Friend of Chewing Pixels, Graham S, points us to a majestic New Yorker article on ex-crime reporter turned TV writer and director David Simon and his valuable television show The Wire.

Reading on screen text of this kind of length can be literally painful and the Yorker’s layout here exacerbates the eye strain but the words, both from the players therein and the writer who frames them, are wonderful.

The article covers all angles of the show, from its initial pitch stage (Simon wrote to HBO management: “It would, I will argue, be a more profound victory for HBO to take the essence of network fare and smartly turn it on its head, so that no one who sees HBO’s take on the culture of crime and crime fighting can watch anything like C.S.I. or N.Y.P.D. Blue or Law & Order again without knowing that every punch was pulled on those shows.) through to its closing moments in the fifth and final series which aired in America and over Bit Torrent earlier in the year.

There are some wonderful anecdotes (Once, a man pressed a package of heroin into the hands of Andre Royo, the actor who plays the sympathetic junkie and police informant Bubbles, saying, “Man, you need a fix more than I do.” Royo refers to that moment as his “street Oscar.”) and for the fans of the show – which should frankly be everyone reading this – it’s illuminating stuff.

One thing that cuts through everything I read about David Simon is his sense of purpose and ambition. “The Wire is dissent,” he says in the piece. “It is perhaps the only storytelling on television that overtly suggests that our political and economic and social constructs are no longer viable, that our leadership has failed us relentlessly, and that no, we are not going to be all right.”

His themes throughout the show are laser-targeted, every scene loaded with meaning and purpose but wrapped up in a rare sort of believability. Lack of authenticity is something he’s damning of in other crime shows. ““So much of what comes out of Hollywood is horseshit. Because these people live in West L.A., they don’t even go to East L.A. The only time they go downtown is to get their license renewed. And what they increasingly know about the world is what they see on other TV shows about cops or crime or poverty.

“The American entertainment industry gets poverty so relentlessly wrong… Poor people are either the salt of the earth, and they’re there to exalt us with their homespun wisdom and their sheer grit and determination to rise up, or they are people to be beaten up in an interrogation room by Sipowicz… How is it that there’s nobody actually on a human scale from the other America? The reason is they’ve never met anybody from the other America. I mean, they could ask their gardener what it’s like.”

Oof.

Slate called the show the best American television series that had ever been broadcast saying, “No other program has ever done anything remotely like what this one does, namely to portray the social, political, and economic life of an American city with the scope, observational precision, and moral vision of great literature.”

If you’re yet to see it, start now. As Simon himself points out in the piece, it will take you a little while before you’re hooked (“You know how, in a Russian novel, the reader does the work for the first hundred pages, and then it turns and you’re lost in it? With ‘The Wire,’ it might be Episode 6 before it turns and you’re in.”) but there are few better things you can spend your leisure time viewing.

Then, when you’re done head over to this New Yorker piece for a sharp articulation of everything that you loved about the experience.

If you read nothin else of the piece, then ensure you take in its conclusion, a rare happy ending born from a mythology that delights in bucking Hollywood format and revelling in unresolving downward spirals.

“Not long ago, Simon pulled off a coup that only he could have. It combined his media savvy, his loyalty to the people he’s written about, and his commitment to changing the way the underclass is represented. In “The Corner,” Simon and Burns had written extensively about a woman named Fran Boyd, a smart, likable person who had a devastating addiction to heroin, and whose first husband eventually died of his addiction. After Simon and Burns finished reporting the book, they introduced her to a man named Donnie Andrews, who was serving time for murder. Like the character Omar in “The Wire,” Andrews had robbed drug dealers at gunpoint. Eventually, he killed one.

Andrews had turned himself in to Burns, and Simon had written about him. Burns sensed that he was somebody who could support Boyd in her flickering hope of getting off heroin for good. As Burns told her, “You think you know it all? Well, I’ve got someone for you.” After Burns gave Boyd’s phone number to Andrews, the two began talking for hours on the phone every week, and Andrews, a former heroin user himself, persuaded her to change. For twenty-eight harrowing days in the Baltimore Recovery Center, she got detoxed, and, over the next twelve years, she became a drug counsellor for recovering addicts, a far better mother to her two sons, and a guardian for two nieces and a nephew, all while lobbying to get Andrews released. She and Andrews fell in love. In April, 2005, after seventeen years in federal prison in Phoenix, Arizona, Andrews was freed. The two made plans to marry in Baltimore, in August of this year.

Since Boyd and Simon first met, they had become close friends. In fact, she and both of her sons played small parts on “The Wire”; her younger son even became an assistant film editor on the show. When Simon heard about Boyd’s engagement, he jumped into action.

In recent years, Simon had become an unlikely fan of the “Vows” column in the Times—the Sunday feature in which a couple’s wedding is described in detail. Wouldn’t it make a statement, he thought, if Fran and Donnie’s wedding was covered by “Vows”? Usually, the couples were privileged: Ivy League graduates in Vera Wang dresses and Armani tuxes. Simon called up one of the “Vows” editors, introduced himself, and made his pitch. When the editor called back to say she liked the idea, she told him that the paper wanted to do a feature article about Boyd and Andrews as well. A few weeks later, the editor told Simon via e-mail that the “Vows” column had been cancelled. That made him mad. “Having Fran and Donnie in the ‘Vows’ section was inclusive and smart, an unspoken triumph for the N.Y.T. itself—a democratization,” he explained to me in an e-mail. “To do a feature was far less so—in fact, it was the opposite, in a way. As if such a marriage were grist for a news feature but unsuitable to be considered among other romances.”

So Simon called Bill Keller, the editor of the Times, and made his pitch again. Are you saying, Keller asked, that you’d rather have the “Vows” piece than a front-page feature? Yes, Simon told him, strange though it might seem. Keller said that he’d have to think about it and call him back; he was a fan of “The Wire,” but this decision would have to be made on its merits. In the end, he called Simon and said that he’d read the feature and it made him want to go to Fran and Donnie’s wedding. The feature ran—on the front page of the August 9th edition.

The “Vows” column ran on August 19th. It said that Boyd and Andrews were married at a catering hall in Baltimore, by the pastor of the A.M.E. church where Andrews is now head of security and does anti-gang outreach work. According to the Times, the bride wore a strapless, beaded wedding dress. The groom wore a black tuxedo with a pink tie. They marched down the aisle to the accompaniment of a Luther Vandross song, “Here and Now.” The guests included the actors Dominic West, Sonja Sohn, and Andre Royo from “The Wire.” David Simon was the best man.”