Simon talks about how you drove up from Washington every day, "ate the same crappy lunches on shitty paper plates as everyone else," and endured eight-hour story meetings.

I didn't know if I would enjoy working in that kind of atmosphere again. I produced a bunch of independent movies in the '90s, and I'd also written some films, some of which were produced without my name on them and some of which were never produced, and almost always the experience had been bad. Besides the obvious bad things that you always hear, which is dealing with the people in the business ... one of the things that really didn't appeal to me anymore is wasting my time. And it's almost always a waste of time when you're writing for film because most of the stuff just never gets produced. When they pull a trigger on a TV show, when they make the first one, they've got the make the rest of them. There's a commitment there. This huge ball has begun to roll down the hill and they can't stop it. So I knew what I wrote would wind up on screen in some way.

I mean, yeah, you can take the money. Most of the public doesn't realize this, but there's a lot of people living fat out there who have never had a movie produced from what they've written. And I guess they don't care. But I do care. I don't have that time to waste anymore. I could be writing a book that I know will get published rather than writing for a film that will never get made. I won't do that anymore.

You -- and Simon -- have both talked about how the politics in the show are really important to you, too. Can you describe what you mean by that?

[Simon's] going out there and presenting the world the way it really is. He's not trying to present answers to anybody, or even trying to inject his politics. He's laying it out in a reportorial way. And it's what I try in my books also. I try and leave my voice and my politics out of it.

The crime aspect of it, to both of us, is the least interesting part of it. It's just a vehicle to heighten the drama. It's all about why they're doing it.

It is political in the way it does portray problems, though. The first season surely raised more questions about the futility of the war on drugs, than, say, any number of "Dateline" or "60 Minutes" segments.

Or newspaper articles.

Or newspaper articles. So is there a cause at all involved here? Are you trying to, I don't know, do good?

[Pause.] No.

You can't hope for that much. You can hope that when people turn the set off, or close the book, that they're now going to look at the world a little differently, when they're rolling their windows up and locking their doors when they're driving through that neighborhood.

If anything comes across in these shows or these books it's the waste, you know? And the failure of the phony drug war. Yes, drugs destroy lives, but the drug war is destroying entire neighborhoods.

"The Wire" does offer a pretty strong corrective to the type of shows -- the Dick Wolf "Law & Order" franchise, "NYPD Blue" -- that most viewers have been weaned on, where the issues are wrapped up tidily in an hour. They portray plenty of drug dealers, but they're never going to be read as metaphors for the war on drugs.

The one thing we don't want to do is make people comfortable with the world they've just seen. We do want to entertain them, but we do want them to feel uncomfortable so that they do think about this world differently. Network television in particular and most films try and leave you with the impression that, you know, the world really is all right. Black people and white people, we really are all the same deep down inside. And, if you just stay in school you will get out of that neighborhood.

You know, the world doesn't work that way.

Are there specific shows you're talking about?

Yeah. "The District" is really an insult to the people who live here [in Washington], and it's also a racist show. It tells people, "If we could only bring in a white police chief to come in here and clean up these Negroes who have messed up this city, everything will be all right." Nobody in D.C. watches that show, because they know it's bullshit, and they know it's a lie. But the real crime is that in other parts in the country people will watch that and think, "Hmm, you know what, that's right, that's all we need." And all that is, is people making money off of other people's misfortune. CBS should be ashamed of that show.

So "The Wire" is a corrective to shows like that, right? Which is not a bad thing. It's a good thing. You're doing good, right?

You're not going to make me say that. It's too big a claim. You can only hope that you can make people look at the world a little differently.

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