The Wire - The Real Thing
by Michael HoffmanThursday, August 9th, 2007
As many of you know, I think the best show on TV and probably the best show ever is HBO’s The Wire. It’s great because it’s real. Last season it had a chilling look at what is happening to urban education in the face of gangs and drugs through the eyes of four middle school students. Watch it and you will never think of the problems of public school the same way.
My father told me last week that there was some traffic jam in Baltimore because they were filming the final episode. I am very sad to see it go. John from Cincinnati seems banal in comparison.
In today’s New York Times is a story about some of the real people behind the characters in The Wire. The show was created by David Simon, a former Baltimore Sun reporter on the crime beat. He wrote a book, “The Corner” with a former Baltimore cop named Ed Burns that was turned into an HBO miniseries. Before that, he wrote a book called “Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets.” You might remember that it became a TV show called Homicide: Life on the Streets which was produced by the great producer/director Barry Levinson as well as Simon.
The story in the Times today talk about the person who was the inspiration for the character Omar Little. Omar is a guy who robs drug dealers. He lives on the edge in a world of violence and drugs. And somehow, he’s not a bad guy. You want him to live and to eventually find the life of peace and love and intellectual stimulation where he would seem most comfortable. The real Omar (actually, one of the people that make up the composite that is Omar) is Donnie Andrews who, after serving a long prison sentence for murder, has become one of a team of former addicts and criminals working to get kids off the streets. This is very powerful stuff.
Organizations that work with students and disasters and under served populations and almost everything else have these powerful stories of hardship and of success. They should see the power in them and dig them out and write about them and capture these people on video and in pictures and in their own words. It is these stories that make connections for people to the problems that are otherwise totally abstract. If I want to make a difference I want to make a difference for a person, not an issue. This is, of course, what we do at See3 and I sometimes feel like a broken record talking about it. But it works and it’s surprising how much the nonprofit sector still needs to hear it.
