(btw, please keep this joint in-house... no ctrl-c, ctrl-v ing of this all over the Interwebs, please? Thank you...)


>* applause *

Ladies and Gentlemen, please help me welcome the cast and creative team of The Wire: Deirdre Lovejoy (Rhonda), Seth Gilliam (Carver), Jamie Hector (Marlo), Michael Kenneth Williams (Omar), Sonja Sohn (Kima), Ed Burns (Co-Creator/Executive Producer), David Simon (Co-Creator/Executive Producer), Carolyn Strauss (President, HBO Entertainment), Ernest Dickerson (Director), Alexa Fogel (Casting), Wendell Pierce (Bunk), Andre Royo who will be arriving shortly (Bubbles), Jim True-Frost (Prez), Chad Coleman (Cutty), Robert Wisdom (Colvin), and our moderator for the evening, Howard Rosenberg.

* applause *

Howard Rosenberg: Thank you, everybody, for being here tonight. And I’m delighted to be here, as I’m sure you are, because The Wire is like a stratospheric series, and I know you want to celebrate it as I do. I (feel)… along with The Sopranos, maybe Prime Suspect on PBS, (that) this (show) really represents the best of television. I… I can’t ever think of seeing anything that’s any better. Maybe Charlie’s Angels…

* applause *
* laughter *

HR: Maybe Petticoat Junction. And you’ll notice we have… (to Ed Burns) Yes, my laugh lines… you’ll notice we have one empty chair, and that’s Andre Royo’s chair. As you know, he plays Bubs, and it’s very hard pushing that cart through L.A. traffic…

* laughter *

HR: … so, give this guy a break. I’m going to be walking around, sort of like Donahue so I can face the panel. The first question I have, though, is for David Simon. And I’ve always thought of this series as much less a police procedural than a power procedural. It’s about people attaining power, retaining power, losing power, and why they do that. Am I on the right track?

David Simon: I think so. Um… I would say the star of the show is really the city, in this case of Baltimore, but it’s a stand-in for a lot of American cities. And it’s how power and uh, powerlessness route itself through a modern city. So, I’d say yeah, you’re on the right track.

HR: Oh, that’s good. Uh, it also seems to me that morally, the police, the government, and the druggers are almost morally interchangeable. I mean, that’s… if that’s true, that’s really a dark view of life, isn’t it?

DS: I would say it’s realistic. I don’t think… I mean, I think a lot of our entertainment industry, and a lot of what we call our entertainments, a lot of it is rooted in the idea of Good vs. Evil. And we’re really grounded in that as a culture. And I’m less interested… I know Ed and the other writers are all a lot less interested in the idea of Good vs. Evil as a theme. I think it’s not only been overstated but it’s been done to death. We’re sort of interested in why people, uh, are in the situation they’re in and what the inevitabilities are of the systems we’ve constructed. It’s more about systems.
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This ain't a scene
it's a
got
damn
arms
race