Life Imitates Wire in Philly

THE 'DICK' IN DICKENS The Wire's Klebanow Those gay for The Wire must have loved seeing the news that the Philadelphia Inquirer is doing a series about the homeless.

In this, the last, season of the Best Show on Television©, there's a newspaper subplot, set at a fictitious version of the Baltimore Sun. The paper sets off on a hollow series about the homeless, anchored by a fabricated story—the plot is said to be partly inspired by show creator and former Sun reporter David Simon's nemesis, editor Bill Marimow. (Marimow is mirrored in The Wire as Thomas Klebanow, the patrician weasel heading up the Sun's Pulitzer-humping series.) In real life, the Inquirer's homeless series is being spearheaded by none other than the real Marimow.

Via an assistant, Marimow declined to comment further on the life-imitating-art nature of the series (both the show and the homeless series)—"He is as monomaniacal as Captain Ahab pursuing the white whale," Marimow said of Simon, employing a Melville reference in an October New Yorker story about The Wire. But we're sure the real life Inquirer series will play up the Dickensian aspect of the homeless story, too.