There's a long, but excellent piece in this week's New Yorker about "The Wire" and creator David Simon that gets me even more excited for the new season, now just three months away. My favorite part:
Filming on city streets in marginal neighborhoods carries its peculiar risks and rewards. On one occasion, a car involved in a high-speed chase smashed into one of the actors’ cars, and everybody had to dive out of the way. Another time, a man got shot yards away, staggered onto the set trailing blood, and was treated by the show’s medic. Once, a man pressed a package of heroin into the hands of Andre Royo, the actor who plays the sympathetic junkie and police informant Bubbles, saying, “Man, you need a fix more than I do.” Royo refers to that moment as his “street Oscar.”Then there's this observation, which I've noticed too:
Sometimes the fan base of “The Wire” seems like the demographics of many American cities—mainly the urban poor and the affluent élite, with the middle class hollowed out.In other words: everyone who watches "The Wire" is a Democrat. Posted by Stephen Silver at October 19, 2007 04:56 PM