,” and I’m thinking to myself, You guys, there would be no Corner, because David wasn’t going to go out there by himself. I was more than happy to go out because I liked the experience. I liked to do things like that. David waited until it was safe to go out.’

The decision to commit to The Corner, recalled Chris Albrecht, HBO’s chairman and CEO, came down to a choice between Simon’s project or an adaptation of Taylor Branch’s work on the civil rights movement. He took scripts from both on a cross-country plane ride. Albrecht opened The Corner first. Oh man, that’s so depressing, he thought. No one is going to want to watch this. He picked up Branch’s scripts. He found them entertaining, but his mind wandered back to The Corner, wondering what would happen next. He picked it up again and sifted through the next few pages. This is too intense, he thought. It’s just so intense and so raw.The same scenario played out a few more times. As worthwhile as the Taylor Branch project was, anybody could do that, he finally decided. Only HBO could do The Corner.

The gamble paid off. With Charles ‘Roc’ Dutton directing the six episodes, the miniseries aired in 2000 and received critical acclaim, four Emmy nominations, and a Peabody Award. ‘Assuming the perspective of its characters, the series avoids clichés and condescension; the performances are remarkably free of the cheap mannerisms actors often resort to when playing addicts,’ a New York Times review of the miniseries stated. ‘But the insiders’ view is still undermined by the tone of a cautionary tale. The fact that the series makes a plea to understand the characters’ humanity, rather than a judgment about them, doesn’t make it less didactic.’ Seeds had been planted. Simon possessed juice with HBO. He pivoted to pitching his next project. ‘I couldn’t bring Ed [Burns] on The Corner,’ Simon explained. ‘I had to bring Dave Mills, and I was happy to work with Dave Mills, but I felt bad for Ed. I said to Ed, “This is what The Corner’s going to be. Maybe we’ll have a shot doing something bigger if The Corner turns out okay.” And sure enough, after The Corner was completed, but not yet broadcast, they turned to me and said, “That turned out really good. Do you have anything more?”’

‘As a matter of fact…’ Simon replied.

It still took convincing for The Wire to get off the ground, though. HBO had started making its mark with original programming through shows such as Oz, The Sopranos, and Sex and the City. HBO had wisely left cop shows that opened and closed cases within the confines of an hour for the networks. ‘The journey through this one case will ultimately bring viewers from wondering, in cop-show expectation, whether the bad guys will get caught, to wondering instead who the bad guys are and whether catching them means anything at all,’ Simon wrote in a memo to Albrecht and Carolyn Strauss, the president of HBO’s entertainment division, in June 2001. Strauss purchased the pilot and asked for the scripts of two additional episodes before finally greenlighting the project.

DAVID SIMON (CREATOR): I covered [the Williams case], so I had it in my head, and I did those articles, and that’s how I met Ed Burns. We had it in our heads. There was something unsatisfying about the case, because once they got Melvin [Williams] a lot of years, the two prosecutors who were on that case, actually in real life, they both were promoted off. They were the two guys who were going to bring the wiretap case into court.

The wiretap case never went forward. They did the raids. They made them push up the raids, so they could put some dope on the table. They weren’t similar in scope or history or anything, but Melvin was similar as an avatar to Avon [Barksdale]. And Stringer [Bell] was Lamont ‘Chin’ Farmer. Chin only got seven years federal back when there was parole. So, Chin went and did two or three years and was out and Chin was really the mastermind. Chin was like command central and [Williams’s lieutenant Louis] ‘Cookie’ Savage got like twenty. They all got it over separate charges, but they never did the overall conspiracy case because the prosecutors had been promoted out of it.

So, the whole elaborate case Ed had, really elaborate – it involved the codes and beepers and all that – it never got presented properly. Ed knew more about it than had ever been explained or that I could even do in the articles. It was a lot of fun to construct that, and at the same time, also using the sense that Ed had at the end of that case, which was, we did not give Chin enough time.Chin’s coming back, man. Seven years. Ed looked upon who was responsible for moving that level of drugs, with that much scope, and Melvin got plenty of time and Cookie got a significant sentence, but Chin was the guy who they just sort of glanced at. That’s sort of written into the ending [of Season One], where they leave Stringer on the street.

That seemed the right tonality for the show, the idea that for all of the elaborate police work, it just doesn’t matter. The critique of the drug war was everything can be replaced. Everything is endless. The dysfunction of this thing goes on.

ED BURNS (CO-CREATOR): I said I’d help him. I was teaching then, and I stayed teaching for the first year. I would just come in and work on the story with him. Then, I thought, You’ve been a cop and a teacher. I wrote The Corner and I got twelve dollars and ten cents in the bank. It’s about time to cash this in. So, I did.

CHRIS ALBRECHT (CHAIRMAN AND CEO, HBO):David [Simon] came in and said that he wanted to do the most detailed, most realistic look at a police wiretap investigation that’s ever been done. When I read the first script, it was really hard to know how that was going to play itself out, because, obviously, you’re not looking at the whole breakdown, the whole investigation. Since the pitch was that, then it’s like, ‘Well, is this really what we’re going to get?’

CAROLYN STRAUSS (PRESIDENT, HBO ENTERTAINMENT): This is a relationship business. You start your relationship with David [Simon] on one and then it keeps. You realize that, ‘Oh, this is real special.’ Yeah, you can watch The Corner and Homicide and go, ‘Oh, yeah. I like this,’ but then, when you start to talk to him and listen to him, you go, ‘This is a special guy.’

ED BURNS (CO-CREATOR): We wrote together sometimes. Sometimes we did it on the phone. It wasn’t difficult to create the story. The story was easy to create. The characters were composites of a lot of cops that I knew and that David knows, so that was pretty easy to make the story.

DAVID SIMON (CREATOR): Everybody has an expectation that much of American television is about redemption and about affirmation. We were trying to make a show that was basically an argument of dissent. It was political dissent. It was saying our systems are not functioning. Our policies are incorrect. We’re not going to find a way out of this unless we stand back and take stock and turn one hundred eighty degrees from what we’ve been doing, particularly in regard to the drug war and inequality that we were depicting.

ED BURNS (CO-CREATOR): The first season was all about how difficult it was to get a wire. We used the retrograde idea of using pagers. It flowed very easily. There were a few glitches along the way, but it flowed really easily storywise. That doesn’t mean it flowed easily in the writers’ room, but it certainly flowed easily in the storyline.

CAROLYN STRAUSS (PRESIDENT, HBO ENTERTAINMENT): When we read the story, the document that outlined the first season, that’s when we knew that it would be great. David’s very capable of that kind of story with The Corner and Homicide. Here, this was just taking all that and really taking that story out.

DAVID SIMON (CREATOR):The one thing you weren’t able to pull through a keyhole in The Corner – The Corner becomes six hours about this broken nuclear family and the culture of addiction, what it’s like to try to live in a drug-saturated neighborhood when the drug problem is involving your family. It’s a very microcosmic view of the drug culture, the drug war. You can see a straining to get anything about policy, about why this is so fucked up. Whatever little bit we could was in the interviews in the beginning and the end that [director Charles] ‘Roc’ Dutton did. That was the only place where anybody would stand back and be asked a question about anything macro. And that was really us trying to take the arguments against the drug war that were in The Corner and squeeze them into a format that really didn’t have any place for it.

ED BURNS (CO-CREATOR): It was set up that Baltimore would become a character. The first season, you saw two institutions, the drug institution and the police department. The same problems from mayor all the way down. I like that sort of way of looking at things.

Alexa L. Fogel originally stumbled into becoming a casting director. She knew little about casting when she worked as an assistant to the artistic director of an Off-Broadway play when the casting director abruptly left. Fogel assumed that person’s duties and eventually rose to the peak of the profession, showing an adept skill for blending actors with scripts, and casting Oz for Tom Fontana. She worked with television producer Nina Noble prior to The Wire and joked, ‘I was probably the only casting director they knew.’ Yet, David Simon knew the show would be in capable hands with Fogel sifting through actors for roles. Fogel worked in conjunction with award-winning casting director Pat Moran, whom Simon has described as a ‘mad genius’ in deftly handling Baltimore casting. Indeed, The Wire became known for its dynamic range of actors, while avoiding Hollywood’s better-known stars. Many actors were recycled from recognizable series such as The Corner (Clarke Peters, Maria Broom, and Delaney Williams), Oz (J. D. Williams, Seth Gilliam, and Lance Reddick), and Homicide (Peter Gerety, Robert Chew, and Jim True-Frost). Fogel also successfully pushed for two relatively unknown British actors, Dominic West and Idris Elba, to land prominent roles in The Wire.

The characters were composites drawn from real-life inspirations and often consigned names recognizable in Baltimore lore. To muddle things up further, Jay Landsman read for the role of Jay Landsman, but did not land the part, which went to Delaney Williams. Instead, Simon eventually awarded the real Jay Landsman the role of Lt. Dennis Mello, a figure who, in real life, was the first black man to reach the rank of captain in the Baltimore Police Department. ‘I was honored to play Dennis Mello, the real Dennis Mello,’ Landsman said. ‘Tell me that’s not acting. I’m a white guy playing a black guy. That was real acting.’ The casting largely split the actors into opposing groups: the Barksdale organization, headlined by Avon Barksdale (Wood Harris), Elba’s Stringer Bell, D’Angelo Barksdale (Lawrence Gilliard Jr.), and Wee-Bey Brice (Hassan Johnson), versus the wayward police unit charged with building a case against it, which featured West’s Jimmy McNulty, Reddick’s Cedric Daniels, Clarke Peters’s Lester Freamon, Kima Greggs (Sonja Sohn), and Bunk Moreland (Wendell Pierce).

Many of the show’s actors remained blissfully unaware for some time that their roles had been sourced from real figures. It was months before Williams, for example, realized that a real Landsman existed. Simon preferred that the doppelgängers not meet their inspirations. ‘They were going to be who they were going to be and it can sometimes fuck an actor up,’ Simon explained. ‘They start embracing things that you’re not writing. Better to have them be rock solid in who they think that character should be and chase that.’

To solidify the show’s production, Simon solicited the addition of two trusted figures in Nina Noble and Robert ‘Bob’ Colesberry. Both had proven themselves while working with Simon on The Corner. Noble was no frills, having developed a reputation of landing a show under budget, an enviable trait in any producer. While she came recommended to Simon for The Corner, Colesberry originally arrived forcefully from HBO’s Kary Antholis, who wanted to add a visual producer. Simon immediately distrusted the quiet Colesberry, concerned that he would be more meddler than anything. His opinion changed once he watched the first cuts of The Corner. Colesberry would advance to play the small recurring role of Det. Ray Cole and also to direct an episode of The Wire. ‘I thought back to that first meeting with Bob Colesberry and realized I did not want to put anything to film ever again without him,’ Simon later wrote in Rafael Alvarez’s The Wire: Truth Be Told. ‘For something that began as a shotgun wedding, it was turning out to be quite a marriage.’

DAVID SIMON (CREATOR):[Wendell Pierce] came in and just nailed [his audition]. He was really pissed off. He had gotten in an argument with a cab driver. It was one of those sort of trying-to-hail-a-cab-while-black moments in New York, and he came in and he was steaming. He was harried, like a bear who’d hit the hornet’s nest. He had to focus on the scene, and he was apologizing for what he thought was a bad read, but it had that air of Baltimore – put-upon workaday – homicide detective. As soon as he came in and read, it was like, ‘That’s our Bunk.’

WENDELL PIERCE (DET. WILLIAM ‘BUNK’ MORELAND): It was weeks later, maybe even a year later, while we were shooting, that David said, ‘You know, when you came in, it was not your reading that got you the part. You just came in and you were bitching and complaining about this taxi driver and that was the thing that got you the gig, because you’re so much like Bunk.’ I was kind of indignant about it all, but in my own way, I guess. The fact that I would bring it up in the middle of a major audition shows some gumption on my part.

DAVID SIMON (CREATOR): We talked to Ray Winstone [about playing the role of Det. Jimmy McNulty]. I was not convinced, but he was very hot at the moment, and HBO wanted us just to consider Ray Winstone. So, we went to the Toronto [International] Film Festival, where he was. This was September 2001. We showed him the script, and I was concerned about the accent, that he would not be able to turn the corner. It’s so East End. But I’d seen Sexy Beast, the movie, and I thought, Well, the camera loves him, and he’s gruff. We left Toronto, and he was thinking about it. Then 9/11 happened, and he couldn’t get home for like two weeks. The planes were all grounded. He just went straight back. He was like, ‘I am not.’ There was something traumatic about that, and we never heard from him again.

I thought John C. Reilly could be a different McNulty, certainly not the same, but I thought he could carry all of the excesses and vices of McNulty in a different way. I’ve loved his work in a lot of stuff. I was on the phone with him. It was three weeks before Halloween, because I was in a corn maze with my kid, Ethan, who would have been like seven, six. So, I’m trying to keep up with my kid, who’s running around like a madman in this maze, and that’s when John C. Reilly called me back. I really couldn’t take the call. I talked to him for maybe five minutes, and I said, ‘Hey, listen, can I call you back? I’m in a corn maze with my kid.’ And he said, ‘Yeah, yeah. Call me back.’ In the time between when he called me and when I called him back, he stopped taking calls. He later told Dom [West] that his wife was like, ‘We are not moving to Baltimore.’ I never actually talked to him more than those five minutes to even talk to him about the role.

Later on, Dom was working with him on Chicago and they’re looking at each other. They’re so different, and Dom’s like, ‘What were they going for?’

That’s kind of how casting is sometimes. You go in one direction. You find out you’re on the wrong track or circumstance thwarts you, and you end up going in a different direction.

DOMINIC WEST (DET. JIMMY MCNULTY): To read, I was given one scene from the pilot and nothing else, and I put myself on tape. I didn’t think much of it, but it got too late in the night, and they wanted it the next day, so I got my girlfriend to read the dialogue. It was a scene between McNulty and Bunk, and she read the Bunk part and I held the camera and I did McNulty. She couldn’t stop laughing at my accent, so I sent her out of the room and I had no one else and it was late, so I just left a gap for when Bunk spoke and reacted to whatever he was supposed to be saying and sent it off to them.

David Simon said he found that it was so funny, this fool reacting to complete silence, that he thought we’d better get him over and have a laugh.

DAVID SIMON (CREATOR): I had never seen an audition tape like it. The camera was on him, and he was reading and then he was leaving the pauses for the other actors, who didn’t exist, and he was reacting to the lines. A lot of acting is reacting, and to see somebody doing it to nothingness is a pretty unusual audition tape.

We fell around the room laughing, like, ‘What the…?’ Then, we sat down and watched the tape, and the accent was slipping. It was his first time trying an American accent, and it seemed to be there were shades of sort of New York De Niro–isms. But it was really good acting. He was a good actor, and the reacting to nothing was a tell. Of course, we knew that McNulty would probably be sort of a guy with unrelenting vices, sort of his own worst enemy. Dom had that. You could see that even in the audition tape.

ALEXA L. FOGEL (CASTING DIRECTOR): He was too young. He was too attractive. I’m not sure that anyone else knew this at the time, but he was really well educated. I didn’t let everyone know where he had gone to school, because it wasn’t important. He understood the guy.

DOMINIC WEST (DET. JIMMY MCNULTY): I went to New York and I met Wendell Pierce, who was the first person to be cast, and we hit it off pretty well. So, I think that’s what kicked it all into start.

WENDELL PIERCE (DET. WILLIAM ‘BUNK’ MORELAND): I’m from New Orleans, and we have a laissez-faire sort of approach to everything. It’s a cultural thing in New Orleans. Dominic is very much that. We had so much fun. It started from the beginning. I remember reading with him, and I was like, Oh my God, this guy is prepared, and I don’t have this shit memorized. He was on point and prepared, and he maybe dropped one line and went on and was like, ‘You were so prepared and I was awful.’ I was like, ‘Wow, I was thinking the opposite, man. You were prepared and I was awful.’ Our chemistry – it’s been a great friendship from the bat. He has a great curiosity about things. He’s very well read, loves to go out and have a good time. I think we share that approach to life.

ALEXA L. FOGEL (CASTING DIRECTOR): I did have to sell the head of HBO at the time, Chris Albrecht. I flew out with Dom, and then he and I worked at it at the hotel, and then we all went into HBO and he and I read together for a couple of the executives. I stepped in because I felt like we needed to explain to Chris what it was about, this guy who looked so different than what was written about this character, that he had this kind of darkness and [this] lost quality and a sense of cynicism about everything about him that he really managed to embody.

At the end of my little monologue, Chris turned to me and he pointed and said, ‘You better be right.’ For three weeks, I would wake up every three hours and all I could see was the end of that finger pointing at me, saying, ‘You better be right.’

CHRIS ALBRECHT (CHAIRMAN AND CEO, HBO): Dominic is British. That was before people were casting a lot of Brits as American.

DOMINIC WEST (DET. JIMMY MCNULTY): Ed [Burns] always thought that he was, and rightfully so, the smartest guy in the room. Not on The Wire, but when he was a cop. To a lot of the frustration with the bosses, a lot of the sort of maverick disobedience and thinking everyone else is an idiot, and he’s the only one that knows how to solve the case, a lot of that in McNulty was from Ed.

I think that’s what struck a chord most with the cops that used to watch the show. They’d go, ‘This is exactly what cops think about all the time.’ It’s, I suppose, what everyone thinks about all the time – is what an asshole their bosses are and how they could do the job so much better if only they didn’t have to answer to these idiots who are their superiors. I think Ed brought that very much, the sort of experience of being a cop, to the show, which is what made it so different and so real. A lot of McNulty was based on Ed, particularly the intelligence and the intellectual arrogance, I think.

ED BURNS (CO-CREATOR): That’s what I did. I went to my captain first and said, ‘This doesn’t work against gangs. It just doesn’t work.’ Of course, in Baltimore, we pretended we didn’t have gangs. That was something. It took many, many years to acknowledge the fact that we had gangs, but that was just the brass being stupid. Then I went up to the State’s Attorney’s Office and got Howard Gersh, and he basically put pressure on the police commissioner. I got sprung loose from the Homicide office, much to the chagrin of the major, and was able to go after all the gangs, which got me away from Homicide and also got me away from the Narcotics Unit, sort of carved my own little niche. I did that almost up until the day I retired.

But McNulty is more of an expression of David, with the divorce and that kind of stuff. What McNulty did, as far as pressuring the police department to establish a unit to go after gangsters, was what I did. His personal life and stuff like that – that wasn’t my personal life. I’m sort of a homebody.

ALEXA L. FOGEL (CASTING DIRECTOR):Idris [Elba] was up for a Fox movie that I was casting right before I did The Wire. He didn’t get it, which was really frustrating for me. I thought he had tremendous presence. His American accent was perfect. But he was an unknown face, and for a studio, that was tricky. He was very much on the forefront of my mind when I started on The Wire. Because of the experience that I had with the feature, I told him to just use an American accent. I’ve never done that before, and I’ve never done it since. But I was sort of coming off of this frustrating experience where he didn’t get a role and I was trying to kind of create an environment in which everything was going his way.

IDRIS ELBA (STRINGER BELL): I couldn’t afford to stay anymore. This was literally the last audition that I was up for that could change my life. It was in December when I was auditioning. In January, my lease was up, my daughter was about to be born. It was a really troubling time. It was like, Get this job and you stay. Don’t get this job and you won’t be able to afford to stay and you’ll go back [to England]. Also, my visa was running out next year as well, so it was really the last hurrah for me, to be honest. Then eventually, the day my daughter was born was the day I got the job.

WOOD HARRIS (AVON BARKSDALE): Me and Idris were two of the first people cast. Alexa was talking to me at the time about how she loved us working out. She said, ‘Oh my God, you two are going to work really well together.’

MICHAEL B. JORDAN (WALLACE): I remember feeling so bummed the first time I went in there and I didn’t get the job. I originally went in there for Bodie, and I was too young for it and I didn’t get it, and I was just super sad, and I remember [pilot director] Clark [Johnson] and Alexa calling me back in. They brought me back in for Wallace, and I ended up getting that character. That was cool. That was the silver lining.

ALEXA L. FOGEL (CASTING DIRECTOR): We had to do all these extra things, because [Michael B. Jordan] couldn’t go to Baltimore by himself. He had to have a guardian because he was underage. Every time we did the deal, it was sort of for two people.

ANDRE ROYO (REGINALD ‘BUBBLES’ COUSINS): I had just finished doing a play and got mad love from all these actors that I looked up to. I was on cloud nine. My manager called me and was like, ‘HBO has a new show.’ At that point, because of Oz and Six Feet Under and all that stuff, it still was the biggest. That’s what every actor wanted. You had Law & Order and you had HBO. That’s what every actor in New York wanted to be on.

When she said, ‘HBO is doing a new show called The Wire and I got you an audition for this junkie character named Bubbles,’ I was mad. I was like, ‘I’m not doing that. I’m not playing a junkie.’ I didn’t know anything about the kind of addiction Bubbles was in. I just felt like it was one of those roles we always heard would be either that typecast guy or ridiculed because you never get it right. Only a few. You had Sam[uel L.] Jackson as Gator and you have Chris Rock in New Jack City. I couldn’t see myself doing better than that. If you can’t see yourself doing better with the role, then why take it? I was a little like, ‘I don’t want to go.’ My manager, being the great manager she was at that time, was like, ‘You’re broke, motherfucker. You ain’t got no money. They didn’t offer you the role. You got to go audition. How about you go there, so people in the television world can see if you can act? If you book it, then you can turn it down, if you want to.’

She made it in a tone where it was a challenge, like, ‘You ain’t booked it yet.’ I was like, ‘I’ll book it.’ I was high on myself at that time. I was like, ‘All right. Let me go in.’ I went in. It’s New York. You see the same black actors in all the auditions. It’s a small circle. I see all my boys, and everybody’s auditioning for this guy. His name is Bubbles. Someone’s chewing bubble gum. I was like, ‘That’s so fucking juvenile.’ I spat my gum out.

LANCE REDDICK (LT. CEDRIC DANIELS): I originally was called in for Bunk. I read for Bunk three times. The last time I went and read for Bunk, it was the only time that David, Ed, and Bob Colesberry were in the room. David asked me to read for Bubbles on the spot. I went outside and looked at the words, came back, and I read for Bubbles. I’m sure that was because he’d just seen me play two drug addicts in a row. I worked with David and Bob on The Corner, where I played a crackhead. Then I was cast in Oz in March of 2000, where I’m an undercover cop who gets addicted to heroin. He saw me play two skinny drug addicts in a row. It’s funny, because I even remember, toward the end of my run on that season of Oz, David was stopping by to say hello to [Oz creator] Tom [Fontana]. I remember him saying to me, ‘I’m working on a new project. I’ll keep you in mind.’ I was grateful for him saying that, but people say that stuff all the time. I didn’t expect it to go anywhere.

ALEXA L. FOGEL (CASTING DIRECTOR): That’s just the way it goes until you get deeper into the process. The beginning of the process is a total crapshoot. You’re just trying everything out, and then it starts to makes sense, because the quality of the actor starts to adhere more closely and strongly to specific qualities in the role. But in the beginning, you just don’t know.

ROBERT WISDOM (HOWARD ‘BUNNY’ COLVIN): Alexa Fogel is one of the great casting directors around. Alexa nailed this one. She’s really an unsung hero of the show. She just had her finger on the pulse of a broader array of talent than our industry is given credit for.

PAT MORAN (CASTING: BALTIMORE): I knew right off the bat that this was not any Cosby kids here. That wasn’t going to fly. In order for that to translate, even though the words were great, you needed to match it up with the eyes. I also feel that there’s a role for everybody. After a period of seeing a lot of people, perhaps they couldn’t carry a show, but there’s a one-liner waiting for them somewhere.

I was always happy to be a part of it. I believed in it. There wasn’t one rotten script that came, and that’s what you really love. The characters were so specific, and you saw what it looked like in your head. Until it looked like that, I wasn’t happy.

JAY LANDSMAN SR. (LT. DENNIS MELLO): I actually read for the part of Landsman, but I’m still working now. I’d have to take off three days of work, whenever they want. I said, ‘I can’t do that all the time.’ All of a sudden, they had Delaney Williams read for it. Delaney Williams wasn’t anything like me. David Simon said, ‘You did fine on that reading, but you’re just no “Jay Landsman.”’ Asshole. He thought it was the funniest thing in the world when it happened. We met all these people, and he had this big, fat guy. I was one of the thinnest guys there at the time and never ate.

DAVID SIMON (CREATOR):Jay is not heavyset. Jay had, at that time, probably put on more weight than he had normally had. When I was in the Homicide unit, Jay was and still probably is the worst practical joker in the history of the Baltimore Police Department. There were so many practical jokes he played on me. It was so hilariously humiliating when I was the intern there. So, I finally got him back. Delaney is a great actor, and I loved working with him. We didn’t cast him because he was heavyset. We cast him because he was great in the read. Once we did cast him and I’d realized what I’d done, then it was like, ‘Jay, you’re good, but I got a guy who’s much better at being Jay Landsman than you.’

When he saw Delaney walk on, Jay immediately went on a diet. The real Jay. Jay dropped like thirty pounds. He’d put on some weight. I’m not saying he was heavy. He was heavier than he’d been. He saw Delaney walk on-screen, I think Jay didn’t have a doughnut for the next two to three years. Next I saw, he was thirty pounds lighter. Jay was like, ‘You motherfucker.’

DELANEY WILLIAMS (SGT. JAY LANDSMAN): I didn’t know I was going to be on a lot, and they didn’t tell me anything about the character. I had no idea there was even a real Landsman until the end of the first season, when I met Jay. That’s how little I was told about what was going on or what it was about. I think they kind of said, ‘Well, this is the person we need.’ As an actor, I chose things to play, and they were happy with it. Then they wrote toward those things. As far as that goes, he was functioning as the guy between the bureaucracy of the city government and a police department. I really wasn’t told anything about it, but it turned out that, looking back on it, it was a comic relief device of sorts.

LAWRENCE GILLIARD JR. (D’ANGELO BARKSDALE): When I booked the role, I was living in New York, and my agent