David Simon Keeps His Edge
More than a decade after The Wire, Simon proves he’s still one of the edgiest and most dynamic showrunners in the game
The Wire shaped HBO’s golden age, but Simon isn’t nostalgic for the past. His storytelling remains vital, and so is The Deuce’s final season.
Hbo’s first golden age had its holy trinity of Davids: The Sopranos’ David Chase, Deadwood’s David Milch, and The Wire’s David Simon. In the years since, Chase and Milch receded before returning to their old favorites — Chase with a Sopranos prequel, Milch with a Deadwood reunion. Simon, though, has no interest in reviving The Wire. He already told that story. Besides, HBO has kept him busy since the day we said goodbye to his fictionalized Baltimore: first with the Iraq War miniseries Generation Kill, then the post-Katrina drama Treme, the political miniseries Show Me a Hero, and the porn drama The Deuce, which begins its third and final season on September 9th.
The Wire, little-watched when it originally aired, is now often hailed as the greatest show ever made. Its combination of gripping police stories and blunt talk about failing American institutions made it the ultimate televised example of a spoonful of sugar making the medicine go down. A converted journalist, Simon is a great pure storyteller who manages to invest nearly every character with startling depth. But he’s long pushed back against people who dwell on the most popcorn aspects of his masterpiece. Perhaps not coincidentally, his post- Wire projects have been less commercial.
Treme often felt like one of the jazz compositions its trombonist hero, Antoine Batiste (Wendell Pierce), hustled around New Orleans to play: lively but amorphous. There were some clear narrative signposts, but Treme mostly provided a chance to marinate in the
atmosphere of a great American city and the show’s superb ensemble.
Generation Kill, about the ’03 Iraq invasion, was also intentionally chaotic — the better to reflect what its Marine protagonists experienced during a hastily conceived military action. Large swaths of it turn into dark roadtrip comedy, until the adventure fizzles out, because no one in charge has a plan for what to do after Iraqi forces have been steamrolled.
The public-housing premise of Show Me a Hero almost sounds like a parody of a Simon project. But if it’s wonky, it’s also as compulsively watchable as anything he’s made.
It’s Simon’s first time working with a famous director ( Crash’s Paul Haggis), and with pre-existing stars like Oscar Isaac and Catherine Keener, rather than ones he created, like Idris Elba and Michael B. Jordan.
The Deuce in many ways feels like a culmination of everything Simon’s done since saying goodbye to McNulty and Omar. Like Show Me a Hero, it has high-profile leads in Maggie Gyllenhaal (as a prostitute turned feminist porn auteur) and James Franco (as identical twins caught up in vice to varying degrees). Like Treme, its strongest appeal is its sense of place (the grimy pre-Giuliani Times Square). And like Generation Kill, it’s a period piece about grand plans for which no one has considered the unintended consequences. It’s sometimes too sprawling for its own good, but still a potent reminder that Simon and his collaborators can be as good at pure entertainment as they are at dramatizing civics lessons.
This final season jumps into the mid-Eighties. Director Harvey (David Krumholtz) tells Gyllenhaal’s Candy they have to abandon their loftier artistic impulses to make money in this new home-video market, and calls her films “a niche product that I can no longer invest in.” It’s hard not to view their arguments as Simon and co-creator George Pelecanos reckoning with their position as art-house filmmakers at a network that, thanks to Game of Thrones and corporate mergers, is looking for blockbusters. But Simon hasn’t been coasting on reputation in the 11 years since his masterpiece ended. His shows still feel vital, relevant, and often shockingly fun. So he hasn’t made The Wire 2: Wire Harder yet. So what? His stuff ’s still all in the game.