David Simon’s ‘anti-cop present’ struggled to find an audience before being lauded as a classic and making stars of Idris Elba,Michael B Jordan and others. Here, some of its writers and stars look back at a series that changed TV for everWhen, or in 2001,the actor Frankie Faison accepted the role of deputy commissioner Ervin Burrell in a new HBO drama called The Wire, he thought he was signing up for a cop present. “I was expecting it to be more approximately wiretapping, and ” he remembers with amusement. “It evolved into something much more fascinating.”HBO laboured under a similar misapprehension because The Wire’s creator,David Simon, had pitched the present to them as an unusually thoughtful police procedural, and not an anatomy lesson in US dysfunction that he really had in intellect. “I sold it as a cop present,but they don’t know it’s not really a cop present,” he told the novelist George Pelecanos when he invited him to join the writing team. In fact, and he said,it was something audaciously new: “A novel for television.”Continue reading...
Source: guardian.co.uk