INTELLECTUAL COPS STALK THE STREET OF BALTIMORE ON 'THE WIRE'

"The Wire" is only nominally about Baltimore detectives' protracted
investigation of a drug gang in the city's west side housing projects --
it's also a conduit for David Simon's exploration of the futility of the
drug war and the pervasiveness of corporate culture.

In Simon's view, the police department and the drug organization are
dysfunctional corporations that treat their employees as expendable and
have lost touch with the public they serve, existing just to sustain
themselves; and his two protagonists -- homicide detective James McNulty
(Dominic West) and midlevel drug dealer D'Angelo Barksdale (Larry Gilliard
Jr.) -- are frustrated middlemen whose iconoclasm puts them at odds with
their bosses.

"McNulty's working for Enron, and so is D'Angelo Barksdale," Simon, the
show's creator and executive producer, said during a location shoot on
Baltimore's notoriously violent Pennsylvania Avenue.

"What we're trying to do is a TV show that is masquerading as a cop show,
but it's really about what happens when a policy goes awry and
bureaucracies become entrenched," Simon said. "The police bureaucracy is
fixed and permanent, and the drug bureaucracy equally so, and they both
treat their middle management the same."

The 13-episode series kicked off with McNulty sitting in on Barksdale's
murder trial. The young killer walked free after his cohorts intimidated
witnesses. Afterward, for motives that remain unclear, McNulty spilled his
guts to the trial judge about the drug gang run by Barksdale's uncle, Avon,
and the 10 murders it has committed without a conviction.

The confession creates a whirlwind of shakedowns and finger-pointing within
the police department, and McNulty is banished to the narcotics unit to try
to bring a case against the Barksdale crew and placate the judge. But the
department clearly isn't committed to the kind of investigation -- with
wiretaps and sophisticated surveillance -- that would net any major arrests.

Meanwhile, Barksdale is banished by his uncle to a low-rise housing
project, where he becomes increasingly disillusioned with the violence
necessary to sustain the drug trade.

Simon, a former police reporter for The (Baltimore) Sun, previously worked
on two other Baltimore-based TV shows: "Homicide: Life on the Street" and
"The Corner." But he wanted to return to the streets of Baltimore because
there were aspects of the police department and the drug war he hadn't yet
explored.

"This is the department I covered in all its dysfunctional glory, where
everybody was careerist and where nobody lost their pension by failing to
do police work," Simon said.

Edward Burns, Simon's co-writer, was a Baltimore detective for 20 years and
specialized in the kind of protracted investigations that "The Wire"
dramatizes -- investigations that, in the end, did little to change the
city's poorest neighborhoods.

"Whatever damage that the drugs themselves haven't done to these
neighborhoods, the war against them has managed to do," Simon said. "It's
impaired the police department, it's alienated whole subcultures of
Americans, and it's solved nothing."