![]() ![]() ![]() With the leverage he had already acquired, Mike could have sat there and insisted on the writers gilding his every narrative arc. He had done marvelous things with Omar - his smile and the cavernous barrel of a high-powered handgun were the closing moments of the first season - and he was maybe one more good story arc from elevating his character into a star turn. Waiting for him, I still worried it would come down to his character’s work. Mike thought about this for a long moment. Not just in Baltimore, but elsewhere, too.” “We want to have a bigger argument about what has gone wrong. But if we build the rest of the city - its fragile working class, its political world, its schools, its media culture - then we get a chance to say something more. We were writing about how power and money are routed in an American city, and being from Baltimore, a majority Black metropolis, we had simply depicted our hometown.Īnd a bigger truth, I argued, is that if we don’t now expand the show’s field of vision beyond what happens on the streets of West Baltimore, then we stay a cops-and-robbers drama, a police procedural. I told him that we had never imagined “The Wire” as a Black drama, or even as a drama with race as its central theme. To answer, I had to pause and regroup, and reach for an honest answer - the one less likely to please a hungry actor. To Mike, at that moment, we were the white custodians of a rare majority-Black drama in the majority-white world of American television, and we might well be walking away from that unique responsibility. And now, it’s like we’re walking away from that.” ![]() He pressed the point: “I’m saying, there are all these shows on television, and we made the one that was about Black characters and written for a Black audience. To be honest, I misread the man from the start, and it was my writing partner, Ed Burns, who had first spotted Mike’s read for Omar on a tape of two dozen New York auditions a year earlier. Williams, the man whose sudden death at the age of 54 on Monday deprived us of one of the most careful and committed actors of our age. It wasn’t the first time I was late to Michael K. Mike wasn’t the only actor of color distressed at the new scripts he was simply the one with the gumption to walk into the show runner’s office.Īt first, I misapprehended the depth of Mike’s complaint, assuming - as is often true - that an actor was simply counting his character’s lines and hoping for more screen time. Now, with the new season, our story had shifted to the predominantly white working-class world of Baltimore’s port. The initial season of “The Wire,” in which Mike had delivered his first magnificent turn as Omar Little, a freelance stickup artist and street warrior, had been largely set in Baltimore’s poorer Black neighborhoods. The second season of our fledgling HBO drama in Baltimore did not shoot its first frame of film before one key cast member was in the writers’ offices, scripts in hand, showing his disappointment. ![]()
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