David Simon started out as a reporter, not a screenwriter. His street's-eye view of Baltimore inspired two successful books, Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets and The Corner. Both became TV shows focused on cops and the violence of the drug world. Simon's HBO series The Wire was even more ambitious. A social critique disguised as a cop drama, it offered a bleak picture of the American city, and Simon's views on how to save it. He was still reporting, but in a different way than ever before. We talked with Simon, one of the influential television industry players interviewed for TVGuide.com's Best of the Decade section, about different ways of breaking stories — those that are true, those that are fiction, and those that are both.
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