David Simon is God (or: My Love Affair with The Wire)
I’m obsessed with The Wire and David Simon. The man is a genius.
This morning I was reminded just how much I love him when I came across this extract from the introduction to a new book on The Wire. He writes:
The first thing we had to do was teach people to watch television in a different way, to slow themselves down and pay attention, to immerse themselves in a way that the medium had long ago ceased to demand. And we had to do this, problematically enough, using a genre and its tropes that for decades have been accepted as basic, obvious storytelling terrain.
Yes - and The Wire and selected other shows do that. Television has so much potential; you stay with the story and you live with the characters for longer than any other art form. And The Wire shows that television has the power to make you think and make you work for change.
And if you haven’t read David Simon’s thank you letter to Wire fans, you should. I’ll leave you with this but, really, read it all.
We are a culture without the will to seriously examine our own problems. We eschew that which is complex, contradictory or confusing. As a culture, we seek simple solutions. We enjoy being provoked and titillated, but resist the rigorous, painstaking examination of issues that might, in the end, bring us to the point of recognizing our problems, which is the essential first step to solving any of them.
