HBO has renewed The Wire, its critically acclaimed crime drama from David Simon, and that means more than $25 million will be spent in and around Baltimore next year making the series.
The Wire will receive a full season order of 12 episodes from the premium cable channel, as opposed to the 13 that aired this season. The reduction is purely a scheduling matter, with HBO moving to 12-episode seasons for its premiere original series, such as Six Feet Under and Sex and the City, in an attempt to open up more Sunday nights for HBO films, documentaries and comedy specials. Sunday is the night of highest television viewership.
"We'll be back in production and shooting again in January," Simon said in a telephone interview yesterday. "It's nice to know this is what I'm going to be doing for at least another year."
The series will shift its focus for next season from the drug wars in high-rise housing projects to the Port of Baltimore. There will be a new target, but many of the police investigators from this year's show will be back, as well as some of the characters from the drug world. The story line involving the war on drugs will become secondary rather than being dropped altogether.
"The plan is for the main case to always be something new [season to season], and for us to deal with a new issue each year," Simon said.
"Last year's theme was sort of the futility of the drug war and institutions vs. people. This year, it's kind of going to be as if [filmmaker] Michael Moore got a hold of the show. It's going to be a lot about the death of industry. It's going to be about unions and the idea of work and the betrayal of the working class. That's why we're going to be down at the port."
Simon said the original plan was to leave the high-rise drug scene completely at the end of the season and move on to another case. But the decision was made to keep that drug world as the setting for a secondary story line because so many of the actors playing characters in that world did such outstanding work.
"One portrayal after another just rang so true, and those projects were so real and so vibrant that you wanted to try and keep it," Simon said. "The trick is to try and sustain them and go back there in a way that is credible from time to time in Season 2."
Renewal of The Wire was expected.
"The show is so successful in so many ways for us, there's really no way for us to fault the show," Chris Albrecht, the chairman of HBO, told television critics during the Summer Press Tour in July, only a month after The Wire premiered.
Still, when you are talking about a show with a budget estimated to be between $25 million and $30 million a season, a lot can happen between the expectation of renewal and the reality of it.
One thing a full second season will mean is Hollywood paychecks for some local writers. Simon said Rafael Alvarez and Joy Lusco, Baltimore writers with screen credits for Homicide: Life on the Street and The Wire, will become staff writers for Season 2. Also joining the production team as story editors will be Edward Burns, who wrote The Corner with Simon, and George P. Pelecanos, the acclaimed crime novelist from Washington. The series is already considered one of the medium's most innovative and intelligent in terms of storytelling.
While declining to discuss specific dollar amounts, Simon said much of the $25 million to $30 million will again be spent in the Baltimore area.
"We use all Baltimore craft unions. We use all Baltimore locations. All of our catering goes to Baltimore. Even some of our out-of-town actors live here for six or seven months [during filming]," he said.
"Look, I can't tell you how much actually lands in local cash registers. I don't know if anyone can. I mean, who knows how much money an actor spends here and how much he puts in a bank in Los Angeles. All I can tell you is that the bulk of our money is being spent right here in Baltimore."