Bill Moyers with The Wire’s David Simon

Here Bill Moy­ers sits down with David Simon, exec­u­tive pro­duc­er of The Wire, the stun­ning HBO pro­duc­tion. As any­one who has watched the show knows, The Wire is not just a splen­did dra­ma. It is, as Simon has once called it, “a polit­i­cal tract mas­querad­ing as a cop show.” It takes a pen­e­trat­ing and aes­thet­i­cal­ly rich look at some of Amer­i­ca’s most vex­ing social issues. And it’s why Moy­ers says, “What Edward Gib­bon was to the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, or Charles Dick­ens to the smokey, mean streets of Vic­to­ri­an Lon­don, David Simon is to Amer­i­ca today.” To access this 40 minute inter­view, you can watch it on the web or on iTunes. You can also grab an audio mp3 here.

Final­ly, as a quick aside, the video below recaps The Wire’s 5 sea­sons in 5 min­utes. It hard­ly does the show jus­tice, but it gives you a quick feel for things. If you haven’t watched the show, do your­self a big favor and get your­self a Net­flix sub­scrip­tion and spend the new few months watch­ing it from begin­ning to end.