“And then the evil bad cop who was secretly a terrorist manipulates the dumb naive youth into protesting police violence, causing a riot which is used as a distraction for the bad cop to do a bank heist and now it’s up to the handsome good cop who doesn’t play by the rules to stop the bad cop while rolling his eyes at the dumb leftists who are so easily manipulated by their emotions”
years ago I remember getting into a twitter argument with David Simon about this when he came out against local “defund the police” efforts. he insisted that his intent in making The Wire was not to show that police were systematically racist or incapable of reform. his position was basically that The Wire shows the negative outcomes of American police being underresourced and hamstrung by excessive red tape from out of touch bureaucrats. I still think the show is generally great, but I’ve never quite gotten over how Simon was able to make something so completely at odds with his stated real-life politics. My takeaway was mostly that the things I think work best about The Wire may have been totally accidental, which in a way almost makes it more impressive.
That is very interesting, I didn’t follow that little saga.
That said, I will say that from his other works, Simon suffers from liberal blinders from having spent too much time with cops and journalists. But like chuds who are telling on themselves when they make movies, David Simon also tells on himself by literally seeing things from the cops point of view, including their bad behavior. In that way, his blinders actually work in his favor because he literally can’t see it as ‘consistent negligence and bad behavior’. A more self-aware propagandist would either hide the behavior so it doesn’t exist or highlight the behavior so much that it would never get past the censors of production funding.