Today's Guest: David Simon, TV writer, creator, "The Wire, "Homicide: Life on the Street," "Treme," "The Corner" David Simon (Photo by Bob Andelman) Today, it’s January 26, 2007, and I am sitting across from David Simon, creator of the critically-acclaimed and Peabody Award-winning HBO series, The Wire. We are speaking at The Inn at the Bay in St. Petersburg, Florida, where Simon spent the last week working with students at Eckerd College. The fiftieth episode and fourth-season finale of The Wire aired just a few weeks ago, and the fifth season goes into production in March, so Simon is hopefully enjoying a vacation of sorts. I am an admitted late-comer to The Wire, having seen my first episode just last September in a New Jersey hotel room. I was struck by the show’s tension and extraordinarily tight script and character development, which has often been overshadowed by better-known HBO shows, such as The Sopranos and Deadwood. If you like those shows and you haven’t already caught The Wire, you should consider it assigned viewing. Fortunately, the first season of The Wire is now airing on the BET channel, so us late-comers can start catching up. If you haven’t seen The Wire, you may still be familiar with David Simon’s work. A former Baltimore Sun crime reporter, he is the writer that the Baltimore Chamber of Commerce no doubt loves to hate, having co-authored (with Edward Burns) the Baltimore-based book, The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner City Neighborhood, and the subsequent HBO series, The Corner, and providing the inspiration and a number of scripts for the Baltimore-based NBC show, Homicide: Life on the Street. Another of his Baltimore-based true crime books, Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets, was the basis for Homicide. David Simon • •