The Wire creator David Simon ‘can’t get anything made’ in franchise-obsessed TV business

The Wire ran for five seasons from 2002 to 2008

David Simon, the screenwriter, journalist and author who created HBO’s The Wire, has said he is struggling to get any of his projects commissioned in an industry that has become heavily reliant on existing IP, reboots and franchises.

“I can’t get anything made now,” he said in an interview with UK newspaper The Observer.

“I’ll never write anything that’s going to be a franchise,” he told journalist Francisco Garcia. “I was having lunch with the boss [at HBO] and I said, ‘You know, I’m not sure you guys are the home for what I do any more. You’re not going to take the David Simon Harry Potter miniseries about a bureaucratic Hogwarts that can’t function.’”

Simon, a Baltimore-based reporter who transitioned into screenwriting when his book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets was adapted by NBC in 1993, has been in business with HBO for more than two decades.

Earlier this year, he signed a two-year first-look deal with Warner Bros Discovery-owned HBO, in addition to a premium script agreement with Sony Pictures Television.

The last of his shows to be produced was 2022’s We Own This City, which he developed with frequent collaborator George Pelecanos for HBO. The six-part crime drama, based on a non-fiction book by Baltimore Sun reporter Justin Fenton, follows the rise and corruption-fuelled fall of Baltimore Police Department’s Gun Trace Task Force.

That show launched 14 years after the conclusion of The Wire, which ran for five seasons from 2002 to 2008 and, after an unspectacular early ratings run, has become one of the most adored series in history with both critics and viewers.

His other projects for HBO include miniseries The Plot Against America (2020), based on Philip Roth’s novel, and crime drama The Deuce, which ran for three seasons starting in 2017 and was set in the underbelly of New York in the 1970s and 1980s.

Simon, 64, told The Observer he is content with his 25-year run in television, but has several other projects sat “on my shelf.”

Among them is a series about the “history of the CIA and American foreign policy since the Second World War” and a miniseries about the “first Muslim FBI agent and how he got run out of the bureau.” Others include a project about child protective services and the family courts, as well as a punk musical using the music of The Pogues.”

The outspoken Simon was blunt in his assessment that the television business has veered so far in the direction of reboots and franchises that getting more subtle, well-observed, slow-burning television made is a major challenge in today’s climate. The issue, he believes, is due in part to profit being prioritised above all else.

In the wake of the streaming bubble bursting, he also voiced concern about where the next generation of showrunners would be able to hone their craft at a time when risk aversion is the norm. “There are three things that will fuck up any chance of quality storytelling: fear, greed and the hunger for repetition,” he said.