In the decade since The Wire, David Simon has produced TV that matters
TV Features For Our Consideration
Writer, producer, and former The Baltimore Sun crime reporter David Simon spent most of the 21st century’s first decade making the ambitious, novelistic HBO drama The Wire, which ran from 2002 to 2008. Pre-Wire, in 2000, he and David Mills adapted The Corner: A Year In The Life Of An Inner-City Neighborbood, a nonfiction book Simon wrote with his frequent collaborator, novelist Ed Burns. Immediately after The Wire, in 2008, HBO aired Generation Kill, Simon and Burns’ adaptation of Evan Wright’s report on the U.S. Marines’ run-up to the invasion of Iraq.
In other words: David Simon had one hell of a run in the 2000s, bringing his skills as a journalist and his frustration with faltering American institutions to bear on some uncommonly sophisticated television. The Wire in particular is an unparalleled masterpiece, detailing the inextricable interconnectedness of gangsters and government; Generation Kill today seems unsettlingly prescient in its depiction of a massive military force defined more by arrogance than accountability.
And yet it’s possible Simon’s output in the 2010s eclipses what came before.
This April 11th marks the 10th anniversary of the premiere of Treme, the New Orleans-set ensemble drama that Simon co-created with Eric Overmyer, as his big, sweeping follow-up to The Wire. The show ran for four seasons, and drew a fiercely devoted following, albeit a small one. In 2015, Simon returned with Show Me A Hero, a six-part miniseries (co-written with William F. Zorzi) about the fight over desegregating housing in Yonkers, New York. Then Simon rounded out the decade by collaborating with George Pelecanos on The Deuce, a lightly fictionalized journey through the pornography and prostitution business in New York City’s Times Square, from the ’70s to the ’80s.
None of these series ever had the buzz of The Wire, which itself always under-performed with viewers and awards voters. But they all expanded on the ideas in Simon’s ’00s work in unexpected ways—largely by shaking loose of genre altogether. While it’s true that The Wire was always more than just a cop show, and Generation Kill more than just a war story, it’s even harder to pin down where any of Simon’s recent shows fit, genre-wise.
What is Treme, for example? A drama, sure. But it’s not a drama in the way that This Is Us is a drama, or Pose, The Crown, Downton Abbey, or Mad Men (to name a few of the non-genre shows nominated for “Outstanding Drama Series” during the 2010s). It doesn’t have an episodic plot, and it’s low on startling “wow” moments. Even though it’s populated by some of the finest actors of this era—Khandi Alexander, Kim Dickens, Wendell Pierce, Steve Zahn, John Goodman, Melissa Leo, Clarke Peters, and more—Treme has the structure and perhaps even the intent of a fly-on-the-wall documentary, capturing life as it unfolds.
Specifically, Treme is set in the months and years following Hurricane Katrina; and it covers different aspects of New Orleans after the deluge. Chefs, musicians, entrepreneurs, bureaucrats, activists, and cops all cross paths, as they struggle to resume jobs, relationships, and personal missions that in some cases were pretty tenuous even before the levees broke. There are some gripping individual struggles throughout the four-year, 38-episode run of Treme, and some small triumphs alongside scenes of pain and loss. But these stories play out mostly in the casual interactions between the characters, in scenes unrushed and unassuming.
It’s not hard to say what Treme is “about,” because as a former journalist, Simon rarely buries a lede. The show is blunt at times about racial and class divisions, and about the multiple ways that the residents of a city can provide a civic service. But the atmosphere and the cultural traditions of New Orleans are more foregrounded than the themes. Ultimately this is a snapshot of people caught in the quietly heroic act of being present, whether they’re cooking a meal or playing a tune or arguing in the street.
Perhaps because it’s just a six-hour miniseries—and perhaps because it tells a true story—Show Me A Hero is more direct in its approach than Treme. While it too has an impressive ensemble cast, it’s primarily focused on one character: Nick Wasicsko, played by Oscar Isaac. Elected mayor of Yonkers in 1987 at only age 28—after campaigning to fight against court-ordered public housing—Wasicsko abandoned his platform upon realizing that resisting legal compliance could bankrupt the city. The angry voters that swept him into office quickly revolted; and he spent most of his two-year term arguing with his city council and his constituents, trying to get them both to think pragmatically.
Typical of a Simon production, Show Me A Hero ventures well beyond city hall. Each of the six episodes spends some time with the white and Black citizens on either side of the integration debate, taking their respective concerns seriously. We see middle-class white voters who’ve become increasingly obstinate and unrepentant, after decades of being called bigots for resisting social progress; and we see Black voters who’ve become cynical and exhausted, after hearing a litany of empty promises from opportunistic politicians.
Isaac embodies the contradictions of this situation well. He plays Wasicsko as optimistic, ambitious, good-humored, and a little underhanded. Like a lot of people who are hungry for power—and not necessarily committed to any ideals—Isaac’s Nick quickly learns that while it’s easy to whip up a mob, it’s almost impossible to control one. How he responds to a mess partly of his own making is what gives this miniseries its tension and its heart.
Simon himself would probably be the first to point out that Show Me A Hero was in no way an auteur project. Throughout his TV career, Simon has favored collaboration—most notably with Nina K. Noble, his co-producer on all of his shows. In this case, key contributors included Isaac, Lisa Belkin (the reporter who wrote the original book about the Yonkers hubbub), Gail Mutrux (the producer who sent Simon that book), William F. Zorzi (the co-writer who took the lead on developing the miniseries for over a decade), and director Paul Haggis (the controversial, Oscar-winning Crash writer-director who helmed every episode).
It’s also worth noting just who Simon has worked with over the years. On The Wire, he invited in some of the most acclaimed crime novelists of this century: Richard Price, Dennis Lehane, George Pelecanos. He also hired women and people of color to direct episodes. In the 2010s, the directing roster on Simon shows has remained culturally diverse; and the writing pool has broadened too.
This made a huge difference on The Deuce. Simon and Pelecanos set themselves a difficult task with this show, taking stories about the history of sex work in New York City and putting them in front of a modern audience with a lot of opinions about the differences between personal sexual liberty and exploitation. Allowing different kinds of perspectives into the writers’ room and into the director’s chair defused some potential complaints.
It helped that The Deuce didn’t shy away from its more disturbing elements. Unlike some stories about adult entertainment that make the erotic seem cutesy or alien, The Deuce was always bracingly explicit, conveying both the sleazy appeal of illicit sex and the many problems it can cause. By the end of its three seasons—spanning about 15 years of the Times Square smut business, plus a modern-day epilogue—the show had touched on drug abuse, sexual violence, AIDS, racism, gentrification, and the countless ways the moneyed class squeezes their best earners.
Like Treme, the narrative here is scattered between about a dozen major characters. One, though, arguably matters the most to the series’ overall thrust… and it’s not the one HBO pushed when The Deuce debuted.
Though the show was pitched to the public back in 2017 as the story of mobbed-up twin brothers (both played by James Franco), The Deuce’s most consistently powerful performance came from Maggie Gyllenhaal, playing the complicated Eileen “Candy” Merrell. A sex worker who becomes a porn star, and then a porn director, and then an aggressively feminist experimental filmmaker, Candy struggles always to remain independent, while also owning her fascination with the dynamics of human lust. But she also can’t shake her fear that by mass-marketing sexuality, she’s debased it—and in the process has made the world of sex worse for women.
If there’s one idea that winds through Simon’s shows in the 2010s, it’s that good intentions rarely survive the grinding, torturous process of scaling up. That’s mainly because the system—and its underlying power structures—will always defend itself ferociously against any attempt at radical change.
This new decade is beginning with another Simon HBO miniseries: an adaptation of Philip Roth’s novel The Plot Against America, co-created with Ed Burns. It’s the first fiction adaptation for Simon. It’s also the first show from him that ventures into the fantastical, imagining what life might’ve been like for a typical New Jersey Jewish family in the early 1940s… if a Nazi-sympathizing antisemite had won the U.S. presidency. Though the source material comes almost entirely from Roth’s imagination (and some of the author’s personal experiences), the story very much aligns with what seems to be Simon’s worldview. In The Plot Against America, it’s in the wealthy’s best interests not to rock the boat, and so the country mostly just keeps rolling on as usual, even with a fascist in charge.
Bleak? Sure. But not hopeless. Whatever pessimism Simon and his collaborators may feel toward the prospect of positive, wide-scaled social progress, they do express a persistent faith in people like Show Me A Hero’s Nick and Deuce’s Eileen: to evolve, to learn, and to reach out to others. In fact, if there’s any lesson to take from Simon’s 2010s TV shows, it’s that no matter who’s running the world, nothing’s ever stopping us from being creative, or being kind, or finding good people to work alongside. Even if we can’t turn this ship around, we can at least keep nudging the wheel.
114 Comments
I loved The Wire and Show Me A Hero. I liked Treme and Generation Kill. So I guess I should watch The Deuce? I can’t put my finger on it, but it looks terrible.
The look and “feel” of the show is scuzzy, in keeping with its time and place. Some episodes made me want check if I got any grime stuck under my fingernails. If you ever walked down a big city alley between bar closing and trash collection, you’d get the idea.Like The Wire, it takes a second to get used to the show’s milieu, but then you start having an easier time focusing on the characters and it becomes another specific environment you can visit, like Baltimore and New Orleans were.
For my blood, the best and most surprising thing about The Deuce is that it’s *fun*, even as it never shies away from the bad parts.
It’s not.
It’s worth watching, depending on taste. It includes instances of violence toward women (and men, too, but the latter is less predatorial and more “part of the game”); and, of course, the focus on the sex industry (with scenes that can get pretty explicit at times) makes it something some people won’t want to engage with. It’s more like Treme than The Wire in terms of narrative structure, the latter having a clearly structured plot and the former, like The Deuce, being more “scenes from a life” so to speak. From a technical perspective, I think The Deuce could also be said to feature more characters than it knows what to do with–one of the last episodes had an extended scene focused on a tertiary character whom I struggled to recognize. I should also add that, for some people, two James Francos is four Francos too many, but personally I felt he did a good job creating two distinct characters from the twin brothers (and the show helps the audience out at the beginning by having the main twin get conked on the head in a mugging early in the first episode so that he’ll wear a distinguishing bandage for a time).
I’ll add in a 3rd it’s not terrible. In fact, it’s even better than not terrible. It even works despite James Franco.
Is it cool to hate Franco now? He seems an alright chap
Yes, I was about to say, James Franco is of course the weakest link, but that in no way weakens it.It’s not as good as The Wire or Show Me A Hero, but it’s still stellar and better than the vast majority of television.
It’s definitely a good show and I got over the issues I had with Franco with Season 1 but damn I started S2 and neither him nor the relationship he has with the bartender are even close to being as compelling as the rest of the cast
Don’t put your finger on it, it’s probably sticky.
I can definitely see how “Show about porn/sex work on HBO” would lead a person to think it’s going to be an excuse for the network to indulge in its worst tendencies, but it’s really not. (Though I’m not going to say there’s not some gratuitous nudity on the show.)
It strikes something of a balance between The Wire and Treme as a languid hang-out kind of show, where everybody’s tied up in some aspect of the vice industry and working towards a greater personal goal (at a pretty relaxed pace.)
Maggie Gyllenhaal is fantasic. One James Franco is usually tolerable. Two is excessive.
To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, casting one James Franco may be regarded as a misfortune; to cast two James Francos looks like carelessness.
I watched all of it, and there’s not a single likable character.
What about the cop played by the same guy as D’angelo Barksdale?
He comes close to a likable character, but he doesn’t get that much done, does he? The show needed a cop character, because of the location, but it doesn’t dwell much on the policing of the crime-ridden area.
I’m pretty sure we saw him solve a homicide early on. Later he acts on a larger scale to transform the area by forcing slumlords to sell their properties, although the “heroism” of helping the Koch administration push through their redevelopment strategy is more cynical. That bit also ties in with trying to suppress the spread of AIDS, although of course he could never be as effective as Fidel Castro on that front.
I found it so honest it was hard to watch at first. The thing is….the characters, pretty much all of them, have really hard lives. And they make really bad choices, like all the time. Easy judgment for me to make from my couch, I realize, but I’d finish an episode feeling a little dirty and twitchy. I even put it down for a while towards the beginning of the second season. I’m glad I went back and finished it though. Honestly, the journey is worth it, you’ve just got to look it right in the face.
The Deuce seems to be a love letter to NYC, and as someone who is utterly sick of media centered around NYC, it just looks awful to me.
And yet it’s possible Simon’s output in the 2010s eclipses what came before.
Nope. The Wire is arguably the best TV series ever, while his later stuff has been at best pretty good.
If there’s one idea that winds through Simon’s shows in the 2010s, it’s
that good intentions rarely survive the grinding, torturous process of
scaling up. That’s mainly because the system—and its underlying power
structures—will always defend itself ferociously against any attempt at
radical change.
I don’t know about that. In “Show Me a Hero” it’s the judicial system which is forcing through change and Yonkers voters who futilely fight against it. In “The Deuce”, the abandonment of “community standards” in New York would seem to constitute a major change, but we don’t see anyone pushing back against it. And it now occurs to me that the New Orleans school system has been described as changing radically in the wake of Katrina, but I don’t recall “Treme” getting into that at all.
The Corner is really good too. Only mentioned briefly.
Not mentioned at all, shockingly, is his having written Homicide: A Life on the Killing Streets, upon which the similarly named classic cop show was based. It’s a cliche to call it The Wire 1.0, but a lot of the well-observed day-to-day challenges and institutional obstructionism are right there. Simon also joined the show’s writing team in later seasons, getting him the necessary experience and connections to make all these other great shows.
Probably because, as the title states, this is about his output since The Wire.
I had noticed. Not rallying for a paragraph on Homicide, but its omission from his bio info was notable
There are actually elements of Homicide that would later be incorporated directly into The Wire, from tiny details (if I remember correctly, both shows featured conversations about the terminology regarding a specific piece of future—I remember it as something a “divino”) to major story arcs: one of the later seasons of Homicide featured a proto-Avon Barksdale (Luther Mahoney) with a “weak” cousin who broke under interrogation and a sister who was in the thick of things with him. The actor who play Mahoney appeared on The Wire, I believe, as a coroner or something like that.
They both use the Xerox-as-lie-detector gambit as well!
They both have the female detective being the one who can’t stomach the detectives illegal activity and she goes to the bosses to rat them out.
That would be Erik Dellums, son of the late U.S. Rep. Ronald Dellums of Oakland, CA. We worked at the same DC law firm a couple years before he had his arc as Luther Mahoney.
He also re-used the “shot a mouse and left it there as a warning to the others” joke between the shows (and from the book).
Erik Dellums was so good as Luther Mahoney I never understood why he didn’t get much work after that until I realized he’s 6’7″
The first few seasons of Homicide were unbelievably good. Watching Ned Beatty, Jon Polito, Yaphet Kotto, Melissa Leo, Andre Braugher and a bunch of other excellent actors with strong scripts was a joy. So watching it go down the drain was incredibly painful. If people think the decline of Battlestar Galactica was rough, it’s nothing compared to the mess that Homicide became.There are shows that decide to drop the original concept and just go for shallow entertainment, and that can still work. But with Homicide both the stupidity and the pretentiousness shot through the roof, and most of the good actors were replaced with people who wouldn’t push back against Tom Fontana’s increasingly dumb ideas.
Season 5 is still solid IMO, and season 6 has some highlights.Season 7 is straight garbage though.
I remember liking the 2 parter where Kellerman returns as a PI I think that was season 7. I did think the movie was quite good minus Jason Priestley.
The decline of the show can be placed on the honcho’s at NBC who wanted it to be more like other cop shows.
The first four seasons of HLOTS are bascially perfect.
Not mentioned at all, shockingly, is his having written Homicide: A Life on the Killing Streets, upon which the similarly named classic cop show was based.It’s a memorable work of deep journalism, which obviously you know, but I mention because it came out fully a human generation ago… A fly-on-the-wall perspective on a single police unit over an extended time period was, I think, quite unusual and maybe pioneering, and it’s no surprise that Simon would gravitate toward something like Generation Kill. (Now I want to re-read Homicide, perhaps while listening to the album Falteich liked—A Vision Shared: A Tribute to Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly—but both are stored in a place I can’t get to until coronavirus eases up…)Ghettoside by Jill Levoy is something I’d recommend as a comparable book from a more recent time.
The Deuce is an exceptional show. I hesitate to say it’s as good as The Wire (because what is?) but it’s very close. Maggie Gyllenhaal gives the performance of a lifetime and she should have won all the awards for it.
From the other shows talked about here, I’ve only seen Generation Kill and I did not like it. The characters are exceedingly loathsome. I should probably watch Treme at some point though.
I also loved “The Deuce” although like you said, it’s not “The Wire”
Treme is a hard pass. It goes nowhere and is painfully boring. Also, the deuce was great, but honestly i thought the worst part of it was maggie gyllenhaal. i just think she is a terrible actor. Her delivery has no range, so everything just falls flat.
I thought she was…okay? To be honest I was surprised at how good James Franco was, and in double parts. I know a lot of folks hate him because of the allegations against him, but putting that aside I thought he was legit great on that show.I still haven’t tried to watch Treme. For whatever reason I just couldn’t get past the first episode.
It took me three tries to get through the first episode of The Wire.Treme is worth the effort.
Nope. Treme is near perfect in the same way The Wire is.
sorry, dawg, treme is about as pleasant as a wet fart.
It’s this kind of detailed, trenchant insight that keeps me coming back to the comments section!
just trying to help people avoid wasting a lot of time on dud TV. its hard work, but someone has to do it.
Treme is my favorite of his shows besides The Wire. I think it helps that I have spent a LOT of time in New Orleans and so part of the appeal is just hanging out in that city that I love.
I can’t agree with the characters on Generation Kill being “exceedingly loathsome” (though, of course, that’s ultimately a matter of opinion). It’s been awhile since I’ve seen the show, but having also read the book, I think the main characters’ commentary and behavior (outside their military performance) is largely ironical, with them consciously (more or less) playing the role of “Marine” while also being aware of the gulf between their “job” and both the lofty ideals that the Bush administration claimed as justification on the one hand and the American public’s simplistically “patriotic” view of them and their actions on the other.
“I hesitate to say it’s as good as The Wire”Counterpoint: The Deuce had more boobs.
That’s a compelling argument!
It’s time like these that one wonders what Bonertime would have had to say.
*HBO CEO of Tits nods approvingly*
Treme is very good, and leans more into the hangout-vibes of The Deuce.The first season takes a long while to get going, though.
Count me as another who loved The Deuce, but puts it below The Wire. I feel like The Deuce wasn’t as expansive as The Wire, probably because it only had 3 seasons, and they were doing the time jump thing in between to cover more temporal distance rather than branching out into as many other aspects of the current situation the way that The Wire did.
I feel like the lows of the Deuce are just a lot lower than The Wire’s. People complain about the shift to the docks or the journalism stuff being too on the nose, but Season 2 is underrated and Clark Johnson is always fun to watch. Franco playing twins and then in old age makeup is never not distracting. It’s the bad kind of stunt casting, and he’s the ostensible focus of the show.
That said, Simon’s shows are about honest humanity in a way that perhaps only a good journalist, or at least someone with a good journalist’s soul, could really do. Even his weakest stuff is thought-provoking and nuanced in a way that almost nothing else on television is.
I would have loved to see one more season, set maybe in the late 90s, covering the beginning of internet porn/escorts. There’s something to be said for keeping it short and sweet though.
it’s even harder to pin down where any of Simon’s recent shows fit, genre-wise. Simon creates the prestige drama equivalent of slice of life-anime.
His stuff doesn’t feel written, like it adheres to conventional structures or as if there’s a Writer pulling the strings to make stuff happen on screen.
The genre is “Dickensian depictions of cities”. “Generation: Kill” excepted.
I like slice of life anime better. David-sempai would agree.
Anime? If it’s not an American city near the Atlantic ocean, David Simon doesn’t want to hear about it!
Anime? If it’s not an American city near the Atlantic ocean, David Simon doesn’t want to hear about it!
Sempai would never!
The problem The Wire has always had is that when someone tells you that something is quite possibly the greatest thing ever written for TV of its time, potentially one of the greatest pieces of TV that will ever be written, it sounds like hyperbole, or nonsense.
I think another part of the problem when calling it “one of the best ever” is looking now through the lens of time what a wet fart season 5 is compared to the rest of the seasons.
Season 5 was worth it just for the scene of McNulty meeting with the FBI profilers.
Every time McNulty uttered, “What the fuck did I I do?” it was a moment of television gold.
Between him hammering his car — twice! — into a highway abutment while blasting The Pogues, “James Cromwell of Knightsbridge, Stepney and Mersey,” and questioning the provenance of a free bar’s Irish whisky, McNulty has to be one of my favorite tortured drunk cop characters ever.
It’s amazing to me that Dominic West is from British upper crust, who went to Eton for god sakes and is married to an aristocrat (i don’t exactly know what that means besides ‘fancy and rich). But he played McNulty *perfectly*. Like…..how??? I know it’s called acting but i still cannot quite believe it.
I remember one interview he did that he missed out on a lot of roles earlier in his career because casting directors thought he was “too posh” to play grittier every-man roles.
I completely forgot about McNulty losing his marbles in that season. That was kinda brilliant
It’s one of the reasons I prefer Breaking Bad. Its ambitions weren’t that of The Wire, but BB executed them better and really stuck the landing.
Yeah, I haven’t re-watched Breaking Bad, because I don’t want to find out I’m wrong, but when that ended, I felt like that show never had a bad episode and was as close to the perfect execution of what it was striving for from start to finish as a show could get.
I just rewatched it for first time since it ended last fall. You have nothing to fear.
On the opposite end, time has seemed to cast season 2 in a far better light, year by year. I think it is my favorite now.
I never understood the hate for season two. Maybe I’m just a sucker for union drama.
Plus you got the rise of String and Bunk and Lester teaming up. There’s a lot in there to love.
I understand the hate. The season didn’t meet viewer expectations for the show after season one and Ziggy was super annoying when you didn’t know how his story would end. And a lot of the season developments with Avon and Stringer don’t truly pay off until S3.That being said, I never hated it.
I just don’t know what viewer expectations there could have been, excepting, “I thought this was supposed to be a cop show!”
Sure, they sidelined the main cop on a boat, but almost immediately brought him back into the fold to detour into some pretty fucked up territory with his dating life meshing with the human smuggling side plot.The season does set up quite a bit politically that only pays off later, like you said, but I think it’s superbly if clumsily and dourly entertaining in doing so.
I always preferred 2 because it had the best intro theme song
My theory is that from season 3 the plots started stacking, so by the time 5 came around, the streets, the police and City Hall each had their own labyrinthine territorial disputes to give time to, leaving almost no air for the newspaper plot to breathe and do the character work that made the docks saga compelling.Yes, I’m a season 2 apologist.
IMO the issue was that the newspaper angle just wasn’t compelling. It’s clear why Simon thought it would be as writing for the Sun was his background. But it felt like wasted time.
…and then you watch it.
This might be piling on the hyperbole, but I rewatched the Wire a few years ago, and it actually made me less interested in television. It just seems like we’re so inundated with content now that TV shows try too hard to entertain rather than just tell a good story in a unique way, and fuck you if you don’t like it, which has been Simon’s approach for the last couple of decades.
Bill Simmons made this point a long time ago, the advice people need to give people is to stick with the show until one of the bigger events of S1 happens (he suggested, spoilers obviously, Wallace getting killed near the season finale which I agree with).The thing seasoned fans of the show don’t realize is the slow pace, especially in first few episodes, can be off-putting. Goal should be to keep your friends and family watching, once they get to a certain point they should be able to recognize the brilliance on their own.
“The problem The Wire has always had is that when someone tells you that something is quite possibly the greatest thing ever written for TV of its time, potentially one of the greatest pieces of TV that will ever be written, it sounds like hyperbole, or nonsense.” I don’t see how that’s a problem that The Wire has at all. It sounds like maybe a problem that you have.
I binged Treme late last year and absolutely loved it. Maybe not more than The Wire, but its certainly up there.
It seems a lot of people here didn’t watch The Deuce. It is fantastic television and as a few have mentioned here, Gyllenhaal was phenomenal, but so was the whole cast including two performances by James Franco.But do go back and read the reviews after each episode beginning with Season 2 through the series finale. Not to take away from Erik Adams in Season One, but Noel Murray gives such great insight in his reviews of Season 2 and 3 that it rounds out the viewing experience.
David Simon is whom I wish had written The West Wing instead of Aaron Sorkin.I’d have loved to see a David Simon take on the White House, especially with a lot of criticism towards The West Wing nowadays by both left and centrist critics who saw The West Wing as the cause and symptoms of brain rot within Democratic Party politics especially with Aaron Sorkin’s boomer takes on young politicians as of last year. House of Cards is too dramatic, while Veep is too comical.When you watch The Wire and you see someone like Carcetti running from a populist candidate to just another mayor who can’t get anything really done, I want something like that for 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Something that really tells people why someone like Obama couldn’t get things done and why we got a system like Obamacare that is faltering under both a succeeding Trump admin and a global pandemic like the Coronavirus.Hell, a David Simon-written show about The White House could explore the one thing the West Wing was even scared to talk about: Democratic Party Infighting. I think only David Simon can make a show about that.
Obama couldn’t get things done because he, wrongly, believed that Republican politicians at the highest levels are patriots and have morals. He might even think this from watching The West Wing. We got the ACA because President Obama thought the country wasn’t ready for Medicare-for-all. He was quite effective once he gave up trying to negotiate with Republican politicians and finally started doing things through legislative orders that the executive branch can do unilaterally.
Was it Obama that nixed Medicare-for-all or Congress?
It was common sense. Obama only got the ACA passed because he had a tiny little window where the Dems had 60 votes in the Senate, and even then, he had to massage idiots like Manchin and Heitkamp to get it done, and he knew all this going in. Purity leftists like to sneer at his compromising, but he basically chose to improve the health care of tens of millions of Americans versus tilting at windmills.
Medicare-for-all was never gonna happen in 2008.
And as long as “pragmatism” is the criteria it never will.
Then do the fucking work instead of whining. Get your ass down to West Virginia and see if you can find an electable Dem even remotely to the left of Manchin and then rage into the void. Now, realize that whining about a compromise that literally improved the lives of tens of millions of Americans is even less helpful than that.
Apparently a president could make Medicare for All become law without needing to control Congress. You just do an executive order and it’s done! Stupid Obama didn’t realise! Compromising to wrangle 60 votes for Obamacare in the Senate like a fool. There is absolutely no need to do any work to ensure Democrats control the Congress. After all, it’s more important to primary existing Democrats than make any compromises needed to beat Republicans in purple states.
Get your ass down to West Virginia and see if you can find an electable Dem even remotely to the left of Manchin and then rage into the void.Are you willing to donate to Paula Jean Swearengin?
https://twitter.com/paulajean2020?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor
Lieberman wouldn’t vote for a public option.
Hell, M4A lost right now, in the year 2020. (Warren, Sanders). Crazy pandemics notwithstanding.
Fucking Carcetti.
Chaos is a ladder
Sheeeeitttt!
I’m happy to have a Sorkin West Wing, even if it looks more and more bizarre during the current presidency. But it does seem to demand a show in response from someone like Simon – that I agree with and would love to see.
I only watched the first part of Show Me a Hero, but it was awful. Coupled with the praise for Season 5 of the Wire, I got the impression that many critics can’t be “objective” when it comes to Simon. I guess I should just watch the rest of these shows, but they don’t even sound interesting.
Or how about Show Me A Hero was not awful, and maybe it just wasn’t built for you. Since, y’know, the vast majority of people who have watched it do not share your opinion.
It’s straight up blowing my mind that this article calls Generation Kill’s depiction of the US military as arrogant and unaccountable “unsettingly prescient”. Reminds me of that insane Aaron Sorkin quote that the world no longer cheers when they see American soldiers… because of Trump.
Trump yes, but Junior more so…
Have you seen Generation Kill? Or read the book? Its non-fiction by a Marine Recon Lieutenant. The “arrogance” refers to reckless tactics like “don’t tell them its a trap”.
I’d say Treme belongs to the same genre as Friday Night Lights, with music replacing football.
Treme doesn’t get enough credit for basically transposing neorealism to television. There’s been nothing quite like Treme in TV. If you’re going to come up with similar approaches to storytelling, you’d probably have to reach for directors like Sean Baker or Vittorio De Sica.
Treme doesn’t get the credit that it deserves. It was a fantastic show full of amazing and different characters trying to deal with the aftermath of one of the worst natural disasters to ever hit the States. All of the great local music and big musical cameos only made the show that much better.
Treme is my favorite tv show ever and it’s not close. Khandi Alexander, Kim Dickens and Clarke Peters are god damned super heroes in that show. No hum bow, don’t know how.
The Deuce is fucking terrible.
I will read this later, but just here to say that Treme is the best. You have to wait through the first season. But it is wonderful.
God I love his work. As much as I loved The Wire, Treme might be even better to me. Each time I watch it I enjoy it more. The last time I went through with Nola online’s guide to all the local shit added in each episode. It’s staggering how nuanced some of the choices are from songs playing in the background, to local personalities, etc. It’s a great celebration of New Orleans while also telling larger stories for all of us.
if a Nazi-sympathizing antisemite had won the U.S. presidency.One did.
First time I’ve seen Steve Zahn counted among the finest actors of the era. I like him in what he’s in, and he has a certain goofy charisma, but I’d hardly say that he and the others listed are on the same plane.
The Wire is in my Top Five tv show of all time. I remember not getting sucked in after the first season and waited a couple years before I got bored and picked it back up. Then I got absolutely addicted and binged the remaining four seasons. Treme was similar for me. I started watching after the show was complete, and while I have sung praises to many friends, I never binged it. I would watch maybe five episode in a weekend while the wife was out of town, then not watch anymore for six months, then rinse and repeat. When the show was over I got really sad though, I wanted to keep following these character’s lives. Treme isn’t a story, it’s just a slice of a fictional timeline based off an actual timeline. I thought I hated jazz until that show but while I was watching, I would constantly Shazam a song or Google what I just heard. I think when describing it, one should use anime genres/tags/tropes. Treme is a “slice of life” show with a strong emphasis on music. Very similar to the anime Kids on the Slope