DX: The Wire has taken risks (knocking off Bell mid-season, ridding itself of Avon Barksdale, killing Omar mid episode) that conventional shows would never attempt. What kind of flack did HBO give your team when these ideas were put across?
EB: HBO, by the third season, was definitely on board. The logic (in killing Stringer Bell) is that Stringer’s story came to an end.  And if you are servicing a story, you can’t punch a hole in the story and try to make this guy go on. All the forces were coming at him. He fought the good fight and he was the reformer on the criminal side. He was Ellis Carver’s (Seth Gilliam) opposite. And as Carver had to be put down, as we do in sort of the middle class way by being relieved of duty, in Stringer’s world they do it with a bullet. It made absolute sense to do this. To do anything else would have been betrayal of the story. It’s all about the story. If you dedicate it to a character, then that character takes predominance over the story and you lose the logic of what you are working on.

DX: Were you wrestling with the idea of killing Omar’s character? Many people came to love Omar but others thought that his time was up.
EB: To follow the logic of the fourth season. You had to have Michael (Tristan Wilds) step up and Dukie (Jermaine Crawford) step up and fill the boots of Bubs (Andre Royo) and fill the boots of Omar (Michael K Williams). Omar had to step offstage. Dennis Lehane was the writer who really put forth the idea of not waiting until the ninth or the tenth episode to kill Omar. We did it in the eighth episode. We did it quick so the audience and Omar would have no sense of it. That’s the way these guys get killed. There’s no rhyme or reason to it a lot of times. You are just on the wrong corner at the wrong time and catch a bullet.

DX: I’ve read somewhere that Omar wasn’t initially supposed to last as long in The Wire as he had. Did that grow organically to keep him around?
EB: What Omar gave us was the mythological character if you will. He was the one above the institutions. He was what we all wanted to be. He was free of the ties that bind. The ties that bind him down were of his own making and his own personal way of being. He’s always out there. There was no thought of doing him in until we were very close to the end. He was too compelling. His relationship with Bunk and the two worlds that you see in George Pelecanos’ episode in season three are the contrasts of how two guys who went to the same high school end up. Omar was Omar. He became one of these characters that you just knew how to write for.

DX: He is indeed an amazing character. Was he based off an individual that you dealt with in the past?
EB: He’s not based off of one individual. Here’s a little bit of the police world for you. If you go and “work a neighborhood”, you need information and that’s the name of the game. Everything that the police are doing today in places like Baltimore is wrong. It’s not getting information. As you start to talk to people, the person who is most vulnerable is the drug stick up guy. Because he carries a gun, it’s that simple. When I was doing what I did - before the feds came in with the 15 year minimum mandatory for handgun possession if you’ve had two priors convictions - back when I was involved in the late '70s and early '80s when you got maybe two or three years for the same crime. It wasn’t like you had this incredible wall that you had to get over with the judges. So you would seek these guys out and lock them up for the pistol, you make a deal with them and you stick with your side of the deal. It’s amazing. These guys always stuck to their side of the deal.There was this thing where you could actually go to them with nothing hanging over them and they would help you out.  Because in a sense, the ones that I know, they despised their addictions. They despised the drug dealers. There was a hatred there. If they understood that you were going after bad guys, they had people that would give you information right out of the blue. They would just call you up.

One of the guys I met was very soft spoken. He was a ferocious stick-up guy but he had a very gentle way of being. You would never ever expect him to be one of these guys. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen these guys, but if you are watching a drug corner and you see all the guys take off and maybe thirty seconds around the corner comes a guy. This was the type of guy you wouldn’t expect the corner boys to take flight from. He was just a very gentle and quiet guy. But he didn’t play. He was amazing in that gentleness and sincerity, which became the seeds to Omar. Then we sprinkled in guys that I knew to create the character. Michael K Williams did an unbelievable job portraying that character. Continued on page 3 »