Yesterday David Simon gave an interview to the Times’ ArtsBeat blog in which he slammed pretty much anyone who watched The Wire after its initial airing. Today he’s apologizing for some of the comments he made in that interview. Kind of. He tells HitFix’s Alan Sepinwall:
“Let me say this: my apologies to anyone for saying, or trying to say, “You’re not cool if you didn’t get to ‘The Wire’ early, and I only want you to watch the show on my terms.â€
Then he goes off on a very, very long diatribe complaining about Grantland’s bracketology feature on The Wire, and he basically tells people … to watch the show on his terms. Simon says critics shouldn’t review individual episodes of episodic television shows because, “You would never see anyone review a novel in similar fashion.†Sepinwall gently tries to explain to Simon that TV and novels are different mediums, but Simon doesn’t really budge. He maintains the same stance: “[A]t the end of the piece, what the goals actually were become self-evident.â€