The show that we weirdly sometimes get compared to, and I don’t think that the comparison is unfair, but I’ve read it in a few reviews, is The Wire. As the show has gone on, I see slightly what they mean. David Simon obviously writes from a very journalistic point of view, and the show is slightly drier than ours and much more political and dense. We started from a very narrow field of view on the trading floor, and the characters were very young, and as me and Mickey have grown up and as the show grew up, we matured and realized that we could put our concerns onto the show, and it could carry the weight of that a little more. So we make the show every two years; we do a 12-week writers room; we get into the room, and 18 months of stuff have happened in the world, and the feeling we have about the world, whether that’s cynicism or fear about authoritarianism, just bleeds into the show. We couldn’t write Season 4 of the show without writing about entrepreneurship or authoritarianism; it’s stuff we find interesting and feels like it’s true to the world of the characters and the world that they are operating in, because the show is not a one-to-one copy of the world; everything is elevated and more operatic, but it can be a kind of truth without there being a documentarian need. Truth and reality are slightly different when it comes to making television or film, and I think the show is not 100% real but totally true.
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