David Simon’s “The Deuce” Charts the Rise of Pornography

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 29 September 2017

⏱️ 32 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

David Simon believes in the dignity of labor, “even when it’s undignified.” What “The Wire” (which he created) did for the drug trade in Baltimore, “The Deuce,” also on HBO, does for sex work and the beginnings of the pornography industry in New York, in the seventies. Critics have compared Simon not so much to other television showrunners as to novelists like Dickens; Simon’s work is similarly wide in scope, with large casts, and aims to create a picture of a whole world. At bottom, he wants to follow the money from the street to the bosses to the politicians. But while Simon is sympathetic to the sex workers he depicts in “The Deuce,” and even to some of the pimps and mobsters who exploit them, he is unambiguously critical of porn’s effect on America. He tells David Remnick that porn—universally available on the Internet in its most extreme forms—has warped a whole culture toward misogyny. Plus, Ellie Kemper as a character with pathological delusions of gracefulness; and the rapper Wiki grows up.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hi, it's David Remnick. Before we start the show today, I want to extend an invitation.
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1:14.6	I basically just think it would be interesting to look at the emergence of a criminal economy.
1:19.6	And also I'm always amazed that there aren't more profiles of her out there,
1:24.6	this really subversive, strange thing, in rap especially, and see what
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1:40.9	Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. A new show by David Simon isn't just a new television show. It's a real event. Critics have compared him not so much to other showrunners, but to 19th century novelists like Charles Dickens. 15 years ago, he created The Wire on HBO, and it traced the underworld and politics and street life of Baltimore.
2:03.0	It was an ambitious piece of sociology as much as it was great storytelling. It was dense.
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2:15.2	What The Wire did for the drug trade in Baltimore,
	...

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