Baltimore has been
David Simon's muse throughout his professional life, from his days as a junior reporter for the Baltimore Sun newspaper to the March 9 conclusion of his epic saga of life and crime in the hardscrabble waterfront city.
But as HBO's acclaimed drama series "The Wire" wraps its five-season run this month, Simon is looking well past his hometown boundaries for fresh inspiration for a TV drama skein.
His focus has shifted far south of the Chesapeake Bay to New Orleans. Simon is at work with former "Homicide" and "Wire" scribe
Eric Overmyer on a pilot script for HBO set among musicians in the Big Easy. It's "not so much crime and grime" but about the "culture down there trying to reconstitute itself" after Hurricane Katrina, Simon says.
New Orleans "was a favorite place of mine even before the storm, and the storm has just made me more passionate about it," he adds.
Simon is also wrapping up post-production on a seven-hour miniseries for HBO based on "Generation Kill," the non-fiction tome by
Evan Wright about Marines on the ground in Iraq.
"I've think we've actually done something worthwhile here" with "Generation Kill," he says, with a reporter's disdain for bombastic self-promotion. "Time will tell."
Even as Simon sets his sights on moving on, the past few weeks have been an unavoidably introspective period for Simon as "Wire's" ardent fans (many of them TV critics) waxed poetic about the final act of the convention-defying series that never pulled punches in its study of the agonizing decline of America's urban centers.
Throughout its run, "Wire" has had a sprawling cast of finely drawn characters in order to portray such a wide swath of the city. Simon has been living with and writing for these people for so long that it's been wrenching for him and his writers to bring it to a close.
"We knew what was going to happen over the course of the five-year run. But we were always adjusting where the characters were going to end up ... and what we wanted to say with the overall theme of the show," Simon says. "It was a Greek tragedy done in a modernist, urban way, with the city as the main character."
Yet even as he closes the book on "The Wire," it's a safe bet that Charm City will never be too far removed from Simon's professional endeavors. He and
William Zorzi, a "Wire" collaborator and a former Sun colleague, have a book deal with Henry Holt and Co. for a non-fiction chronicle of the blossoming of the drug culture in Baltimore in the 1950s and '60s.
Contact Cynthia Littleton at
cynthia.littleton@variety.com