George Pelecanos on what made 'The Wire' so great

[Oregon Live, 13 november 2013]

Jeff Baker

If you're sick of "The Wire" and don't understand what the big deal is about a cop show set in Baltimore, this isn't the column for you. If you think "The Wire" is the greatest show in the history of TV, you're in luck.

 George Pelecanos came through Portland recently, on tour for his novel "The Double." Pelecanos has written 19 books and is one of the kings of crime fiction, but fans of "The Wire" know him as the guy who wrote seven episodes and played a key role as a story editor and producer.

"That's my M.O. now," Pelecanos said over an early dinner at The Nines. "I'm OK with that. Totally. I mean, I'm proud of it. I don't know if I'll ever do anything that good again. You always have to have a pinnacle to your career and I guess that's it, man."

One thing that made "The Wire" special is the way it used TV to its fullest advantage and created a world with the scope and ambition of a novel by Dickens or Balzac. A movie is too compressed to tell a multi-layered story with dozens of characters and scenes, and network TV has too many limitations. "The Wire," even more than "The Sopranos," "Breaking Bad" and "Deadwood," was a drama that wanted to do more and did it.

"If you look at Season 4, you can no longer say 'why are kids on street corners selling drugs?' We tried to show why that is, what conditions exist that create that," Pelecanos said. "You can no longer say 'why don't they just get a job?' That's too simple. It won't work anymore. It's the best thing we did."

Pelecanos was invited to join "The Wire" by David Simon and had no idea what he was getting into. A film studies major in college and a movie freak his entire life, Pelecanos thrived on the experience of working with Simon and Ed Burns and the other fiction writers who came on later, Dennis Lehane and Richard Price. He was usually assigned to write the penultimate episode of each season, the one that brought everything to a head before the finale.

"When we made that show, speaking for myself, I didn't know I was making 'The Wire,' you know what I mean?" Pelecanos said. "I just had my head down and was working hard. We caught lightning in a bottle, but when you do that you don't know that you're doing it at the time. We just really worked hard and we wanted to make a good show, and it happened."

"The Wire" didn't get big ratings when it was on HBO from 2002-08 but was huge on home video and had perhaps the longest "tail" in TV history. The actors, unknown at the time, are everywhere from a Capital One commercial with Alec Baldwin (Hassan Johnson, aka Wee-Bey) to the starring role in a movie about Nelson Mandela (Idris Elba, aka Stringer Bell).

"They're all getting work," Pelecanos said. "Some of them, like Michael B. Jordan, who played Wallace in the first season, he could win an Academy Award for 'Fruitvale Station.' He's about to be a movie star. Idris Elba is a movie star. And you know we used Clarke Peters and Wendell (Pierce) in 'Treme.' "

Pelecanos is a writer and consulting producer on "Treme," an HBO show created by Simon and Eric Overmyer and set in New Orleans, a city Pelecanos came to love. It will conclude with a five-episode fourth season that begins Dec. 1.  After that, Pelecanos and Simon are waiting to hear whether HBO is interested in a series they've written called "The Deuce," set in Times Square in three different time periods: the early 1970s, the late '70s when "prostitution and pornography were in full bloom," and the early to mid-1980s, when the AIDS epidemic hit. 

"It'll have a broad range of characters that change over time," Pelecanos said. "And the music will be important-- punk, disco ... We're really excited about it."