David Simon and The Wire
From a fascinating interview with the occasionally obtuse but always interesting David Simon, creator of HBO’s The Wire, comes a tidy explanation of the motivations behind the show, encapsulated as only a writer could:
It’s a Greek tragedy, and everyone’s trying to think Antigone or Medea or Oedipus out of the box. Which is understandable. When you go see those plays performed, if they’re done well, you know the ending with absolute certainty — and yet you can’t help but think somewhere in act two that the fates are not the fates. And, listen, American entertainment does nothing but sell redemption and easy victories 24-7.
I’m not saying that “The Wire’s” unique in that respect — there’s a lot of other high-end television that is dark and continues to be dark — but I agree with Chase in one respect. I read an interview with him where he said what American television gets wrong relentlessly is that life is really tragic. Not a lot of people want to tune their living room box to that channel. It’s an escapist form. There are people who are willing to look at it for something else. It’s not a mass audience, but possibly some portion of that mass audience finds its way to something else, and then they expect to be treated as they’ve always been treated. There’s nothing the writers can do about that, other than twist themselves into hacks trying to please people with what they want. What are you gonna do? We weren’t doing it to be mean, we were doing it cause this is the story we cared about.
Yep.
[also, in case you haven't noticed, I finally figured out how to get ecto/blogger to stop inserting random line breaks into my carefully crafted entries. You know how? I spent ten seconds on the ecto forums. Sometimes you just have to ask, people!]