A crime novelist who learned television on The Wire and has spent twenty years writing, with David Simon, drama that trusts a car stop over a speech. In the street his series are among the best around; indoors, explaining themselves, less so.
Fi1m perspective
Somebody in a George Pelecanos episode is always at work. A cook on a bad night, a plain-clothes officer on a car stop, a musician playing a whole number while the plot waits outside. The detail is the point: how people talk when the job is going badly, what they say to each other in the car, who is a local and who is passing through. On The Wire (2002) he wrote the penultimate episode of each of the five seasons, the hour before the finale, which on that programme is where the worst things happen. We will say no more about them than that they are the hours people remember.
He came to television from the page. He had been writing crime novels set in Washington since 1992, about working-class neighbourhoods, race, basketball and the music of the 1970s, when David Simon brought him onto The Wire. He has said of it: "I never went to a writing school, so The Wire was my writing school." He wrote for The Pacific (2010) and for Simon and Eric Overmyer's Treme (2010), then co-created The Deuce (2017) and We Own This City (2022) with Simon. He has kept writing novels throughout, King Suckerman (1997) and The Night Gardener (2006) among them, and readers have noted that the later ones keep close to the crime-fiction formula.
It is hard to say where a writer ends and a room begins on a Simon series, and we will not pretend otherwise. But the things Pelecanos is known for are the things we praised. In Treme the arguments about who is a real local and who is a tourist have the sourness of people who have had them for real, and the series earns its slowness by putting work and music on screen at full length. In We Own This City, when Jon Bernthal's Wayne Jenkins does his talking on a car stop, everything the series wants to say about how a police department goes rotten is said in the action. We could not look away from him, and we did not need anyone to tell us what we were looking at.
Then Wunmi Mosaku's Nicole Steele sits down at a conference table and somebody explains what we have just watched. We felt lectured, and we started noticing how much of each hour was talk. That is the recurring weakness of the Simon and Pelecanos partnership: a great deal to say about institutions, and a habit of saying it twice, once through the drama and once through a meeting, as if the drama might not have been trusted.
Start with The Wire, obviously, and then Treme, which is the purest version of what these writers do: people at work, no hurry, the wreckage in the background. We Own This City is worth an evening and is not The Wire, and it knows it. He will be back in Baltimore or Washington before long, and someone will be at work when he gets there.
Biography
George Pelecanos is an American novelist, television writer and producer. Born in Washington, D.C. in 1957, he has written more than twenty crime novels set primarily in the city.
On television he has frequently collaborated with David Simon. He wrote multiple episodes of the HBO series The Wire (2002) and Treme, and co-created The Deuce (2017) and We Own This City (2022) with Simon. He also contributed to The Pacific (2010) and Bosch (2015).
