'Wire' creator brings HBO a different 'Hero'

SHOW ME A HERO. 8 p.m.

Sunday, Aug. 23 and 30, HBO.

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. - David Simon is not buying my theory that "The Wire" creator never really left journalism behind.

"It's not journalism," said Simon, whose latest project, "Show Me a Hero," premieres Sunday on HBO. "I mean, every now and then I get to a scene and there's a better line than the reality, and I use the better line. In that moment, I can't wear the journalism hat, can I? I can't. Making the s--- up is not journalism.

"But some of the impulses that made me want to be a reporter are still the only impulses that I find interesting. I never wanted to be an entertainer."

A six-part miniseries about the long and ugly battle over introducing scattered-site public housing to a predominantly white neighborhood in Yonkers, N.Y., "Show Me a Hero" is, nevertheless, a dramatically satisfying story that embraces the second half of the F. Scott Fitzgerald line, "Show me a hero and I'll write you a tragedy."

Oscar Isaac ("A Most Violent Year") stars as Nick Wasicsko, a young politician whose career rises and falls on the struggle over ending the city's 40 years of federally funded segregation.

And though it's based on a 1999 book by Lisa Belkin, who covered the story for the New York Times, it feels as current as anything Simon's done in the 20 years since he quit the Baltimore Sun, years in which he's explored the drug trade and its collateral damage in "The Corner" and "The Wire," tackled the Iraq war in "Generation Kill" and chronicled life in post-Katrina New Orleans in "Treme."

In case you hadn't heard, Simon does gripping drama, but he doesn't do a whole lot of cheerful.

"The most oversold thing in American popular culture has to be redemption, right? We're slinging that stuff 24/7," he said. "We do redemption, we do violence and we do porn. We do them really well."

(Simon will be exploring at least one of those subjects next. According to the Hollywood Reporter, HBO has ordered two new pilots from him, one, "The Deuce," with James Franco, set in the world of 1970s-80s porn, the other a Capitol Hill drama.)

Ultimately, there's redemption for at least one major player in "Show Me a Hero," whose other stars include Winona Ryder, Catherine Keener, Alfred Molina and James Belushi.

But that person "earned it," Simon said. "If we tarted it up or made it bigger than it was . . . we'd ruin it."

Directed by Oscar winner Paul Haggis, the miniseries was written by Simon with another former Baltimore Sun reporter, William F. Zorzi, who essentially rereported Belkin's book, "because you need the voices," Simon said.

"To write the characters decently, the more you know about their actual voices," the better, and "you can't pull that from the prose," he said.

Belkin's book "was an incredible resource to us. I don't mean to suggest otherwise. But then you've got to sort of make the people come alive," he said.

The road from Baltimore to Yonkers proved to be long and winding.

"This was going to be the miniseries that followed 'The Corner.' And then 'The Wire' happened," Simon said. "Then the Iraq war happened, and then 'Generation Kill' needed to follow, as a news peg . . . And you needed to do 'Treme' in prompt response to Katrina."

When he first read Belkin's book, he thought it was "pretty timeless in terms of the racial dynamics of the country, governance, integration. This is good. This is almost a perfect allegory for anywhere . . . At this moment, they're happening two towns up the Hudson [from Yonkers] in Tarrytown. Same fight," Simon said.

When they began preparation to film, "Ferguson hadn't happened, Baltimore hadn't happened, Charleston hadn't happened," he said. "The current fault lines weren't evident but all of the racial fights, all of the arguments over sort of power sharing and the integration of society, that was evident. HBO approved this before race became a front-page paradigm again."

Scattered-site housing "works really well," he said. "Government's actually learned how to do this that allows . . . affordable housing to be introduced into communities without destabilizing the community. Yes, a lot of bad stuff happened in the '60s and '70s. Yes, Cabrini-Green and Robert Taylor Homes [in Chicago] and Murphy Homes, in Baltimore - these were all terrible constructs of urban planning. But some of these people learned some lessons."

Wasicsko "probably saw himself as being perhaps more of a hero than we did," said Simon, who thinks "the subversive thing about the piece is that the real heroes" include members of an oft-maligned class.

"Bureaucrats get a terrible name in America. Unless you've actually covered some good ones, you can mock bureaucrats pretty flippantly, and go your whole life doing so and think that you're clever. But I covered a lot of [them] . . . and some of them were invaluable people."

Besides highlighting a process that's seldom the stuff of TV drama, "Show Me a Hero" represents an unusual collaboration with Haggis, a director "who's known for writing his own stuff," Simon said, but who signed on after the scripts were largely written.

"Left to our own devices, we might speak different languages, but we found a language that I thought worked for the piece. Listen, it's a piece about public housing, about building 200 units of public housing in Yonkers, N.Y. It needs a little more poetry than David Simon might lend it."

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