All the Pieces Matter: The Inside Story of The Wire

by Jonathan Abrams

DENNIS LEHANE (WRITER): We were trying to break a transition in an episode once, where McNulty and Greggs needed to gather the information necessary to figure out Bubbles’s whereabouts. We’d been at it for a couple hours, just banging on the box, and it was turning into a time suck, all over this minor transition. So, I said, “I know it’s not pretty, but what if we just have McNulty and Greggs happen across a CI [confidential informant] and ask where Bubbles is? And the CI says, “The soup kitchen on such and such?” So, Ed Burns, who hates anything that smells even a little bit like it was something he ever saw on a shitty network cop show, leans back and folds his arms and stares across the table with a kind of bemused contempt. And he says, “In twenty years as Bal’more police, I never, not once, just happened to come across a CI who was conveniently in possession of the location of another CI on the other side of the city. I mean, who is this guy, fucking Huggy Bear?” And there was much snickering and pained looks of pity and commiseration for me and my dumbass idea. And for the rest of the week, Ed called me Huggy Bear or Starsky or Hutch. The takeaway there was: Don’t cut corners, even if it’s a lot harder not to. Taught me more about how to write good TV than just about any lesson I can think of.