Over the twelve days from Monday, December 23 and concluding on Friday, January 3, we will present special Re-Podcasts of my Crime Story Podcast interviews with storytellers in the world of crime and justice. Each interview will be presented in its entirety, and so interviews that were previously offered in multiple parts can now be accessed in one download or streaming session.
This is Day 6: a conversation with David Simon.
David and I met when he came in to HBO to pitch The Corner as a television series. The Corner is a book that he wrote with Ed Burns about the year that they spent in an inner-city Baltimore neighborhood ravaged by drug abuse and distribution. Together with his book Homicide, The Corner was the foundation for David’s series The Wire, which has been widely acclaimed as one of the great television series of all time. My aim in sitting down with David was to try to dig into where his storytelling instincts and values come from and how they manifest themselves in his work on Homicide, The Corner, and The Wire… three classics in the crime drama genre.
The interview was originally presented in four parts, and in this podcast we join them all together.
In part one we discuss David’s formative years as a storyteller and as a journalist.
In part two we discuss David’s work as a crime reporter for The Baltimore Sun, his writing the book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, and his transition to writing for television.
In part three, we discuss David’s reporting for the book The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner City Neighborhood and his experience producing the multiple Emmy Award-winning miniseries based on that book.
In part four, we discuss David’s creation of The Wire and some of the key themes explored in that series.
On the day we published the final part of the interview, David tweeted to his 250,000 followers:
You can find a complete transcript of this interview here.
