Once you had the kids on the show last season, did you have trouble realizing that you were going to weave them into some pretty awful fates down the road?
No, we knew they were going there. Let me just say this: We're not being manipulative in any cynical way about marching those characters towards tragedy. If you read "
The Corner
" [the book Simon wrote with Ed Burns], of the kids that we followed, two are alive, two were shot to death as teenagers, and another is in prison. We looked at what happened to the kids that we followed when they were 14 or 15, and looked at what had happened to them by the time they were 17 or 18, and "The Wire's" story reflects the odds.
From Salon.com:
http://dir.salon.com/story/ent/tv/fe...mon/index.html