Interviewed on The Culture Show in 2008, David Simon let viewers in on a little secret about his HBO show The Wire. Citing the show’s novelistic approach to storytelling – with a lack of exposition, and complex, multi-layered plots – host Lauren Laverne asked him about the “contempt” The Wire showed for the average viewer. “What about the casual viewer?” she said, bewildered. “People who want to dip in, dip out?” Simon just shook his head. Looking over his shoulder, and leaning forward conspiratorially, he whispered: “Fuck the casual viewer.”
It was a controversial statement, not least because broadcast television was specifically designed to accommodate the casual viewer. As the former TV producer John Ellis, now professor of media arts at Royal Holloway, London, wrote in 1982, typically, television was supposed to be “a casual experience rather than an intensive one”. Because it was intended to be watched at home, TV could not “assume the same level of attention from its viewers that cinema can from its spectators”. For Ellis, proof of this was the simple fact that broadcast TV in the 20th century had not “produced a group of telephiles to match the cinephiles who have seen everything and know the least inconsequential detail” about prestige cinema – an aside that now seems thrillingly out of date. When The Wire was being made in the early Noughties, the idea that you could deliberately alienate the majority of TV viewers and go in search of a more devoted audience seemed radically new.
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