> HR: And in trying to depict that, do you… do you understand that this has been an exploratory process on the part of you and the rest of the production team and the writers, in terms of understanding society as you want to depict it?

DS: Uh, we do our best. I mean, we’re, uh, we’re not academics. Ed was a police detective for 20 years…

Ed Burns: That proves that I’m a… (inaudible)

DS: Yeah, he’s the anti-academic. And (Ed was also) a teacher for 7 (years), and I was a newspaper reporter, and the other writers were all, uh, from the prose world, they’re novelists. So what we’re looking at is a bunch of people who were not supposed to have a TV show. And, uh, we’re also writing from a place in America that is actually, forgive me, but a little more indicative of America than say, West L.A. or the island of Manhattan. So, we’re not of this industry and yet, we’ve sort of stumbled into it and HBO gave us this home, or this window, and we’ve crawled through it. But, um, we’ve done our best to learn our city, and we’re all either rooted in Baltimore or in other post Rust Belt cities of the country.

HR: So you’re saying South Baltimore’s different than West L.A. is what you’re saying.

DS: A little bit.

HR: Okay.

DS: Although we did get our first Starbucks. We’re trying to catch up.

HR: Uh, Carolyn, when you first encountered this series, was it a slam-dunk or did you have any reservations at all?

Carolyn Strauss: Uh, well, I think it was a lot of different things from the start. At first it was 9 episodes, over and out. And, so it was a miniseries—

EB: Really?

CS (to EB): Yeah. It was done, kind of.

EB: I never knew that.

CS: Yeah.

* laughter *

CS: Like, here it is, 9 episodes… it was like, basically, well, this could go on, you know. Then we talked about… but the thing that was most perplexing—

DS: Our show was killed, and we didn’t know it.

CS: No, no, no. That was your idea, pal.

DS: I was pitching The Corner then.

CS: No, I was not in The Corner conversations.

DS: Reall… I said 9 and out?

CS: Yeah.

DS: I was lying.

* laughter *

CS: The first and only time. Um…

DS: Apparently.

CS: And then, our biggest reservation is, why would we be in this arena of a cop show. I mean, the networks have them down, locked down. And David wrote this, as I learned he loves to do, this impassioned letter – single type, many pages…

* DS laughs *

CS: … about… that was exactly the reason we should be doing a cop show. It was sort of the most subversive thing for HBO was to take a traditional network arena and see what HBO could do with it. So… but, um, and ultimately, it was just the quality of the material that allayed everybody’s fears.

HR: Were you worried at all that, well, first of all, HBO, even though many of us feel, is head and shoulders above the rest of television, but still, uh, you had stockholders, TimeWarner has stockholders, you have to achieve a certain level of audience. Were you worried at all that this show would be seen by white mainstream viewers as “just another black gangster show” and might turn them off?

CS: Um, that isn’t really how we approached it. I mean, I think the themes that David was talking about, the way he had constructed the scripts and the shows, were of such a specific kind of quality, that we’re just… you know, our philosophy is let’s try and put it out there and see what comes to it. And it, you know, there is a core audience for The Wire that is incredibly loyal to the show.

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