The final series aired on the small screen this year and will be out on DVD next month. Hot Press is proud to announce that, in association with Canongate Books, HBO and Fox, we’ll be acting as official media partner for a special screening of The Wire in the IFI on September 19th at 6.30pm.
The event will be attended by the series’ creator, executive producer and writer David Simon, who’ll be participating in a public interview, chaired by a representative from HP Towers.
Created, executive-produced and written by ex-crime reporter David Simons, in collaboration with ex-detective Ed Burns, The Wire is a gritty, complex and no-punches-pulled depiction of the war on drugs in the city of Baltimore, as seen from multiple perspectives, including those of the detectives, the dealers, the lawyers and the politicians. It’s an ensemble piece with long story arcs more akin to the plotting of a novel than the usual show-by-show pay-off, and this ambitious structure, plus the opportunity to mine the labyrinthine chain-of-command machinations of the police department, has enabled Simon to attract the the services of such A-list crime writers as George Pelecanos, Richard Price and Dennis Lehane.
Irish audiences will recognise homeboy Aidan Gillen in the role of Councilman Thomas Carcetti. Speaking to Hot Press last year, the actor explained what drew him to the show.
“I thought it sounded like City Of Hope; it cuts into the cross section of the class tier of an American city,” he said. “The Wire really tells it like it is. You don’t see that many dramas on TV where you see eight-year-old kids on street corners selling drugs in Baltimore ’cos they’re treated with more leniency if they’re caught. David Simon was a crime journalist in the Baltimore Sun, which is a pretty good East Coast paper. He wrote a book called Homicide – A Year On the Killing Streets, a fact-based book, following this cop Jay Landsman around, and he made it into the TV series Homicide: Life On The Street. After that he hooked up with this guy who was an ex-cop called Ed Burns, not to be confused with the actor, and they hung out on a street corner for like a year or more, just hung with these blokes, and wrote a book about it called The Corner, which they also made into a six-part HBO series, a very successful and very honest look at the so-called war on drugs, which bled directly into The Wire.
“The first season of The Wire was sold almost as a cop show,” Gillen explained, “but it wasn’t about the cops being good and the criminals being bad. The whole thing takes maybe 48 episodes to tell the story, and because it’s HBO and the writers have been given leeway to do it their way, you can, as Ed Burns said in an interview, sow the seeds of something in episode 8 or 9 that might not come to fruition until episode 35. It’s written like a novel, and it’s not dumbed down in any way, so they did get people like Pelecanos and Richard Price and Dennis Lehane on board, because they could see the quality was fuckin’ amazing. And they’re first rate crime novelists, all East Coast as well. The Wire is a big ensemble thing and there are no stars in it, which is probably one of the best things about it. They go out of their way to get people you’re not gonna know to make it more real. I’m not a star in The Wire. Nobody is.”
There are, however, some notable cameos, not least Steve Earle in the role of a redneck recovered drug addict named Waylon.
“In other words I’m not acting!” Earle told us last year, as he was filming the final series. “There’s a character in it who’s actually based on a real person, called Bubbles, who was a pretty notorious snitch in West Baltimore who eventually got clean and became kind of an inspiration to other recovering addicts around town, and then he ended up dying of AIDS. But I play Bubbles’s sponsor. Whenever Bubbles decided to try to get clean over the arc of the show, they’d write me in. All my scenes are with Andre Royo, who plays Bubbles, so I’m grafting behind a really fine actor, and I get to say those words, and it’s really great writing. It’s interesting that it’s playing in Ireland, because Ireland might be the only place in Europe…there are definitely people in parts of Dublin that’ll relate to it.”
Wire obsessives will have a chance to attend a special screening of the show in the IFI in Dublin on September 19th at 6.30pm. David Simon will be in town to promote not just the DVD release, but also Canongate’s reissue of Homicide – A Year On the Killing Streets. We're proud to welcome him.