David Simon = Genius

Why, you ask? It's not just because his show "The Wire" is perhaps the greatest achievement the medium has yet produced, even though, as I've told some friends before, if Simon were to write and produce a 12-hour miniseries on the plight of plumbers in America, I'd be his bitch and faithfully watch all twelve episodes. The attention to detail, use of dialogue, and level of characterization that rivals any good novel, both in his nonfiction and television work, are on a par with nobody else writing for TV in the country. Not even David Chase.

But why do I really love David Simon? Because of quotes like this:

My standard for verisimilitude is simple and I came to it when I started to write prose narrative: fuck the average reader. I was always told to write for the average reader in my newspaper life. The average reader, as they meant it, was some suburban white subscriber with two-point-whatever kids and three-point-whatever cars and a dog and a cat and lawn furniture. He knows nothing and he needs everything explained to him right away, so that exposition becomes this incredible, story-killing burden. Fuck him. Fuck him to hell.

You people can have Dick Wolf and your Law and Orders. I'm sticking with Simon.