Last night creator and showrunner David Simon, executive producer Nina Noble, and cast members Michael K. Williams, Seth Gilliam, Wendell Pierce, Sonja Sohn, Lawrence Gilliard Jr., John Doman, Tristan Wilds, Jamie Hector and Jim True-Frost took part in a reunion panel at New York's PaleyFest to talk about the HBO series everyone now loves, but didn't watch when it originally aired: THE WIRE.
At the event, David Simon revealed a few interesting things involving THE WIRE, including how HBO turned down a spin-off that would have focused on the political career of Aidan Gillen's Tommy Carcetti.
We were actually trying to spin off the city hall show and do a political show. We wrote a bunch of scripts that would spin off after Season 3 of The Wire. But HBO said, “No, we only want one show that nobody is watching in Baltimore, not two!"
Simon also told Variety he wanted to do a season about immigration.
You know, television has more of a shelf life than it used to, so… because this was five seasons, they had to have a certain amount of faith in it. But the last couple seasons were kinda hairy. They were looking at it like, ‘Look, you’ve got all the critical notices on this, why are we trying to snatch something more? We don’t seem to be building an audience. That’s also what the show was about: bad short-term decisions affecting the long run. We were considering a season on the topic of immigration, it was debated in the writers’ room, but it’s like, by the time we do the research, learn the Spanish, the train’s already rolling along and you can’t stop it. We were just begging HBO to give us another season.
It's unfortunate we didn't get another season or a spin-off, but we should appreciate what we did get: an absolutely outstanding series that is definitely worth binge watching. While there have been plenty of other critically acclaimed television dramas, in my opinion there's nothing quite like HBO's THE WIRE.