The television series based on Homicide was a step towards The Wire, was it?
I initially went to work for the show when my newspaper started going south, after it got bought by out-of-town ownership and they started implementing the priorities that I didn't agree with. So I looked around and I'd been offered a job on Homicide and I took it. But it was not on HBO, it was on a broadcast network and there were commercials and advertisers and only so much you could do. There was no call to write something as dark as The Wire. The Wire is kind of dissent against the American status quo, it's a political argument of a kind. Homicide taught me what was and wasn't possible with broadcast and certainly it taught me a lot about telling a story visually, but The Wire was its own beast.

You must think that you've been very fortunate. Maybe your employers did you a favour in allowing you to fall out with them.
I'd been dipped in shit, is the way to say it. I've been unbelievably fortunate. People ask me how do you get involved in television, how do you learn to produce television? I say, "OK, spend about 12 years as a newspaper reporter and write a book and have Barry Levinson buy it, then make it into a television series." I start telling people how I ended up producing television for HBO, it's an absurd angle, it's ridiculous.

Do you ever think it won't get any better? Professionally, you've done a fantastic amount and been hugely applauded in a short period.
I'm always ready to fall on my ass. Isn't everybody? The moment you stop thinking you're capable of falling on your ass, that's the moment you do.

As you say, The Wire is about dissent and it's about society in crisis, but you've managed to get them made in the way you wanted by selling them via premium cable and then on DVD box-sets at a significant price. Isn't it quite ironic that you're prospering by virtue of the fact that TV has got a different economy?
No. My standard for irony is a little higher, I have to say. No, I don't think it is at all. The critique of The Wire is not that there isn't another America in which millionaires get minted every day and people build better mousetraps and profit is to be taken. Capitalism is a pyramid; it's a pyramid scheme, and there are people at the top of the pyramid and everyone gets to climb a few rungs if they end up in the right spot, if they get lucky. So if you're saying, "You, David Simon, get to make shows for HBO; isn't that ironic when you're writing about the other America that doesn't", I'm not sure that's ironic. I don't think anything in The Wire's critique of capitalism suggests that there aren't people who are better off because of the capitalist model. What The Wire is saying is that not everyone is better off, some people are worse off, and that unencumbered capitalism, absence from social frameworks and social compact that allows for a redistribution of wealth among all the classes, among the whole American collective, is not a recipe for social justice. That's what The Wire is saying. So the fact that the CEO of Time Warner gets to make half a billion dollars, or whatever he makes, for presenting shows that are in some way a critique of capitalism, is in fact part of the fundamental evidence of the excesses of capitalism; it's not ironic, it's indicative.

Does it bother you that most people will never see The Wire, in the sense that it's never seen by huge audiences in the States?
I used to write for a newspaper that had a circulation of about 250,000 most weekdays and when I wrote books Homicide sold about 25,000 hardbacks and then over the run of the show sold another 350,000. So by that standard, about ten million people are acquiring The Wire, either in its first run on HBO, in its additional runs, on demand, TiVOing it, or buying the box-sets of DVDs. Ten million people is far in excess of anything I imagined I would ever be catering to when I started as a newspaper reporter. It's all about scale, and the truth is, when you design something like The Wire you can't very well expect 100 million people are going to watch it. If that was the plan then why have 70 per cent of your cast be African-American, because immediately you're imposing a ceiling on your likely audience.

Have you been surprised by the enthusiasm for it in the UK?
I'm stunned by it. I didn't know it would translate quite so well. Somebody pointed out to me this week that on Amazon UK the box-sets were ranked 1, 2 and 3 of DVD sales for Seasons 1, 2 and 3, and Season 4 was number 9. I thought this is an aberration; I checked back the next day, it was still the same thing. Part of that may be that it's not on a terrestrial channel, as you call them, so the box-sets are more of a way people acquire them. But that never happened in the US. I'm stunned. I can't figure you people out.

Many people don't want to watch it weekly; they want the box-set so that they can go through it at their own pace as they would a novel.
That's happened in America too. I no longer take seriously our Sunday-night Nielsen numbers. Like for Generation Kill, the Iraq mini series which is on in America now, it's drawing 1.3 million on Sunday night. I don't care. I know from experience now that a certain percentage of the audience is waiting for the box-set. A certain percentage is going to catch it on illegal downloads, off BitTorrent and that stuff. A certain percentage is going to wait until they're all available on HBO on demand and then watch them in succession. And a certain number of people are TiVOing it. The whole notion of appointment television is dead now in America. We've reached the point of measuring when people watch any show at a given time is irrelevant. Television is now more of a lending library; you watch it when you want to watch it on your own terms. And how that gets measured is much more complicated, but that is the actual measurement, much to the chagrin of some critics who still want to look at the Nielsen numbers and think they matter.

On The Wire, what did the American actors think of having British and Irish actors in prominent roles?
Everyone was really professional. Dom and Aidan and Idris [West, Gillen and Elba, respectively playing McNulty, Tommy Carcetti and Stringer Bell] were generous actors. There was nothing haughty about their arrival on this programme. They were total pros, they were generous with the other actors and they demonstrated the same allegiance to the whole as the rest of what I regard as the best ensemble cast in recent television history. And they really committed to what they were doing. The actors socialised together; they remain friends. I've been on shows where there were schisms in the cast and there really weren't any here.

If The Wire was arguably a new form - a 50-episode screen novel, as somebody described it - is that the beginning of something new or is it like Concorde in that it's never going to be followed?
We'll see. I mean, it required a lot of planning. It required a lot of talk from the writers about future seasons and where we needed to leave various arcs and which character had to go where and what had to happen in this season for the next season to work. There was a lot of heavy lifting in the writers' room and sometimes it was aggravating as hell, but it seemed to be worth it. I'm not sure every show ought to be that and I'm not sure that 60 hours is the optimum; it can be that a show could do that in 12 hours. But I do think that it demonstrated a little better what television is capable of in terms of storytelling. Some other shows recently have made it clear that this idiot box that was only able to do a certain amount can actually be made to tell a very sophisticated, very thematic story.

What are the other examples of good things going on at the moment?
I think The Sopranos and Deadwood. I don't watch a lot of TV, but I think those two. I think the first season of Weeds was very shrewd, on Showtime. I think there's a lot of good work in Mad Men, on AMC.

Do you watch any British TV?
One of the fundamental thematic triumphs I think is Prime Suspect. The early series of those were excellent.

A lot of The Wire is based on real life. You told me that the wake for the dead cop, in which the body is laid out on the bar and they all sang along to The Pogues' Body Of An American was invented. What else was made up?
Well, drugs were never legalised by any police commander in West Baltimore, that never happened. There's a lot that's made up.

What about the late-night drinking outside?
No. You mean out by the railroad tracks? No, that's not made up. Dead-end streets, they call them "holes". That's the name that cops would give it. You go to a hole and you drink. A hole is where you can park your car, even when you're on duty sometimes, and just hide out and you could sleep, you can have a six-pack with a partner. That's actually what they call it. They'll be looking for somebody and say, "Did you check all the holes on his post?"

Is it the case that senior police officers get public dressings down by their superiors?
The ComStat meetings were formed by the last mayor of Baltimore, based on the New York model. Ideally ComStat was supposed to make police officers more responsible for their jurisdiction and their bailiwick and in their post and make them answerable in a constructive way. But it very quickly became an exercise in bureaucratic brutality and cover-your-ass brinksmanship. It became performance art after a while, as opposed to a legitimate management tool.

Could you do a novel or do you have no interest in it?
It's funny, I actually enjoy prose writing and I don't get a chance to do much of it. When Season 5 of The Wire premiered over here I wrote a couple of pieces, one for Esquire magazine that's sort of a memory of my career at the [Baltimore] Sun and what pulled me out of journalism. And then an essay - I wrote something for the [Washington] Post about what had happened in newspapers. And I really enjoyed it - it was like a muscle I hadn't worked in a while, it was a lot of fun. Right now, I have this big crack pipe called HBO in my mouth and it's hard to take it out and do anything else, but I signed a book contract to do another non-fiction work called The Avenue. It's about the history of when drugs arrived as a major market force in Baltimore in the late '50s, early '60s, to about 1970.

You seem to have the job that all journalists want.
Well, you know what, there's a lot of journalists that could. A lot of it's luck, just pure luck. How many good books get written by newspapermen - really good narrative accounts of something - and don't get made into television shows and they don't get a chance to walk over and meet the guys making it and get offered the opportunity to write a script? How many good books have sold 10,000 copies and then slipped below the waves? Listen, the horrible thing is everybody in journalism wants to have the job in journalism they had five years ago, which is a meaningful role in terms of acquiring and presenting sophisticated storytelling. What's happened in newspapers is just tragic. And I'm not saying that with any sense of schadenfreude for having gotten out. I have friends still at the Sun and just this week it had another buyout - 60 more reporters. They're going from 280 down to 220. It's a dismantling of the journalistic deterrent against wrongdoing. Oh to be a political hack or a bureaucrat over the next decade; you can gamble freely without the slightest bit of concern that anyone's going to call your shit.

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Homicide: A Year On The Killing Streets by David Simon is published by Canongate. The fifth season of The Wire is released on DVD by HBO Video on 22 September

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