Exclusive David Simon Interview on WTMD: Thursday, July 10

Only a few months after cutting The Wire, Baltimore-based author, journalist and writer-producer, David Simon returns to HBO at 9 p.m. Sunday, July 13, with Generation Kill.

The seven-part miniseries follows one of the first Marine units into Iraq at the start of the war. I recently had the chance to chat with David extensively about the show based on the book by Rolling Stone reporter Evan Wright.

Highlights from the interview will air at 7:40 a.m. Thursday, July 10, on the TMD Morning Show, and the full conversation (nearly 30 minutes) will be available on http://www.wtmd.org/ later that morning. is available here.

Here's a sample:

ERIK: One thing that we all can't help but notice with The Wire, and for those who have read the book Generation Kill and learning about some of the soldiers, is that some of them DO stand up to authorities and the incompetence of bureaucracy. It seems like that's one of the themes...

DAVID SIMON: It's funny, everybody's going to attribute that to me! It seems symbiotic with a lot of the Wire's themes. And, of course, I had nothing to do with this book. I didn't know Evan Wright when he wrote it [in 2003]. Evan Wright didn't know The Wire . . . .

He is just experiencing the bureaucracy that is First Recon Battalion as it exists and he's reporting with great clarity on a day-to-day basis . . . . Yes, a lot of the same institutional dynamics were present in Generation Kill that are present in The Wire—completely unrelated to my take on the world . . . . I guess the best I can say for myself is that Ed Burns and I, we got some things right on the nature of bureaucracy and that it applies to military culture as well.

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