Ed Burns writes about people at work: police, dealers, Marines, a Newark family, all answering to organisations that do not much care for them. With David Simon he has made some of the most patient television going, and some of the most tiring.
Fi1m perspective
Nobody in an Ed Burns script is simply good at their job. A detective in The Wire (2002) has a case and a superior who would prefer nobody bothered; a Marine in Generation Kill (2008) has orders and no idea why. The scene, again and again, is someone wanting something done and someone else deciding whether to authorise it, and Burns treats that argument as the drama, with the gunfire as an interruption. It is an odd way to make television and it works more often than not.
The habit comes from twenty years as a Baltimore police detective, in homicide and narcotics, and then several years teaching in the city's middle schools after he retired in 1991. He wrote the nonfiction book The Corner with David Simon, about a year on a Baltimore drug corner, and the partnership that followed has now run to five series. The Wire ran five series and remains the spine of the work. Generation Kill took the method to Iraq, adapting Evan Wright's book by staying close to one unit of Marines through the early invasion. The Plot Against America (2020) turned Philip Roth's novel into six quiet hours about the Levins of Newark, watching Charles Lindbergh win the presidency in 1940. We Own This City (2022), written with George Pelecanos, went back to Baltimore's police and their corruption; we have not reviewed it and will not judge it here.
What Burns brings is detail nobody would think to invent. The fourth series of The Wire, set in the schools, is where his years of teaching show, and the investigations of the earlier series carry the same weight of having been lived. In Generation Kill the men are not made easy to like: Alexander Skarsgård's Brad Colbert holds the crowded company steady, and James Ransone's Josh Ray Person makes the filthy talk funny without smoothing away how much it grates. We laughed at that banter, then felt uncomfortable at how quickly we had accepted its terms, and the discomfort was the point: Simon and Burns let the jokes bind the men before we notice what the jokes contain.
The reservation is the same each time. Over five series of The Wire, people accommodate themselves to bad arrangements until we can predict the shape of the next compromise. The military language in Generation Kill can exhaust. The Plot Against America is thin in the middle and hurried at the end. Burns has said his aim is "To make characters into characters, not cliches. Just as we did on The Wire." He does, and then arranges the world so that none of them can win. That is honest, and after forty hours of it we sometimes wanted the writing to leave a little room for surprise.
Start with The Wire and give it three episodes before deciding; the detail has a purpose and it takes that long to see it. Then Generation Kill, which is shorter and funnier and no kinder. Burns is now approaching eighty, and his last two series were both adaptations of other people's reporting and fiction. We would like one more from his own notebook.
Biography
Ed Burns is an American screenwriter and television producer. He worked for twenty years as a detective with the Baltimore Police Department before becoming a public school teacher. He later collaborated extensively with David Simon on several HBO projects.
Burns served as writer, producer and co-creator of the series The Wire (2002–2008). With Simon he also wrote and produced the miniseries The Corner (2000), Generation Kill (2008), The Plot Against America (2020) and We Own This City (2022). He co-authored the book on which The Corner was based.
Burns received a Writers Guild of America Award nomination for his work on the fifth season of The Wire.
