You know when you look at “The Wire” and you look on the corners, that’s a culture that you’re looking at. You’re privileged to see another way of being. And if you’re interested in that, you have a dire obligation to make that as real as possible and to give the details for viewers to begin to see how this is shaped, why it’s shaped that way, why people act the way they do.
— Ed Burns, the writer of “The Wire” and “Generation Kill” in a Salon article.