Difficult Men: Behind the Scenes of a Creative Revolution: From the Sopranos and the Wire to Mad Men and Breaking Bad (23 page)

“He was pissed, man. And I got it, because, in effect, we were firing him,” said Pelecanos, who wrote the episode. “David and I went to his trailer and tried to talk him down. We said, ‘This is the end of the character. We can’t keep his story going, it’s not logical. And this is exactly the way he would probably go out.’” Elba fixated on the pee. Omar wouldn’t be peeing on him, Simon and Pelecanos said; he’d be peeing on a fictional character. “Not on
my
character,” Elba told them.

Simon and Pelecanos could have invoked a favorite David Chase line when faced with similar protests: “Whoever said it was
your
character?” Instead, they cajoled and apologized until Elba relented. The death scene was shot at an empty Baltimore warehouse and wrapped at four a.m. On his way down a dark street to his car, Pelecanos heard pounding footsteps behind him and turned, cringing. It was Elba. “I just want to shake your hand,” he told the writer. “It’s just business.”

• • •

T
he Stringer Bell controversy was an instance that would have benefited greatly from the equanimous presence of Robert Colesberry, but he was no longer there to provide a diplomatic, even keel. In January 2004, just before filming on season three was about to start, Colesberry had gone to the doctor to see about a procedure for a chronic throat issue; he had problems swallowing and would occasionally choke on food. While there, tests revealed severe arterial blockage and an emergency double bypass was ordered.

Before going in for the six-hour operation, he talked about
The Wire
with his wife, Karen Thorson, who supervised the making of each season’s main title sequence. Colesberry spoke excitedly about using the Blind Boys of Alabama to record season three’s version of the Tom Waits song “Way Down in the Hole.” The last thing he said to Thorson was that they needed next to turn their attention to a sound track for
The Wire
,
collecting all the music the show had employed over the years. (Like
The Sopranos
, the show didn’t use a score.) Then he went off for the routine surgery.

The surgeon, Thorson remembered, emerged from the procedure confident that all had gone well. Then, at one a.m., she received a call. “They said, ‘We want to do an MRI, because he’s unresponsive.’ They said it like they were delivering a newspaper: ‘Robert’s unresponsive,’” she said. Colesberry, it turned out, had suffered a stroke. Over the course of the next four days, he swam in and out of consciousness. Simon, Nina Noble, editor Thom Zimny, and members of the
family gathered in the hospital room. Simon brought in a boom box and played fifties R&B and music from the show. On February 9, with the whole group gathered around his bed, Colesberry died. He was fifty-seven.

There were several official memorial services for Colesberry, the last of which was held in Baltimore just before shooting began. Simon addressed cast and crew, assuring them that the production would soldier on. Many said it was a crucial moment for Simon, the point at which he ceased to be a journalist working in TV, or even just a TV writer, and became a full-fledged producer in the best sense of the word. There were implications for other members of the team, too. Pelecanos and Burns were given more responsibility, with Burns assuming the title of executive producer. Nina Noble, whom Colesberry had mentored for many years, stepped into his shoes and would be a crucial partner for Simon for the rest of
The Wire
’s run and beyond.

There was one more memorial to come. In the third episode of season three, a wake was held, in accordance with Baltimore police custom, at venerable Kavanaugh’s Bar. Ray Cole, the character Colesberry had played, was laid out on the pool table. It was Dennis Lehane’s episode, but Simon wrote the tribute delivered by the character Jay Landsman. In it, Landsman praises the work Cole did “on that arson down in Mississippi” and “that thing on Fayette,” references to
Mississippi Burning
,
which Colesberry produced, and
The Corner
. Finally, he concluded, “Ray Cole stood with us. All of us. In Baltimore. Working. Sharing a dark corner of the American Experiment. He was called. He served. He is counted.”

Before filming started, Thorson and Simon had taken Colesberry’s ashes in a piece of Tupperware and, with a plastic spoon, spread them around the sets of
The Wire
.

• • •

W
ith the third season completed, HBO certainly had every reason to feel it had done right by
The Wire
: it had allowed the show to run for thirty-seven episodes, despite small ratings and few awards. Now the story that had started it all, the effort to bring down Avon Barksdale and Stringer Bell, had played itself out. From a business standpoint, it was hard to argue that it was owed any more time or space.

But then, of course, hard arguments were David Simon’s chosen art form. He and Burns had already sat down and discussed ideas for two more seasons. Burns was intent on visiting the public school system, to explore the world he had experienced as a teacher. Simon, in turn, had always believed that the only proper ending for the series would be to turn
The Wire
’s
roving gaze on the world
he
knew best: the press.

“The last critique we wanted to make was of ourselves, our media culture,” he said. “It was a critique of newspapers, but it was also a critique of the audience, of how stupefied and simplified the audience has become. So that Americans can no longer recognize their own problems, much less begin to solve them.”

Later, rumors surfaced that a sixth season, focusing on Hispanic immigration, had been scrapped, but Simon dismissed them. A season on that theme had been proposed by David Mills, he said, but it would have needed to be inserted before the events of the fourth season, which led to the series finale, were put in motion. It would also have required everything to stop so that the writers could do the research necessary to maintain the show’s level of verisimilitude. And time was one thing Simon did not have, as he tried to save his show before it was scattered to the wind. Already, in the long hiatus, uneasy actors were investigating other jobs; Andre Royo went deep into the audition process to play “Crab Man” in the NBC sitcom
My Name Is Earl
.

Simon and Burns sat down and worked out a story that focused on four elementary-school age boys losing their innocence in various heartbreaking ways as the season progressed. We would be introduced to them by the ex-cop Roland Pryzbylewski, who, like Burns, had left the force in order to join the public schools. (There had been a time, during the brainstorming for season three, when the character of Carver had been the one the writers pointed toward becoming a teacher.)

Then Simon marshaled all his powers of persuasion: the tantalizing storytelling, the moral dudgeon. And the begging. “I don’t mind kissing ass when the ass then moves and does what it’s supposed to do,” he said. “Give me that familiar HBO ass and I’ll pucker right up.”

Every time
The Wire
had come up for renewal, Chris Albrecht remembered, the HBO fax machine would leap to life. “David would send these letters—intense, single-spaced, pages long—explaining why picking up this show was something we absolutely had to do. You would get to the third page and be so exhausted you’d say, ‘Just tell him to come in.’”

Carolyn Strauss had always considered
The Wire
a favorite child—or at least the one most in need of protection. “I suppose it was because
The Sopranos
got all the attention,” she said. “And my little baby did not.” Still, she knew that more seasons would be a tough sell and which way the wind was blowing. “I understood the business pressures that Chris was under. And I knew it would be a painful decision.”

Said Albrecht, “We had taken the show to three seasons. Season three had ended in a great place. Arguably, the story was complete. So, let’s declare victory for a show that nobody was watching—and not a lot of people were writing about, either—and move on.” On the other hand, he was willing to hear Simon out. “We didn’t shut the fax machine down. We didn’t refuse him entrance to the building.”

Instead, Simon was summoned to give the pitch of his life. Characteristically, its theme was less about the specifics of the proposed season four story than about a singular artistic appeal: he wasn’t done, he had more to say. When Simon left, Albrecht turned to Strauss. “He was like, ‘We’ve got to do this,’” she said. “And I was like, ‘
Duh.
’”

“
It was one of those meetings that played out as you would’ve hoped,” said Michael Lombardo, then the executive vice president of business affairs, production, and programming operations, who was in the room. “A passionate, smart writer gave a beautiful explanation of what he was wanting to do, and the network responded appropriately. Chris listened, understood, and responded. I was very proud of him. It was a good day to be at HBO.”

“Honestly,” said Albrecht, “I think it was easier to do the fourth season than to have to call up David and have another meeting.”

• • •

P
roduction on season four was, Nina Noble said, the high point of the near decade of
The Wire,
despite being a flagrant violation of the old show business imprecation against working with children or animals. “Just personally, for David and me, we had spent the third season still trying to deal with Bob’s death and figuring everything out. The fourth season was really when we felt like we were standing on our own again.”

The kids were not the only thing different about season four. Dominic West had been growing increasingly restless. With a new baby back in London, he was putting his wilder days behind him, and it was hard to be an ocean away, occupying the same head space as the hard-drinking, skirt-chasing McNulty for yet another season. There were also the temptations of bigger stages. Almost alone among
The Wire
actors, West had become moderately famous thanks to the show. There were murmurs about his becoming the next James Bond.

For all these reasons, West had asked to be put on the back burner for season four. The previous season had ended with McNulty busted down to beat cop and happy about it. That’s where he remained for most of season four, seemingly done banging his head against the police department’s walls and shacked up in domestic bliss with the harbor policewoman Beadie Russell.

Still, West was needed for at least brief scenes in every episode, and the production often tied itself into knots attempting to accommodate his schedule—often cramming scenes from several different episodes into his visits to Baltimore, about a week per month, so he could hurry back to London. This was already causing some stress among what was usually a strikingly peaceful ensemble. When West began showing up unprepared and grumbling, his fellow actors felt it was time for some self-policing. A group of them—Sohn, Royo, and Gilliam, and others—rented a hotel room and staged a gentle but pointed intervention.

“They wanted to tell him, ‘Look, get with it. When you’re here, you’ve got to be here,’” said Noble, who didn’t hear about the meeting until after it was over. “It’s the kind of thing that I would have had to do eventually, but they just took care of it.” West, she said, shaped up quickly.

Unlike other seasons, this time the production had the luxury of shooting all twelve episodes before any began airing, which made things at least marginally less stressful. (Simon’s production company, went a quip popular with nearly everybody who knew him, was called “Blown Deadline” for a reason.)

The schedule was helpful in another, vital way. By now, the revolution in viewing options was well under way. In 2001, HBO had launched its on-demand service. The next year, DVD sales eclipsed VHS for the first time; an industry report cited the release of entire seasons of
The Sopranos
and other TV shows as one of the driving factors in the technology’s growth. Meanwhile, TiVo and other digital video recorders had made their debut, further detaching any given program from any particular night.

The network now brought some of those changes to bear on its last-ditch attempt to build
The Wire
’s audience. The three previous seasons were released in DVD sets. Meanwhile, critics received all thirteen episodes of the new season and were asked to watch it in its entirety before it even began to air. This was a tacit admission that one of the strengths of the new TV—the ability to draw out stories as if in a novel—could also be a weakness: it could take three or four or five hours of viewing before the show became addictive, just as you might need to read one hundred pages of a novel before getting hooked. This had been a particular problem for
The Wire
, which with its complicated jargon and byzantine plotlines gave even less quarter than most when it came to easing a viewer in. The biggest obstacle lovers of the show faced when trying to recommend it to friends was dislodging the suspicion that it was homework, TV that was good
for you
but not at all a good time.

Critics had always been kind to
The Wire
, if not overtly messianic (this was before the era of twenty-four-hour tweeting and recapping). After watching season four, they began beating the drum in earnest. “This season of
The Wire
will knock the breath out of you,” wrote the
The New York Times
.
“
This is TV as great modern literature, a shattering and heartbreaking urban epic,” said
TV Guide
.
James Poniewozik, in
Time
magazine, wrote, “They have done what many well-intentioned socially minded writers have tried and failed at: written a story that is about social systems, in all their complexity, yet made it human, funny and most important of all, rivetingly entertaining.”

To further entice people to watch, HBO confusingly began to offer future episodes for on-demand viewing, almost immediately after a previous episode had aired. This may have felt somewhat desperate, and it undercut some of the sense of occasion that longtime fans felt as Sunday night approached, but it did allow more viewers the chance to find their way to the show. Certainly, something worked in its favor: the average weekly rating for season four was, depending on whose numbers you trusted, somewhere between 4.4 and 5.5 million viewers, up dramatically from 3.9 million during season three. That was still a shockingly small number by the standards of mass media. But a better measure was the degree to which
The Wire
suddenly penetrated nearly every conversation among a certain class of educated, liberal, city-dwelling HBO viewers. Legions of these now scurried back to watch the first three seasons while taking in the fourth in real time, making the series perhaps a unique instance of a narrative experienced out of order by a majority of its viewers. In some circles, to not have seen
The Wire
had become a shocking breach of social protocol.