All the Pieces Matter

by Jonathan Abrams

  Simon let most of the criticism pass. Earlier, Bill Zorzi had proposed that one of the characters come right out and state the season’s theme—what nearly everyone would miss. But The Wire was always a show of exposition. It never told; it showed. The show’s newspaper missed out on every story of legitimate impact, such as the mayor who had promised change and instead resorted to juking stats; or how the killing of an appliance store owner actually signified a vicious turf war and the death of the city’s largest drug importer. “In Baltimore, where over the last twenty years Times Mirror and the Tribune Company have combined to reduce the newsroom by 40 percent, all of the above stories pretty much happened,” Simon wrote for The Huffington Post. “A mayor was elected governor while his police commanders made aggravated assaults and robberies disappear.”

  DAVID SIMON (CREATOR): I was in Mozambique scouting or shooting [for Generation Kill] when I got a call from Carolyn saying that they were going to cancel after Season Four. I was shocked. I thought that once they committed to the story of the vacants and Marlo, they weren’t going to stop. I remembered being utterly depressed traveling in Mozambique. It was almost four in the morning when I got this phone call, and I am thinking, How can they cancel after Season Four? I can see them canceling after Season Three, when we had finished the Barksdale story. As Chris said, don’t seize defeat from the jaws of victory. The show’s going out with good reviews. It didn’t get an audience. Lots of shows don’t get an audience, but we got credit for a good show. We can do better. We can take command of a scene.

  GEORGE PELECANOS (WRITER/PRODUCER): At the end of Four, they were definitely ready. They were like, “Congratulations, you just went out on a high note. Let’s not try again.” David really was passionate about getting that last season.

  CHRIS ALBRECHT (CHAIRMAN AND CEO, HBO): Carolyn and I were always aligned about it. She’s the best, and we had a lot of eye rolls and behind-the-scenes laughs about David’s passion for it all. If she and I didn’t both agree that the show deserved to continue, it wouldn’t have continued. As much as David was an advocate, and as much as it certainly made a difference, ultimately the quality of the show was recognized by the two of us and by our colleagues at HBO, too. It was frustrating when you look at something that’s good and say, “I don’t understand why more people aren’t getting this.” But then, you almost become a little defiant. Your stance is, I’ll be damned if they’re going to run me off my own property, or whatever the analogy would be.

  DAVID SIMON (CREATOR): To their great credit, they heard the storylines [for Seasons] Four and Five, and they said, “We’ll give you those.” And then, they kind of wanted to get out of Five. I said, “You can’t leave the bodies in the vacants. You’ve got to help me out, Chris, come on.” And he helped me out again. I think I’m being fair with Chris, which is to say, it was a show that nobody was watching. It had already gotten all the good reviews it could by Season Three, and he wanted to get out and put the money in something else.

  CAROLYN STRAUSS (PRESIDENT, HBO ENTERTAINMENT): We were able to take some big chances with that show and able to keep it on, even though it wasn’t breaking the records in ratings. We were able to do things, I think, that may be harder these days.

  DAVID SIMON (CREATOR): That year, they gave Ed and me seven hours of Generation Kill and they gave us time to finish The Wire, so we were taking seventeen hours of the programming pie. We were taking up a lot of pie. And I had the head of the network saying to me, “Can you do it in ten? If you can do it in ten, I can find the money.” They were ready to cancel the show after Four. We were canceled twice. We were canceled after Three, effectively, and they gave me a chance to go back in there and argue. Then, we were canceled after Four, and they gave me a chance to go back in there and argue. But this time they said, “You’ve got to do it in ten. I don’t have the money.” And so, it’s good faith. He’s showing me good faith.

  It’s not my network. I’m a vendor. So, I went back in and had the ten, and we had to leave some stuff on the table we couldn’t fit. Years later, after The Wire finished its run, people said, “Man, that show ended okay. That was a good ending.” Chris was already gone by then, and he had held me to the ten. I got an email from him. It cracked me up. He basically goes, “Man, the only thing that could’ve made that ending better was two more episodes.” I just emailed him back, “You motherfucker.” It was affectionate, because that show had no audience after three seasons, and he heard the stories and he let us stretch for another two seasons. Yeah, I can’t sit here and complain. It’s unseemly.

  CHRIS ALBRECHT (CHAIRMAN AND CEO, HBO): At some point, you got to just realize you run a business.

  ED BURNS (CO-CREATOR): I’ve never seen Season Five, basically.

  GEORGE PELECANOS (WRITER/PRODUCER): Ed had gone off to do Generation Kill. Honestly, I had sort of checked out, too. I was concentrating on my novels at that point. I had a contract, and it was a very good contract to write three books, and I wanted to honor that and do the best I could. So, Season Five, I would say, was quite a bit of David and Bill Zorzi, because Bill was a newspaper man, too.

  DAVID SIMON (CREATOR): Whatever season it had been, if I had five, six, seven seasons, the capstone was going to be the media, because the last critique I wanted to send was, “If all this is true, if this is what the drug war is, if this is what the city government is about, if this is what public education is about, where were we? What was our attention drawn to? What were we jerking off to where we couldn’t actually tend to our society?” That’s the last thing to say: we turn the camera back to the audience and go, “You’re complicit.” That’s the implied thing. “You’re complicit. We’re all complicit. We’re not attending to any of this. We’re so easily distracted. We’re so easily entertained.” That’s the last thing to say. After that, there’s nothing else to say. You can’t swivel the camera back.

  RICHARD PRICE (WRITER): Season Five—sometimes I thought David had a little too much of an ax to grind against the establishment.

  GEORGE PELECANOS (WRITER/PRODUCER): I think there’s a truth to that. I’ve written for newspapers, but I’ve never been in the newsroom. It’s always been in freelance, the stuff that I’ve done, so I had no connection to that world. I didn’t know who they were talking about when they were talking about their bosses at The Baltimore Sun. I had no idea what that was about. It was only later that I saw that some people responded in a negative way to the portrayal of some of the bosses in the newsroom, because they saw themselves in that. I think they actually used a couple names that were either close or right on the money.

  These are all people that left The Sun. None of them were fired. They all left voluntarily, but very frustrated with how the newspaper business was going, the changing direction from hard reporting to going after prizes, which comes at a cost, because that’s how [Stephen] Glass and all these people do it. They were fabricating things to win prizes.

  They did have an ax to grind, in a way, but I feel like they were coming from an experiential position and they had a reason to feel that way. Having said all that, I think it’s the most didactic of the seasons, where you see the people behind the show. It’s the least successful of the seasons for that reason, in my opinion, but the least successful season of The Wire is still better than most anything you see on television. There’s a lot of great moments in that season and, as a whole, I think it’s less successful, especially coming after Season Four, which to me, is the best season of television that’s ever been made.

  WILLIAM F. ZORZI (STAFF WRITER): There was some bad shit that happened at The Baltimore Sun, but there was great journalism that went on at the same time. I think those guys who were down there every day doing the Lord’s work, really, felt a little deceived by Season Five of The Wire, like somehow that tarred and tarnished them as well. That was definitely not the intent.

  In the larger sense, we’re speaking to the state of journali
sm. That was the state of journalism then. You have to remember, we beat it out and started writing it more than a year in advance of it going on HBO. In that period of time, journalism was in this downward sort of death spiral, overnight almost. It was pretty shocking.

  That whole thing about Templeton making it up, that may have been based on some real people, a real person. He might have. David is a good talker, so I think David can probably take care of himself in explaining the circumstances under which he left. That became part of the battle in the aftermath of Season Five. “Oh, well, he’s just pissed off because he didn’t get a raise,” or some shit. “What? David needs a fucking raise?” I don’t know, it was a little much. I was like, “Let’s just take a giant step backwards, just for a moment, and let’s reexamine that statement.”

  ED BURNS (CO-CREATOR): I just don’t watch television. I see enough of the takes of it on set, watching stuff like that. These characters are in my head, all right? Once I read the script to make sure that the characters are doing the right thing, then it’s up to the producer, myself, or whoever’s on set to make sure that the director or the actors don’t fuck up the lines. That’s all I need. Except for Season Five, I think that the first four seasons have a logic to them.

  NINA K. NOBLE (EXECUTIVE PRODUCER): That’s a true credit to our cast and to the family that we had created with cast and crew, because every single crew member, David wrote a letter to all of our cast and all the leads and asked everyone to come back and to not hold HBO up for money, which is normally what happens when somebody’s contract lapses, then all of a sudden they want two million dollars an episode or whatever and David just said, “Look, we’re still the underdogs. We still have the lower budget, but we really hope you’ll come back, so that we can finish this story.” He always had the five-year arc in his head.

  ANDRE ROYO (REGINALD “BUBBLES” COUSINS): I got burned out and stressed out in four seasons. I just got frustrated. I was like, “I’m sick of it. I’m sick of these clothes.” I was hitting bottom as an artist and as an actor. I was hitting my creative bottom. I was fed up. I don’t want to be this no more. It was incredible that Season Five, that was probably the scariest season for me. After Season Four, I was like, “Wow. What a journey.” This is the life that Bubbles was living. It was so fucking ugly, just so painful, that I was like, “I’m done.” Then, Season Five, David called me and said, “We’re going to pick up. It’s a year later and you’re clean.” I was like, “What? I don’t know how to play that. I don’t know what that means.”

  I was playing this addict who’s fiending, who wants to get high for four years. For four years, that means another two, three years in between, where I’m staying in character, staying in [Bubbles’s] headspace. Now you’re telling me that it’s a year later and I’m clean? I was scared to death. I don’t know what that looks like. I thought about me and Dom’s conversation. I thought about how sick I was of being this character, which means Bubbles was sick of being high. I used that to just be organically, “Yeah, I’m clean. I’m going to fight to stay clean.” That was wonderful, but it was also weird, because I remember in the fourth season, when I hung myself, I thought that was it. We’re reading the script, and you see that [on] one page, [and] before you turn the page, I’m like, “It’s time to go out. This has been crazy. This is my time.” When I found out that I wasn’t dying, there was a part of me that was a little weirded out, because I felt like, at this point, we were known as the show that’s real. We’re the realest show on television. I knew that the real Bubbles died. I was like, “We can’t lie now. We got to be organic to what really happened.”

  David Simon and Ed Burns, they pretty much were like, “We just put this audience through a bleak, bleak look at the world and what it is and what’s going on and the darkness of how this machine is so fucking broken. At the end of the day, with these people [getting] out of bed every day, with these people that at least wake up and hope, they got to believe that it can get better. It has the possibility of getting better. That’s what Bubbles is.” We decided that’s what Bubbles is going to be. All the people on the show, the one guy you expect not to turn around or have that moment, we need to give that to the world.

  ERNEST DICKERSON (DIRECTOR): Bubbles, he’s a character that, whenever you see the show, you always worry about him. You just love him, but you always worry about him, and you’re just so afraid that he’s not going to last the full run of the show, and he actually did, which was one of the amazing things, which was pretty cool. He’s the character that always kept me on the edge of my seat.

  STEVE EARLE (WAYLON): I knew that Bubbles had to live. Part of that may be me—and I didn’t have that inside information from anybody—but I would have bet money, and I do this with characters all the time. I almost once wrote a letter to J. K. Rowling and told her she was wrong about something once, but I always knew Bubbles was going to live. To me, he just sort of had to live. That’s what he is. He’s the hope that runs through the show. It’s a heartbreaking story, but somebody has to come out okay.

  ANDRE ROYO (REGINALD “BUBBLES” COUSINS): My mind was like, That’s it? Really? I can’t have a job somewhere with a girlfriend, a couple of kids? This is how far the author’s going to go? David was like, “This isn’t Disney. This is not Disney. Don’t worry. The people that seen so much of your character, this is going to be enough.” I’m like, “Okay.” I trust the boss. I trust the genius that is David Simon and Ed Burns.

  ED BURNS (CO-CREATOR): You don’t know if he turned it around. That’s the thing. Most guys do detox fifteen, twenty, thirty times before it might work. It’s not like walk in, walk back out. No, sir. And remember that the quality of heroin that Bubbles was shooting, which would be heroin from the eighties and seventies, at the most, would be twelve percent heroin. Today, what they’re shooting is ninety or one hundred percent. It’s in that ballpark.

  ANDRE ROYO (REGINALD “BUBBLES” COUSINS): He got an ending that suited him. This is what I love about the show and the conversations and just how magnificent the writing and the people were. Do I believe Bubbles had a happy ending? Yes. Bubbles, at that point, like life itself, he was happy. Yes, he had a happy ending. Did it stay that way? I couldn’t tell you and I choose not to think about it, because it would probably make me sad because of the unknown, because of the headspace that Bubbles lives. I think the happiest idea of Bubbles is that no matter what, Bubbles was always going to try for that. He might have relapsed, but that’s not what makes Bubbles happiest or sad. What made you so happy about Bubbles was that he was always trying. He didn’t do that Hamsterdam shit. He just didn’t give in and go, “I just want to be high.” He would always try. I think that’s the real beauty that you find in every human being that scares you. When a human being stops trying, when we don’t give a fuck, when we say, “Ah, fuck it. I don’t care,” once that aspect comes into the human psyche, humanity is lost. You got to want to try. Whether you know you’re pushing that rock up a hill or you’re going to bang your head against a brick wall, the idea to not try cannot seep into our society. We got to try.

  DOMINIC WEST (DET. JIMMY MCNULTY): It must have been between about Season Four or Five or something, and Lance [Reddick] and Bubbles, Andre Royo, they had some time off and they’d gone up to audition for the same part. Andre didn’t tell anyone about this part. Lance didn’t tell anyone, and they didn’t realize they were going for the same part. They found out at the audition. It wasn’t to play a woman, but it was to play a dude who dressed up as a woman. They both went full monty with it. Can you imagine these two, Lance and Andre, both in full makeup, wearing a dress or something, and they’re sitting there?

  Andre is sitting there in the audition hoping to fuck no one he knows turns up or sees him, and in walks Lance and he’s wearing full makeup. They look at each other and go, “You fucking tell anyone about this, I’ll kill you.” Anyway, I don’t think either of them got it, but it d
id make me laugh. He’s so serious, Lance. The idea of him in eye shadow and lipstick was quite funny.

  Clark Johnson (Gus Haynes), who directed the first two episodes of The Wire, also directed the show’s finale. Tom McCarthy (Scott Templeton) would go on to direct Spotlight, winner of the Best Picture Oscar in 2016. Michelle Paress, who is married to Lawrence Gilliard, accepted her first television role in Season 5 of The Wire as Alma Gutierrez, an ambitious, earnest reporter.

  TOM MCCARTHY (SCOTT TEMPLETON): David remembered me and called me, and at that time, I was editing a movie up in New York. My second film, The Visitor. They made me an offer on this role, and I was really flattered and excited, but at the same time, I was in the middle of editing. I was like, “I don’t know if I can do this.” I didn’t want to shortchange either job, the editing or my acting, so I was really hesitating on it, and a bit torn, and then David called me and said, “I just really think you should do it. I can’t really show you much yet, but I think it’s going to be a really interesting season and an interesting role.” That was kind of enough for me.

  MICHELLE PARESS (ALMA GUTIERREZ): Larry [Gilliard] was very happy for me. He was very proud of me. I think some cast members were actually a bit more sensitive about it than my husband, believe it or not. Some cast members were just a little weird at first, ’cause a lot of them didn’t know I was an actor. They all knew me as Lawrence’s wife, so when I show up to Baltimore to start shooting, some of the cast members felt a certain kind of way, because they were still recovering from the fact that he was no longer on the show, and then here I am coming on the show, and I think a lot of them just thought I was Larry’s wife and maybe I was bored and decided, Hey, I think I’ll be an actor. Let me get this job on The Wire. And that’s not what happened at all. I’ve been acting since I was nine, and enjoying musical theater and community theater and talent shows since a very young age. So, I think because they didn’t really know my background and that being an actor is what I’ve always wanted to do, I think they felt a certain kind of way about me being on the show.