Without any mercy. HBO, which owes so much to David Simonjust fired the writer, creator and producer of essential series of our time as ‘The Wire’, ‘Generation kill’, ‘Treme’, ‘Show me a hero’, ‘The deuce’, ‘The conspiracy against America’ and ‘The city is ours’ for supporting the American Writers’ Strike. This is how the studios and platforms that dominate the audiovisual industry spend them in the 21st century. Who is going to generate series as good as those mentioned now? Is not the strike a fundamental right in almost all civilized countries? Yesterday we could see images of the actor Rob Lowe joining the cause and talking with some of the strikers who were demonstrating in front of the entrance of Paramount studios. Christopher Nolan and his brother Jonathan –creator and producer of the series ‘Vigilados. Person of interest’ and ‘Westworld’– have also expressed their solidarity with the strikers and have been photographed with the ‘writers guild on strike’ signs. Are they going to stop releasing ‘Oppenheimer’ because of this act of ‘indiscipline’ by someone who, like Christopher Nolan, is also a screenwriter for his films?
Fifteen years ago there was already a similar conflict that in the field of television serials had an almost immediate effect: some of the productions scheduled at that time went 20 or 24 episodes in half because of the writers’ strike, and that format, that of 10, eight or six chapters, is the one that rules today. Simon is a good example of an author who had previously adapted to circumstances: ‘The wire’, released in 2002, had 60 episodes divided into five seasons, an average of 12 each. But while this is important, what defines Simon is his ‘Shakespearean’ ability to create characters, situations, settings, plots and subplots of a script never seen before on television, and that, in general, these series defined the American reality as few have done: drugs, police wiretapping, the effects of Hurricane Katrinathe creation of the porn industry, local politics, the Iraq war and police corruption.
Without Simon, the quality television of this century could not be understood. And, above all, the prestige acquired by HBO in terms of the most innovative series. Now he is being shot at for supporting the legitimate right of screenwriters –Simon is, above all else– to ask for more decent wages and a minimum stability to be able to carry out their work. Because it is true that although scripts are not made of iron today as Billy Wilder wanted them to be, they are becoming more and more malleable and during the filming and editing phases of a series or a movie all kinds of changes are allowed, which are what they give the work a definitive shape, without a starting script there is nothing.
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“The day HBO called me to suspend my contract after 25 years writing television for them, I was doing the right thing & rdquor;, Simon has written on his Twitter account. HBO made a good transition from cable television to streaming thanks to Simon’s series, among other productions. We will see if the calloused writer who, during his period as a journalist, accompanied the activities of the Baltimore homicide unit for 12 months, an experience from which the book ‘Homicide, a year on the streets of death’ arose, a direct antecedent of ‘The wire’, shut up, grant or counterattack. The rest of the companies have been equally belligerent with the scriptwriters on strike. In any case, for Simon and HBO it is the sad end of a prodigiously lucid and creative time.