As America went into coronavirus lockdown in March, HBO reported a surge in viewership for a number of its programs, including The Wire, David Simon’s riveting chronicle of drug slingers, cops, politicians, and folks just trying to get by in Baltimore. The show, which turns 18 in June, is now in the enviable position of having tripled its usual audience. Apparently, quarantine has allowed many folks to finally watch—or rewatch—the series, which routinely shows up on lists of the greatest TV shows of all time.

Last week, I spoke to creator David Simon about both The Wire and The Plot Against America, a new limited series from Simon and co-creator Ed Burns. What follows is an edited version of our conversation about two dramas that examine the uses and abuses of power.

Are more people reaching out to you about The Wire right now?

Yeah. There seems to be a little bit of [that]...I’m happy it’s had the shelf life it’s had. I’m a little bit amused at the contrariness of the fact that I have a miniseries running now [The Plot Against America] that I spent the last three years working on. So the idea that that thing’s in its first run—and people are watching The Wire now, or talking about watching The Wire now—is a little bit contrary. I have to laugh at that. I mean, five years from now or 10 years from now, they’ll be looking at The Plot Against America. If I’m still making TV then, they won’t be watching what I’m putting on the air then. That’s the standard vibe I have, which is, nobody watches the stuff when it’s actually broadcast.

Well, the work that you and your collaborators do certainly has staying power.

I think TV’s become [about] that in a sense, because of streaming and downloads, and even the generation before with DVDs, to some extent. It’s become a lending library. People are finding Treme now, people are finding The Deuce. Those shows are long gone as well. I feel like if you can get it on the shelf, it’s pretty much like a book—it will be found by the people who are looking for that book, or something like it.

Have the things that people bring up to you when they talk about The Wire changed a lot over time?

Not really. People seem to respond to the same things. They’re acquiring it at different moments in their lives. I’d say the thing [that’s different is] people are not experiencing it while it’s being broadcast, they’re basically binge-watching it on their own terms. So there’s a lot less of the, “Oh, I hated season two; there were too many white people. Oh, I hated season five.”

[When it was on,] these things were debated on a weekly basis without anybody being able to stand back and look at the whole. To us, it was always a whole. Yeah, there were separate seasons and they each had a theme, but it was structured as a whole, as 60 hours. Now it’s being experienced as that…. They may like it, they may not like it, but at least they’re taking it as the whole meal. That’s probably a little bit better.

It’s not that TV had never been serialized before, but around that time, there was a new approach in the sophistication of serialized drama. The Wire helped people get familiar with an approach to storytelling that we are now much more used to.