The Reporter: David Simon Creates Commentary Disguised as a Cop Drama on The Wire - Today’s News: Our Take | TVGuide.com
http://www.tvguide.com/News/Reporter-David-Simon-1012876.aspx
What we really wanted to do was construct a city and to say these are our problems as a people. [We didn’t want to] leave it at the feet of some abstract bad guys in Baltimore. We wanted to say the opposite — that, it’s not about good and evil. It’s about money and how money and power root themselves in our society. To do that, we had to build a city. Now did I say that to HBO when I first pitched it? Nope, because they’d laugh me out of the room. In the beginning, we basically said we’ll undercut the cop show. People will start by thinking they’re trying to catch the bad guy. If we do this right, by the end of the first season we’ll be wondering what a bad guy is anymore and what a good guy is.