David Simon TV Guide Interview: Creates Commentary Disguised as a Cop Drama on The Wire

David Simon TV Guide Interview: Creates Commentary Disguised as a Cop Drama on The Wire

TVGuide: How did you develop the character of Jimmy McNulty?
Simon: {Executive producer] Ed Burns was a [cop] who was nominally assigned to homicide, but he would often pull himself out of the rotation and go to wiretap cases. He had a hard time convincing the department that the methodology was not only sound, but that it should be replicated. I watched him during the last half of his career hit his head against the wall trying to get the police brass to have a little bit of ambition. There’s a lot of Burns in McNulty. Ed would laugh at that, because he thinks there’s a lot of me in McNulty. We gave him an ex-wife and there were some personal things, but that’s writing. You cannibalize everything you have in front of you. I grafted on a lot of stories from hard-drinking cops. There’s a lot of oral history in the show. We got to write a lot stories down on cocktail napkins and put them in the show. I think that’s what made the show idiosyncratic and, for lack of a better word, real.

TVGuide: You killed a bunch of characters. Who was the hardest?
Simon: They were all hard. There was nobody that I wanted to kill off, but the story requires it. This was a tragedy we were writing, and these things have to happen. The hardest one was probably the first, because it was Wallace .The crew was mad. The Baltimore crew had worked on Homicide, and they were used to a certain amount of darkness, but the way in which we killed Wallace bothered everybody on-set. It was the first time we had confronted just where the show was going. I knew there was more to come, but that was the first bite of the apple really.

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Permalink Posted in: show, tv December 14, 2009