HR: Well, you mentioned life experience, and I’m really interested to find out the line separating, in this series, fiction and reality. Ed, you mentioned, uh, your own experiences in meeting characters similar to the ones that are in the show. And after you were, uh, a cop, you became a schoolteacher. And, in this series, we have a middle school where, if acts… if education breaks out, it seems to be an accident almost. How close is Prez’s experience to your experience as a teacher?

EB: Um, not close at all. Um, Prez was a new teacher, and kind of… kinda lost, and um… I met a lot of teachers like that. And the first year teachers are always struggling. Um… I always thought of the classroom as a boxing match. You go in, and if you don’t get the first punch in, you… you lose. So, you know, I went in and got the first punch in, I kept punching, and that’s what I called education. And uh…

* laughter *

EB: … so… at the end of the day, you know, the kids would leave, I would leave, and, you know, we’d… we’d start again tomorrow. But, um, the wonderful thing about it was is that we had a chance, through the kids that we got and through Prez and… Jim, um, to sort-of give you a little feeling of what those kids, uh, go through, which is, um, pretty profound. And um, uh, I think the show came as close dramatically of capturing something like that as you can capture.

HR: Well, again, going back to, uh, to the reality of the situation, how… how close is this, David, to the way government really operates in Baltimore? How close is this to the way cops really operate? How close is this (to) the way the drug scene really operates?

DS: All of the procedure is correct for Baltimore and for what actually occurs. That said, it’s fiction. Um, I guess the distinction I would make is all of these things… some of these things may have actually happened. Uh, some of these things were rumored to have happened, uh, in a street sense. And all of these things could have happened, but not often did. It’s probably the way to say what The Wire is about. Um, we’re very interested in how the city functions, or doesn’t function. And so, we take very careful notes, (and) when we don’t know something… none of us, none of the writers knew anything about the port, for example, for season 2. So we spent several months before the season throwing ourselves at the ILA and the steamship trade and the Maryland Port Authority and saying, “Help us with your world. Tell us everything you can tell us.” And only in about the second or third month were you able to go up to these guys and say, “Okay, now how, how would you make a can disappear off the, you know, I mean heh, tell us the dirt.” And, um, the great thing about be… writing fiction is that… I mean, as a reporter, that was a very hard thing to get people to tell you the absol… everyone tells you their version of the truth that they want to sell when it’s non-fiction. When it’s fiction, everyone will open up a little more because the stakes aren’t as high, uh, at least to them. Um, but having said that, it’s… it’s important to remember that life is sort of anti-drama. If you think of your own lives, you can think of a lot of the people around you, a lot of days go by, um, and your life is not a perfectly-formed dramatic arc. Um, and that’s where… that’s where the craft comes in. You know, so we’re not doing a documentary. Everything, everything has to be a little bit, if not heightened, then at least truncated and shaped to make a plot, um, because much of life is a little bit plotless, uh, if you think about it. It’s… it’s, you know, one day to the next, I mean, it’s… you know, sometime… and sometimes where you think you’re going’s not where you’re going, and sometimes it’s ridiculously random, which is all very real but it doesn’t make for good drama. So, you know, bear that in mind. I mean, you know, it’s not as if all of the events in a single season of The Wire… they may have all happened (but) they probably didn’t happen in the span of 8 weeks.

HR: But at the same time, uh, the picture of the police is not entirely positive. The picture of the government, uh, process, is not entirely, uh, positive. How have these people responded to the show? Uh, standing ovation? Criticism?

DS: No, I mean, we’ve received criticism at the top rungs of city government, or at the top rungs of any institution we’ve depicted. But tellingly, the people who occupy a rank of either, sort of, foot soldier, in whatever they’re doing, up to maybe, mid-level management, are… are very affectionate about the show, and very aggressively supportive. And it’s usually that line between mid-level management and upper-level management, between the bosses, where the appeal of the show breaks down. And I think, I just think that’s telling. You know, this show, (when) we wrote the pilot, Enron was going on, the Catholic church scandal was going on, uh, the disastrous foreign policy, that has been pursued ever since, was just getting underway. It was not eas… it was not at all hard for us to conjure a world in which institutions betray those who they’re supposed to serve or are supposed to serve them. Um, that didn’t seem like a triumph of imagination for us, it seemed like documentarism. I mean, and it still does. I mean, I think that in some ways, we’ve understated just how, uh, how inevitable the decline of American empire is. And that’s really what The Wire is implying, and has been implying since the end of first season. Um, but it doesn’t, you know… to us, we think we’re being restrained. Um, it just feels a little different for people because… listen, you know, the ultimate trope of a cop show is, if you put the bad guys in jail at the end, something has been vindicated, and the system works. Um, and, you know, I mean, beginning with the fallacy that is the drug war, we don’t believe in that. So…
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