Au Revoir, The Wire: Slate interviewed David Simon, the man behind The Wire, one of the two best pieces of drama created in my lifetime. He comes off as something of an angry crank and, like most artistic types, he is confused about politics and economics. He makes common mistakes of assuming his world is everybody's world (if I lived in Baltimore I might be an angry crank, too), and that everybody is blind to what is really going on, and blames "capitalism," and uses all the well-worn cliches of the class-struggle pessimist.

When he's in his element, though, which is the deep understanding drama, he has no peer. The other best piece of drama from my lifetime is Deadwood, which I have gone about at length in past. Here is Simon on the comparison between the two:

...the portrayals in Deadwood are in the Shakespearean model. On The Sopranos, there's an awful lot of Hamlet and Macbeth in Tony. But the guys we were stealing from in The Wire are the Greeks. In our heads we're writing a Greek tragedy, but instead of the gods being petulant and jealous Olympians hurling lightning bolts down at our protagonists, it's the Postmodern institutions that are the gods. And they are gods. And no one is bigger.

By the way: If at any point any character on the show ever talks as I'm talking right now, it would suck. It's crucial that the characters can't lecture us.

Great stuff. He should give lessons in how to shut off the didactic impulse. I am so looking forward to season five, but it's hard to imagine it will be more affecting and human that the season that just finished. I am hoping that more character focus goes back on the Major Crimes Unit. I found them to be more interesting characters than the politicos and bureaucrats. I also hope we will follow the set of four kids who were the fulcrum of this year’s story. They were absolutely real to me.

Actually, the character I most hope they cover is Lester Freamon. The guy is a total Sherlock Holmes but we know next to nothing about him except that he likes to carve miniature furniture. Maybe that's intentional. We know that the characters sometimes are designed to represent concepts rather than be specific individuals. Omar represents the man uncorrupted by institutions. The Greek represents capitalism in its purest form (as imagined by Simon). Maybe Freamon is intended to represent pure reason, or maybe the narrow, task-focused view of Everyman. Hmmm.

Lucky for me, capitalism has provided for me to keep subscribing to HBO, because I can’t get enough of this.