I love The Wire. It's my favorite TV show of all time. But I shake my head when I listen to interviews with the creator of the show, David Simon. How could someone so closed-minded, uninformed, and condescending -- and by the way wrong -- create something as wonderful as The Wire. I don't get it. Think about Season 5 (spoiler alert), where a newspaper reporter and cop conspire to fabricate a story that turns a city upside-down looking for a mass murderer who doesn't exist. The management of the paper lays off the best editorial people while trying to manufacture a Pulitzer Prize for itself. How could a person who sees the crap in news be so nostalgic it as it goes away. It's like wishing the East River could be polluted again, now that it's almost fully cleaned up. (Not a perfect analogy of course.) And by the way, I read the interview with him on The Guardian website. I got the link from an RSS feed, but I could have just as easily gotten it from Twitter. Twitter is often used to publish links to stories, not the stories themselves. His critique is based a misunderstanding of how Twitter works. That's why a little curiosity to go with his bombast would point him in a positive direction. He could do some good with his mind and creativity and fame. |