In the wake of Katrina, what you're witnessing and what we are very careful to depict is a form of patriotism.

In Baltimore they can't do police work to save their lives. Now because of Freddie Gray they're not even getting out of the car and policing corners - they're on a job slowdown, basically. Right now if the police stopped being brutal, if we got police shooting under control, and the use of excessive force, if we have a meaningful societal response to all that stuff, and the racism that underlies it, the question still remains: what are they policing, and why?

Lawrence Gilliard Jr. is a fine actor and I've always felt some residual guilt that we killed him so early in The Wire. It was always planned that way; we didn't kill him because of anything he did, we don't kill off actors just to do it.

If I had to guess and put a name on it, I'd say that at some point, the drug war was as much a function of class and social control as it was of racism.

Rural America's not coming back. That idea was lost with the Industrial Revolution.

What we've learned from the whole election cycle of 2016 President elections is men and women, men particularly, are pretty comfortable talking about women in terms that - I think it's hard for me to not believe this has been influenced by fifty years of open pornography and that kind of culture.

Most of TV works this way: You try to get something up and running, and once you do, you just try to keep it going, because there's a lot of money involved.