For five years this writer ignored The Wire. There were, frankly, a few too many sermons, especially from typically non-TV-watching folks, about how important, how moral, how real the show is. But when the fall of 2007 brought a mostly useless crop of new shows, and the writer’s strike burned what was left over from before, The Wire beckoned. Through 50 episodes, as the show shifted its focus each season from drug corners to the shipyard to city hall to the schools, I was dragged to parts of Baltimore that, despite having grown up just 30 miles away, I’d never seen, and never will. I was swept out to the docks past Fell’s Point and Canton, the haunts of my teens and 20’s. I was drowned in the state and local politics that have bedeviled my mother for her nearly 20 years as an aide to a Maryland state senator. And I was pushed through the doors of a middle school, to see the boys and girls of the inner city who are forced to grow up way too fast, not to mention the crass effects of No Child Left Behind. (The Wire actually manages to turn standardized-test-taking into a dramatic event.) I was impressed, of course. The show was as good as everyone said. It’s indisputable.

The Wire was created by a former crime reporter for the Baltimore Sun named David Simon, who works closely with a former Baltimore police officer and school teacher named Ed Burns. And it inspires a journalist with all kinds of ideas about the kind of work she should be doing instead of, well, writing about television. She could be, should be, reporting the stories of the cracks in New York City’s streets and whoever falls into them; or the stories of the other, ungentrified, Brooklyn; or of failing schools and the bureaucratic nightmares of social service. She could even be a police detective! Pow!

For inspiration there are plenty of “good police”—or uncorrupted cops—on The Wire from which to choose your career model: Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West), the immoral, reckless, brilliant (lady-killing) detective with a predictable Irish-civil-servant-on-television weakness for Jameson’s (or Jamie, as it’s affectionately called); the Bunk (Wendell Pierce), the droll, flashy, often sloppily drunk police poet who might also be the straightest one on the squad; or Kima Greggs (Sonja Sohn), the fearless lesbian cop who can work any angle of a case perfectly.

And surely a DVD marathon of the show has spurred not a few corporate lawyers to contemplate migrating to Legal Aid, and private school teachers to consider braving East New York and the South Bronx. The show opens up a window on inner city life that before now has been mostly closed, or shattered, so that the only view comes in refracted angles and slivers. The Wire lets us in and seduces us into thinking that we can all be better than we are. The problem is that too often a viewer can think that she is making a difference by merely watching the show. When critics proclaim its greatness, we are also congratulating ourselves for watching and not flinching—when, in our actual lives, we continue to look the other way.

DAVID SIMON HAS described The Wire as a “novel for television” with each episode “like a chapter in a book,” and the metaphor has come in handy whenever a critic is in search of high praise. “Broadcast literature,” ventures the Baltimore City Paper. “Echoes of the Victorian social panorama of Charles Dickens,” proclaims Slate. “Television’s most novelistic experience,” announces The San Francisco Chronicle.

This is all right, of course. The show sprawls. An episode can follow perhaps seven or eight subplots at a time, some of which continue and others of which last only a few minutes; over an entire season, that’s a hell of a lot to follow. But with The Wire, as with a big old book, you know not to worry so much about the minor characters. Half the time they show up only to die, to give their lives over to the richness of the whole.

But forget the novel for a second. Season five fronts another print model for David Simon: the newspaper. Sure, it might be Bleak House, with characters named Slim Charles and Proposition Joe instead of Skimpole and Tulkinghorn; but the show is also a kind of broadsheet, laid open, jumbled and urgent and loud with the city’s many stories. Threads from previous seasons get woven into the show’s new focus, the Baltimore Sun, where we spend a considerable amount of time watching editors and reporters fail their city. What becomes clear is that The Wire has become the map of Baltimore that its daily newspaper once was, and Mr. Simon believes it isn’t anymore. The show allows him to continue reporting on all the stories he followed as a writer, but couldn’t finish. At one point, a reporter complains that her piece about a triple homicide gets hacked in half and buried in the B section of the Sun; but in The Wire those killings and their aftermath make up the horrible, bloody center of the episode. Now that he’s running a television show instead of toiling at the city desk, Mr. Simon won’t allow ledes to be buried.

The Wire has always been personal, but it’s almost ridiculously so in season five. Unfortunately, the producers’ didacticism is upfront more than ever, thanks to the focus on the Sun. Where the show used to assume very much of its viewers, leaving them on their own to decipher “Bawlmorese” or master dozens of characters’ nicknames to unpack the chain of police command, now it can’t help but indulge in mini-sermons on the demise of America’s newspapers, more appropriate to Romenesko than The Wire. If earlier seasons dared a budding journalist to dream of telling the stories of our cities that go untold, this season would advise that time’s better spent on, well, writing television.

After all, David Simon is apparently so influential in Baltimore at this point that the Sun allowed him to use their name and logo—all so he can kick them when they’re down. He’s not wrong about anything, but The Wire has always been a delicate, refined piece of work. But as the season, almost certainly intentionally, devolves its gritty realism into some kind of Beckett-like absurdism, it sometimes seems as though Mr. Simon forgot that, as one character reminds another in season five, there’s a b in subtle.

THIS PAST FRIDAY, as I was preparing to write this piece, I was robbed while having a drink at a wine bar in my neighborhood. It wasn’t a violent crime; my bag was lifted off the back of the chair and whisked away with an alacrity that was hard not to admire. My friend called the police. An officer was on the scene within minutes. He took my description of the perpetrators and sped off in his wagon, hoping to find the woman in a red puffy coat who had swiped my blue messenger bag. Another officer took a police report.

I expected that to be it. But two days later, early on Sunday, a detective called to ask me about what happened. He’d be handling my case, he said. I recounted the facts to him, and he explained to me the dangers of identity fraud in cases like this. He called me back again to ask more questions, and asked if I’d come in later in the week to look at photos. I told him I would.

When I hung up, my husband shook his head. “So McNulty can’t get an extra detective for a huge mass murder case against a major drug dealer in Baltimore [this is a plot line in season five], but you’ve got a guy totally devoted to working your purse-snatching?”

Sure, it’s comparing fact to fiction, but he had a point. It’s just the kind of thing that drives Mr. Simon crazy: focusing on the little things, missing the bigger picture. Like the small quality-of-life infractions that mayors love to pursue and the police despise (open containers, bikes on sidewalks, loitering and noise), chasing my missing bag seems like an exercise in futility. Then again, my detective could just be “good police,” working his neighborhood beat, taking care of his community.

No matter how petty the crime, Mr. Simon would have nothing but admiration for that. The only time Jimmy McNulty was sober and happy, he’d quit the murder police to patrol the streets of West Baltimore in a uniform, to protect his own people.

Fox includes The Winner in its Sunday-night post-Simpsons lineup starting March 4. Former Daily Show correspondent Rob Corddry plays Glen Abbott, a now-successful businessman who discovers that Alison McKellar (Erinn Hayes), the only woman he’s ever kissed—a consolation prize after a sucker punch—has moved home next-door to care for her ailing mother. Abbot immediately bonds with her son, Josh McKellar (Keir Gilchrist), simultaneously celebrating and exploiting the notion that men mature at a pathetic pace compared to their female counterparts.

ABC is using its popular Grey’s Anatomy to lead viewers into midseason drama October Road on March 15. Road stars One Tree Hill’s Bryan Greenberg as Nick Garrett, a successful author whose hometown-based novel became a best-seller. When a case of writer’s block consumes him, Garret decides to move back home after a 10-year absence, gets a job at the local university, and finds that his novel has fractured past relationships. Self-absorbed writers all across New York will relate.

After 12 years on public radio, and boasting 1.7 million listeners a week, host Ira Glass—along with indie film producer Christine Vachon (Boys Don’t Cry, Happiness)—adapts the stories of real American experience in a television version of This American Life. A breath of fresh air for “reality television”! It premieres March 22 on Showtime.

Calling Kevin Bacon …. That show is back! (Pregnant Bridget Moynahan, too!) Yep, the Six Degrees folks are giving it another go. Six Degrees, a Lost-esque drama by the same producers, takes place on the far more populated island of Manhattan and follows the intersecting paths of six characters. Based on a mysterious “theory” about six people, six episodes aired in September to lukewarm reviews. One good thing—the stars sure are hot. Six Degrees returns to ABC on March 23.

Jonathan Rhys-Meyers is leaping into the pool of big-screen actors settling down, temporarily at least, for the small screen. After carefully testing the waters as the King of Rock ’n’ Roll in the Golden Globe–winning miniseries Elvis, Mr. Rhys-Meyers now plays King Henry VIII in the infancy of his 40-year reign. The series chronicles the king’s coquetry with Catherine of Aragon and Anne Boleyn, as well as his relationships with philosopher Sir Thomas More. The Tudors premieres April 1.

On April 8, The Sopranos returns to finish what it started last year, concluding the series with eight final episodes. The first 12 episodes of season six, which premiered on March 12, 2006, found Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) in a coma after being shot by a delusional Uncle Junior (Dominic Chianese), leaving his capos without a clear successor. When Tony wakes up, the world is even more intolerant of Jersey’s Cosa Nostra. Is this the end of our Tony? Will this season be better than last season? Please, Mr. Chase!

That same night, the Entourage boys return from their vacation to have what would seem to the rest of us like, well, a vacation. As his celebrity stock rises, Vinny (Adrian Grenier) finds that his relationship with agent Ari Gold (Jeremy Piven) has become increasingly tense. Vinny will either stick with his super-agent, or leave him for greener pastures. But could they really get rid of Jeremy Piven? Come on!

And so another Golden Globes has come and gone, an award event favored by TV viewers who know that, unlike the gravitas-laden Oscars, there’s a high probability of seeing their favorite star get sloshed on white wine and slur his way through presenting (cough … cough … Harrison Ford). Plus it’s the only awards show that mixes television and movie stars in one uncomfortable caste-system night.

Mainly, the Golden Globes are about the partying, the dressing-up and celebrity mixing at the Beverly Hilton, where—within one cavernous compound—the studios all host after-parties with security checkpoints that would put J.F.K. airport to shame. The anxiety was palpable: “Where are you going? Did you get into this one? I just came from In Style—it sucked; try HBO’s …. ” And so on.

Los Angeles is one of those places where all the clichés turn out to be true. The traffic really is a disaster, people actually do drive around with the top down yapping into cellular headsets, each cocktail waitress is thinner, prettier and blonder than the next, movie stars really are shorter in person, and the sky is—somewhat disturbingly—a constant, sparkling spick-and-span blue.

But judging from last weekend’s freakish cold snap—record-breaking lows in the 30’s—one thing that Angelenos don’t know how to handle is real weather. Many establishments, lacking adequate heating, were forced to rely on tall outdoor heaters. And apparently no one in L.A. has ever heard of a coat check. This led to some awkward valet situations, as celebrities were forced to huddle and shiver in plain sight while waiting for their cars (favorite group huddle: a grinning Alec Baldwin, a teensy Bill Maher and Arianna Huffington outside of the L.A. Confidential magazine party).

But for the Golden Globes themselves, the temperatures were nothing short of a disaster. Women with couture gowns certainly didn’t want to cover up. And most of the post-award parties had some sort of outdoor element, creating a new category of celebrity sightings: look who’s hanging out under the heat lamp.

Paramount Pictures was a big winner—Dreamgirls for best picture in the musical or comedy category, with Eddie Murphy and Jennifer Hudson winning best supporting awards, with Babel (under the Paramount Vantage label) winning as best picture in the drama category. Many Paramount partygoers at the Beverly Hilton attended in the hopes that they’d lay eyes on the holy grail of celebrity gawking: Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie. No such luck. Though their names were constantly invoked as the night went on, the couple was nowhere to be found at any of the parties (according to one report, they hopped on a plane directly after the show).

According to a group of friendly paparazzi perched in front of the Paramount party entrance, Jay-Z and Beyoncé were among the first to arrive, sweeping through the room in grand style but leaving moments after Jennifer Hudson arrived—meouch!—certainly not dispelling any of the rumors of a rivalry between Beyoncé and Ms. Hudson. Steven Spielberg arrived with his step-daughter, the actress Jessica Capshaw, while Patrick Dempsey (a.k.a. “McDreamy”) caused a group of older women to literally swoon as he made it through the door. Sacha Baron Cohen, another winner for best actor (and thankfully not in his unwashed Borat suit), helpfully told a foreign press reporter that his fiancée, the teenily beautiful Australian actress Isla Fisher, was in Wedding Crashers. Later, he was seen feeding her pizza in a secluded corner. (As Borat might say: Niiiiiiiice!)

Nearby, at the HBO party, the Entourage guys stuck together. They joked about having to walk the carpet in front of Brad and Angelina. “In-sane,” said Kevin Connolly, ruefully shaking his head. Jeremy Piven seemed to be carbo-loading, with food piled high on his plate, as Mark Wahlberg, the show’s executive producer and muse, held court like the Godfather at a table, rising only to a half-standing position to greet well-wishers like Brian Grazer. The Big Love cast was one of the only groups to stay put—probably wisely—in one venue. “Where’s my posse at?” yelled Chloë Sevigny, one of the few celebrities who is actually taller in real life, as she entered the room, to be directed to the back.

The hotel lobby between the parties ended up being the place to see and be seen. Hugh Grant stood awkwardly trying to make a phone call as a clump of Grey’s Anatomy cast was ambushed—thwomp!—by fans. The by-now-well-fed Mr. Piven, who had arrived at the awards ceremony with his mom, looked pretty cozy with America’s Next Top Model’s whiny loser, Melrose. The brain bleeds!

But despite the pleasure of being almost stomped on by Rebecca Gayheart, one Golden Globe party veteran claimed that the turnout was weak. “No one is out,” she complained. “No Leo, no Brad and Angelina, no Penélope—I swear the cold is keeping everyone away.” (More importantly, where the heck were they keeping Peter O’Toole?)

The weather, which had been dominating the local news for several days, apparently flummoxed, fashion-wise, some fragile celebrities. Last Saturday, at HBO’s pre–Golden Globes party at the Chateau Marmont, the Olsen twins shivered like lapdogs as they climbed the steps to make their entrance. “Oh. My. God. I so can’t handle this,” said Mary-Kate Olsen, in a floor-length green dress and fur stole. The girls, with their matching platinum hair, scrawny, malnourished bodies and china-doll pouts, even shivered identically.

Inside the Chateau, it was wall-to-wall celebs. New couple Ginnifer (Big Love) Goodwin and one-time Katie Holmes paramour Chris Klein nuzzled at the bar, while Sacha Baron Cohen compared notes with Chris Rock, Jeremy Irons classed things up with Helen Mirren, and Michael Keaton chatted with Bill Paxton. Cuba Gooding Jr. (remember him?) pursued a waitress with puff pastries—show him the yummy!

“The Oscars are like the wife, and the Golden Globes the mistress,” said party host and HBO Films president Colin Callender. Indeed, the mood seemed awfully louche, and with no V.I.P. area, velvet rope or bouncer in sight, leading to all sorts of unfettered celebrity interactions, such as Vincent Gallo chasing down Ivanka Trump for a hug and kiss. The mind reels! And by the way, why is sweet Oscar winner Marisa Tomei engulfed in a big fur coat? And how come Matthew Perry won’t take off his coat?

(Another thing that makes an L.A. party different from a New York bash: all the shoving. It’s hard to imagine thrown elbows and the stomping of Manolos being accepted at, say, the Mercer Hotel. But maybe this is why New York never understood last year’s sappy big winner, Crash: Maybe people in L.A. really do need a little bit of human contact outside of their cars.)

“People are going to hurt their necks if they keep craning them about like this,” said a New York City publicist. But though the Golden Globes were just 48 hours away, no one seemed to be talking about movies. Instead, said E! senior editor Marc Malkin, “people can’t stop talking about Britney’s vagina.” Mr. Malkin, a recent Manhattan émigré, looked around and sighed. “Or else everyone is just talking about the cold weather. It sucks—I moved from New York for this?”

“Look what they’ve done to my teeth,” he said, jabbing a finger at his jaw, his voice tripping into a squeal.

In the picture, part of a poster advertising the Jan. 14 second-season premiere of his show Extras, Mr. Gervais’ teeth are bright white and straight; his skin is tan and smooth, his hair just so. He wears black plastic sunglasses with stars on them, and there’s a tasteful dimple pinched into his right cheek.

In person, in a large, white-ish T-shirt and jeans, the comedian and character actor is a more stereotypically British specimen: pallid skin, slight beard growth, a smile defiantly untamed by orthodontics. Mr. Gervais was tickled by the Photoshopping. Leaning in to examine his perfect, three-inch-tall digital dimple, he giggled. It is one of the qualities his fans find most endearing: Mr. Gervais—a chubby, irritable, viceless, dark, British, atheist genius—laughs like a 9-year-old girl.

“Hoo-hoo!” he cooed. “I’ve gone Hollywood.”

The airbrushing of his giant head is just one more amusing byproduct of Mr. Gervais’ unsought-after and unenjoyed superstardom, a result of the tremendous success of his BBC masterpiece The Office.

Mr. Gervais, 45, hates being famous. He’s writing a stand-up act about it now, called Fame. The new season of Extras, in which he plays fortysomething wannabe actor Andy Millman, takes the lures and perils of notoriety as its main subject.

It all comes through in one particular scene near the end of the season premiere. Andy, who has sold a pilot to the BBC, slumps over to the craft-services table on-set after losing another creative bout with the network suits, who are turning his highbrow comedy into a schlocky sitcom. There he encounters Sean, a middling extra who claims to have given up a supporting role on the EastEnders because the writers were cheapening his character. “I just think you gotta do what you think is right,” Sean tells him prophetically.

Inspired, Andy marches over to Ian, the BBC executive. “This isn’t the comedy I set out to make,” he says. “In fact, I think it’s awful.”

Ian suggests they hash this out in private.

“I don’t care who hears what I have to say,” Andy says, “because I’m at that point now. Everyone’s interfered. It’s embarrassing. I don’t want to be on television for the sake of it. I don’t want to be famous for the sake of it. I want to do something that I’m proud of, and I won’t be proud of shouting out catchphrases in a stupid wig and funny glasses. I want to do what I want to do, otherwise I’ll hate myself for the rest of my life. And I tell you what, a case in point—Sean on EastEnders. They started to turn his character into a joke, and he walked away, at the top of his game. That’s called integrity. It doesn’t matter what happens to him now, ’cause he’s got his dignity.”

Sean, who has filled his coat with candy from the catering table, is watching off-camera. Just as Andy finishes speaking, a few pieces of candy fall to the ground. Then, in an extended gag, the candy comes pouring out from the bottom of his coat, as if from a punctured piñata.

The scene pretty much captures Mr. Gervais’ current worldview. Everywhere he goes, he faces down his own outsized self.

“I have to be louder, more confident, slightly more outrageous than normal,” he said on Dec. 30, on the phone from London, where he lives with his girlfriend of 20 years, a television producer. This makes the standup work a particular exertion. “If it was just me, I’d go up there and say, ‘I don’t really feel like talking.’ But show business doesn’t allow that.”

At the beginning of December, Mr. Gervais was in town for two weeks, helping to promote Night at the Museum, a movie he did with his friend Ben Stiller. Mr. Stiller stars in the film as a head-in-the-clouds security guard at the Museum of Natural History. The plot revolves confusingly around a magical Egyptian tablet that causes the museum exhibits to anthropomorphize after dark. Robin Williams plays Teddy Roosevelt. Dick Van Dyke is one of the villains. Mr. Gervais does a turn as the stammering, inept guy-in-charge—another David Brent, the ne plus ultra of idiot bosses, only in this case with not enough screen time.

Mr. Gervais likes the film because “I’m hooked for anything that starts with a big sweeping shot of Central Park,” he said.

On one of his last days in the city, Mr. Gervais went over to HBO for a two-hour lunch. He had the Caesar salad followed by chicken with gravy, Perrier and a latte. He talked about God, mostly, with side rants about cigarettes, racism, censorship, evangelicals, John Stuart Mill and corporal punishment. He said nothing about Extras, Night at the Museum, his new children’s book, the very successful American version of The Office (of which he is an executive producer), the Christopher Guest movie For Your Consideration (in which he played a small role), or any of his other upcoming projects.

“I don’t even know if it’s innate to be good, to be sociable,” he said in response to a question about his Christmas plans, which led to a discussion of his religious beliefs, or lack thereof, which lead to a monologue about personal morality. “I have no idea. We know what’s right and wrong. We do know that. But I know that I don’t do it for a reward because there isn’t everlasting life. It’s a shame. It’d be great. It’d be amazing. But I’m just—I’m afraid it’s not true. It’s regrettable. It’d be amazing if there were a God. But there isn’t.”

Mr. Gervais holds a degree in philosophy from University College London. The only novel he’s ever read start to finish is The Catcher in the Rye. When he was a little boy, he used to draw pictures of Jesus—“I thought he was terrific. I thought he was a superhero”—until his brother set him straight.

He spent Boxing Day with his family. They got him “socks, jumpers, T-shirts and whiskey.” His girlfriend got him a “lovely carving, a 17th-century Russian box.” He got her a laptop. They had a happy secular Christmas all by themselves, he said. “We painted the house black and I sacrificed a goat.”

Fame will be his third major stand-up act. The first was called Animals, the second Politics. “The title is just a vehicle,” he said. “Those things often are a Trojan horse as a structure to go off on tangents.” This show will be the “purest” in that it is shaping up to be the most autobiographical, he said. “I’m basically myself, but now and then I get things wrong for comic effect.”

He prefers television—although the tension of live comedy does hold a certain appeal. “I like people wondering whether they should laugh or not,” he said. “There is something nice about worrying people for a split second. It’s naughty.”

He explained the problem with most comedy these days. “Good observational comedy is not saying something everyone’s thinking,” he said. “It’s saying something nobody’s thinking until you said it.

“I see these comedians and they’re saying things like, ‘Who remembers ABBA?’ And they get a cheer. And I’m like, ‘What’s that?’ Or, ‘Old people say funny things, don’t they?’ I’ll go, ‘Well, what are you doing with it? That’s found art, that’s all right—but what are you doing with it?’ It’s lazy.”

Mr. Gervais stars in Extras alongside Stephen Merchant, his creative partner and co-writer on The Office. The two recently guest-wrote an episode of the American version of The Office, which stars Steve Carell and which, together with Howie Mandel’s twice-weekly bikini-lady-suitcase-funshow Deal or No Deal, is sustaining all of NBC. Mr. Merchant plays Mr. Gervais’ loser agent in Extras.

“He was doing some standup recently,” Mr. Gervais said, “and his character was a loser blaming the audience for not laughing. There was a guy before him doing the difference between black people and white people, and the audience could not be laughing harder. He thought, ‘So why am I doing this?’ And I said, ‘Because they’re not your audience. You don’t want them.’ The people coming to my shows aren’t the same people going to those shows and laughing when someone says, ‘You know, it’s weird—you bring an umbrella, it doesn’t rain. But you don’t, and it does!’ My head bursts when I hear observational comedy like that.”

These sorts of things weigh heavily on Mr. Gervais.

“Arguing whether something is funny with someone is like arguing whether they’ve got a pain in their leg,” he said. “Largely pointless.”

In the second episode of this season of Extras, Mr. Gervais has written perhaps the finest tragicomic scene for television since David Brent received notice of his redundancy while wearing a chicken suit in the second season of the original Office.

Andy goes to a fancy pub, where a few respectable British showbiz types are taunting him about his crappy TV show. Depressed, Andy buys his way into the V.I.P. area, where he pours his heart out to David Bowie. “I think I’ve sold out, to be honest,” he says. Mr. Bowie listens sympathetically, then swivels around to a previously unseen piano. The entire crowd at the restaurant gathers around, and Mr. Bowie improvises a song.

“Little fat man who sold his soul,” Mr. Bowie sings. He progresses to a vision of Andy’s suicide. “Fatso takes his own life. He blows his bloated face off. No—he blows his stupid brains out. He sold his soul for a shot at fame, catchphrase and wig and the jokes are lame.” The crowd gleefully joins in for a chorus. “Little fat man with the pug-nose face!”

Mr. Gervais sits by on the couch, a fake smile fading from his cheeks.

Met: June 5, 2005

Engaged: Aug. 24, 2006

Projected Wedding Date: Oct. 14, 2006

Meredith Ronayne was a starry-eyed intern at the U.S. Attorney’s office in the Eastern District of New York when she watched Wayne Baker deliver a passionate opening statement in a trial against a gang member, pointing a gun at the jury box for effect.

When the prosecutor sat down, he found a Post-It note from Ms. Ronayne on his desk. Your opening was like foreplay to me, it read.

Yowza!

“Unequivocally, that was the best compliment I ever got for my advocacy skills,” said Mr. Baker, an attractive, olive-skinned 49. For the rest of the summer, he found equally inviting little yellow notes stuck everywhere from his laptop to his cell phone. “I had nothing to lose,” explained the brazen ingénue, 26, a slender brunette with a pixie haircut. But Mr. Baker refused to take the bait. “I didn’t want to make the same mistake as other political officials,” he said.

“I thought, ‘This guy must be either married or gay!’” Ms. Ronayne said. No … just cautious. But when the internship was over, Mr. Baker invited her to be his date at a wedding in Washington, D.C., where they also spent an afternoon at the Ford Theater.

“He has a Lincoln fetish,” said Ms. Ronayne, who’s been playing harp at weddings while she seeks a full-time law position.

“I wouldn’t say it’s a fetish necessarily,” Mr. Baker objected. “Let’s get this clear: I don’t put on a beard and top hat and try to seduce Meredith with that.” No, but we like that image!

A month later, Ms. Ronayne’s landlord in Boerum Hill began eviction proceedings against her because he was selling the building. “My law-school education paid off,” she crowed. “I ended up with a walletful of money.”

Mr. Baker offhandedly offered her residency in his Lynbrook, Long Island house, should she want it.

“Did you really mean what you said?” Ms. Ronayne asked a week after the invitation. Though somewhat taken aback, Mr. Baker said yes, sure he did. “I like to be a man of my word,” he told the Love Beat.

And so Ms. Ronayne abandoned her party life for suburban evenings watching HBO, though the couple does occasionally get out and socialize. “We’ve done the brunch thing and the Hamptons thing,” she said.

A year into their romance, Mr. Baker landed a position as the counselor to the Assistant Secretary for Immigration and Customs Enforcement at the Office of Homeland Security in D.C. Meanwhile, Ms. Ronayne had begun to consider her own homeland security. “We started talking about kids,” she said. “I said, ‘If we want to have kids, we really need to get married.’”

They are planning a small wedding ceremony in the backyard of the Lynbrook house. Ms. Ronayne will wear a stunning two-carat, brilliant-cut, platinum-set diamond flanked by two baguettes—a ring that once belonged to Mr. Baker’s maternal grandmother. He proposed to her on one knee after asking a stranger to take their picture—where else?—in front of the Lincoln Memorial.

Alexandra Morra and Steven Pearlman

Met: September 2005

Engaged: June 29, 2006

Projected Wedding Date: Feb. 10, 2007

Steven Pearlman, 50, a plastic surgeon, plans to marry Alexandra Morra, 35, a freelance writer, before 250 guests at the Angel Orensanz Foundation on Norfolk Street. “She’s buzzing around getting everything done,” the smooth-faced, silver-haired Mr. Pearlman said approvingly of his bride-to-be. “My pet name for her is the Tasmanian Devil.”

They met after Mr. Pearlman responded to a long-lapsed profile that Ms. Morra had posted on Nerve.com. “I thought, ‘This person has energy—a zest for life,’” he said. Her tagline was: I’m the girl most guys are too afraid to approach. “That’s me—I can be a little shy,” Mr. Pearlman admitted. “I thought, ‘Gee, O.K.’”

They agreed to meet for drinks at Eight & a Half, a bar named for the Fellini film, in their mutual neighborhood, the Upper West Side. Ms. Morra, who has smoldering sea-foam-colored eyes and lustrous black curls, walked up to Mr. Pearlman and tapped him on the shoulder. “I was like ‘Whoa!’ inside,” he said. Drinks evolved into dinner, and then he escorted her—chastely—back to her apartment. “She has more potential than anyone I’ve dated in 15 years,” he later told friends.

Ms. Morra, however, was still recovering from a two-year relationship with a prominent newspaper executive. “I didn’t look at him with eyes of true interest,” she said of Mr. Pearlman. “I couldn’t believe I was actually dating someone.”

For the next two months, their movie and museum outings ended with cordial kisses on the cheek. “I was a little bit concerned, hopeful, enthusiastic, frustrated … all of the above,” Mr. Pearlman said.

Then, one night, dining at Raoul’s in Soho after a gallery opening in Chelsea, Ms. Morra felt a sudden emotional whoosh as her ex flushed out of her system. She stood up, walked over to Mr. Pearlman’s side of the table and planted him with a passionate kiss. “I guess things are changing!” he thought to himself.

They spent the winter holidays with friends at a farmhouse in Woodstock, N.Y.; it was the first time Ms. Morra hadn’t gone to her parents’ place in Los Angeles for Christmas. At the end of the trip—spurred, perhaps, by the “perfect” domesticity of their hosts—she decided to move into Mr. Pearlman’s three-bedroom, even though it was undergoing serious renovation. “I felt if we waited, it would put us seven months back in our relationship,” she said.

One evening, he insisted that they return home early after a performance of Jacques Brel Is Alive and Well and Living in Paris.

“There’s something for you on the living-room table,” Mr. Pearlman told her in the foyer.

“In a minute,” Ms. Morra said, sorting mail.

It was a vase filled with long-stemmed red roses. A trail of petals lead to the library—my Lord, to have a library!—which contained a bottle of Dom Perignon on ice. Another trail of petals led to a pillow in the bedroom, under which was a box. “Is this for me?” asked an astonished Ms. Morra, before she opened it to find a platinum-set, cushion-cut, 5-carat diamond bordered by two half-moon baguettes.

Yet the proposal that ensued wasn’t really a surprise. “We both knew we didn’t want anybody else,” she said.

“Certain things had to happen first, in their own time,” Mr. Pearlman said.

“Like a procedure,” Ms. Morra quipped.

“Like surgery.”

The larger point is that the only way blacks seem to make it on television as an ensemble is playing sports or on a comedy. The great dramas that have gripped television culture in the last ten years are white. The HBO all-you-can-eat tables of American life, Six Feet Under, Sopranos, Big Love, Deadwood and so on, are white. I guess only white people have dark currents and struggles in their lives. Or more likely, we're scared of those currents, are conflicted about blacks and crime. I'm told that Deadwood creator David Milch wanted to do a 60s black radical drama, which given his track record would surely be startling and loving and black to the eyeballs, but I'm still waiting.

I guess the old racist line, Darkies just like to dance and sing, is still alive. Now they just like to play ball and make jokes.

In the April 10 issue, the Observer reported, based on documents obtained by the Rocky Mountain News, that the Times might take advantage of a window in its agreement with Discovery Communications that would allow the paper to sell its stake.

—Gabriel Sherman

Why are we here? The call for gay marriage led the way, as its opponents insisted it would. If gay marriage were an ancient institution in temporary abeyance, then its restoration wouldn’t necessarily have anything to do with polygamy. But it isn’t, and so one innovation naturally prepares the way for the other. If the State of Massachusetts marries men and men, and women and women, then why not men and many women?

America owes an apology to the Mormon Church. This is an interesting historical moment for Mormonism. A Mormon, Governor Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, is poised to run for President; meanwhile, our eternal pursuit of happiness casts a backward light on the most troubled pages of Mormon history. What enraged 19th-century Americans about the religion, far more than its claim to having found another Bible written on golden plates in upstate New York, was its practice of polygamy. This aversion drove Mormons from pillar to post, and hauled founder Joseph Smith out of an Illinois jail to be lynched.

Finally, in 1890, the Mormons gave up polygamy (Utah statehood followed six years later). Either the Mormons, with their eyes on the main chance, surrendered one good thing to get a better, or a kind God did his children the favor of suspending a doctrine that had brought them so much trouble. Either way, man or God jumped the gun. All those hard-bitten Mormon schismatics, holed up on the Utah/Arizona border with their wives and their broods, can come out of their many-roomed hideaways and join the mainstream.

Is polygamy such a great thing that we should encourage it? The main reservoirs of polygamy in the world today are Islam and Africa. Although Muslims are not obliged to be polygamists, in many Muslim countries those who can afford the extra wives take them on; while polygamy thrives even in the non-Muslim parts of Africa as a product of custom. As a result, in both worlds there is a cohort of unmarried men, a breeding pool of idleness and frustration, as well as a cohort of multiply married men who are too accustomed to having their way. Neither is socially desirable. One leads to a surplus of potential killers, another to a surplus of potential masterminds.

This is not even considering the damage that polygamy does to women. It’s hard enough to live with one peer; few men will want to live with two or three. Therefore, the redundant wives will be younger and younger. If you’re already married to Abigail Adams, you’ll go for Lolita, not Eleanor Roosevelt. In cults, young women are directed to older men more or less by force. John Humphrey Noyes left Yale Divinity School to found his own quasi-polygamist sect, the Oneida Community, in the 19th century. Noyes talked to St. Paul, which gave him a lot of clout among his disciples; among the cuties he steered his own way was his niece. In our day, David Koresh of the Branch Davidians had his teenagers, before they were all roasted.

If we think we’re immune to such grotesque ménages because we don’t wear beards and don’t pray in tongues, consider the license of the very rich. Sir James Goldsmith, the eccentric Anglo-French billionaire, had two families, one with his wife and one with his mistress. “When you marry your mistress,” he explained, “you create a job vacancy.” Therefore, he decided to keep adding. Everyone who knew Goldsmith liked him; I met him once, and he was certainly a charmer. But not every multiple bride will be so lucky.

But maybe the oppressed young women and the young men at loose ends will find their own solace on the side. This is the appeal of polyamory, the arrangement that the control tower is bringing in right after polygamy. The TV show about polyamory could be called Even Bigger Love. No doubt you’ve seen the descriptions in gee-whiz feature stories: Old Goat sleeps with his wife Nymph and their friend Satyr on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. But Nymph also has her lovers, Lipstick and Hardbody, while Satyr spends weekends with his wife, Venus on the Halfshell. Why should these mature and loving adults not find the blessings of holy matrimony?

Polyamory, at least in theory, finds a slot B for every tab A. Yet it scarcely addresses a great pitfall of polygamy, the repression of rivalry and aggression. Didn’t we learn anything from the 1960’s? Didn’t we learn anything from college? When everyone sleeps with everyone, everyone isn’t happy. Love creates jealousy and supplies revenge. Cupid is Mars’ deadliest soldier.

The only people who are concerned about polygamy and polyamory are advocates, and agitated opponents. The great mass of the public gives them a mildly curious “Huh?” and hence is willing to believe the subtlest argument in favor of legalization: how many people will be affected by a change at the margin? Won’t most of us go on as we always have? But marriage arrangements are not tax rates or work-force regulations; they speak to our essential selves. So I propose a thought experiment: Why not legalize slavery? How many slaves, actually, would there be? The old agricultural basis of the institution is gone; no one picks cotton by hand. So if the occasional wretch—a Third World immigrant, perhaps—wishes to better his station by selling himself to a prosperous patron, what skin is that off our noses?

We’re better off sucking it up with monogamy than making small changes of which we can say nothing except that they won’t be small.

Why are we here? The call for gay marriage led the way, as its opponents insisted it would. If gay marriage were an ancient institution in temporary abeyance, then its restoration wouldn’t necessarily have anything to do with polygamy. But it isn’t, and so one innovation naturally prepares the way for the other. If the State of Massachusetts marries men and men, and women and women, then why not men and many women?

America owes an apology to the Mormon Church. This is an interesting historical moment for Mormonism. A Mormon, Governor Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, is poised to run for President; meanwhile, our eternal pursuit of happiness casts a backward light on the most troubled pages of Mormon history. What enraged 19th-century Americans about the religion, far more than its claim to having found another Bible written on golden plates in upstate New York, was its practice of polygamy. This aversion drove Mormons from pillar to post, and hauled founder Joseph Smith out of an Illinois jail to be lynched.

Finally, in 1890, the Mormons gave up polygamy (Utah statehood followed six years later). Either the Mormons, with their eyes on the main chance, surrendered one good thing to get a better, or a kind God did his children the favor of suspending a doctrine that had brought them so much trouble. Either way, man or God jumped the gun. All those hard-bitten Mormon schismatics, holed up on the Utah/Arizona border with their wives and their broods, can come out of their many-roomed hideaways and join the mainstream.

Is polygamy such a great thing that we should encourage it? The main reservoirs of polygamy in the world today are Islam and Africa. Although Muslims are not obliged to be polygamists, in many Muslim countries those who can afford the extra wives take them on; while polygamy thrives even in the non-Muslim parts of Africa as a product of custom. As a result, in both worlds there is a cohort of unmarried men, a breeding pool of idleness and frustration, as well as a cohort of multiply married men who are too accustomed to having their way. Neither is socially desirable. One leads to a surplus of potential killers, another to a surplus of potential masterminds.

This is not even considering the damage that polygamy does to women. It’s hard enough to live with one peer; few men will want to live with two or three. Therefore, the redundant wives will be younger and younger. If you’re already married to Abigail Adams, you’ll go for Lolita, not Eleanor Roosevelt. In cults, young women are directed to older men more or less by force. John Humphrey Noyes left Yale Divinity School to found his own quasi-polygamist sect, the Oneida Community, in the 19th century. Noyes talked to St. Paul, which gave him a lot of clout among his disciples; among the cuties he steered his own way was his niece. In our day, David Koresh of the Branch Davidians had his teenagers, before they were all roasted.

If we think we’re immune to such grotesque ménages because we don’t wear beards and don’t pray in tongues, consider the license of the very rich. Sir James Goldsmith, the eccentric Anglo-French billionaire, had two families, one with his wife and one with his mistress. “When you marry your mistress,” he explained, “you create a job vacancy.” Therefore, he decided to keep adding. Everyone who knew Goldsmith liked him; I met him once, and he was certainly a charmer. But not every multiple bride will be so lucky.

But maybe the oppressed young women and the young men at loose ends will find their own solace on the side. This is the appeal of polyamory, the arrangement that the control tower is bringing in right after polygamy. The TV show about polyamory could be called Even Bigger Love. No doubt you’ve seen the descriptions in gee-whiz feature stories: Old Goat sleeps with his wife Nymph and their friend Satyr on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. But Nymph also has her lovers, Lipstick and Hardbody, while Satyr spends weekends with his wife, Venus on the Halfshell. Why should these mature and loving adults not find the blessings of holy matrimony?

Polyamory, at least in theory, finds a slot B for every tab A. Yet it scarcely addresses a great pitfall of polygamy, the repression of rivalry and aggression. Didn’t we learn anything from the 1960’s? Didn’t we learn anything from college? When everyone sleeps with everyone, everyone isn’t happy. Love creates jealousy and supplies revenge. Cupid is Mars’ deadliest soldier.

The only people who are concerned about polygamy and polyamory are advocates, and agitated opponents. The great mass of the public gives them a mildly curious “Huh?” and hence is willing to believe the subtlest argument in favor of legalization: how many people will be affected by a change at the margin? Won’t most of us go on as we always have? But marriage arrangements are not tax rates or work-force regulations; they speak to our essential selves. So I propose a thought experiment: Why not legalize slavery? How many slaves, actually, would there be? The old agricultural basis of the institution is gone; no one picks cotton by hand. So if the occasional wretch—a Third World immigrant, perhaps—wishes to better his station by selling himself to a prosperous patron, what skin is that off our noses?

We’re better off sucking it up with monogamy than making small changes of which we can say nothing except that they won’t be small.

Instead, he was talking about When the Levees Broke, his forthcoming documentary about Hurricane Katrina, and Condoleezza Rice. He was cracking up, giggling and cackling—in fact, caggling.

Mr. Lee recalled the story of a shopper who approached Ms. Rice at the pricey Ferragamo shoe store on Fifth Avenue during Katrina and reportedly shouted “How dare you shop for shoes while thousands are dying and homeless!” before Secret Service physically removed her.

Mr. Lee picked up The Observer’s tape recorder and held it close in front of his face. “To the lady that got in Ms. Rice’s face in the store before you got pulled off by Secret Service,” he said. “If you read this article, please contact The New York Observer because we’re trying to find you for the documentary we’re doing on Hurricane Katrina.” Caggle, caggle. “IF you are still alive, that is.

“Also, to the person that said ‘Go fuck yourself, Mr. Cheney.’ If you are still alive, we’d like to contact you too. If you are still on our planet”—caggle—“if you are still walking amongst us, if you get this down in Guantánamo with the other jailed peace activists and suspected Al Qaeda agents who have been jailed for five years and not charged with anything, please get a message to me! We want to know what prompted you to tell Mr. Cheney to go fuck himself! Thank you.” He paused to catch his breath. “Seriously, we’d like to find that woman.”

It’s no wonder. Mr. Lee has strong feelings about this administration, but especially Ms. Rice’s prospects as a 2008 Presidential candidate.

“African-Americans will have to really, really, really, really, really, REALLY analyze the Secretary of State’s record, and get past the pigmentation of her skin,” he said. “If we do that, I don’t think we can vote for her. I’m not the spokesperson for 45 million African Americans … but that’s my right as an American citizen.” He laughed. “Hopefully, that right hasn’t been rescinded yet. I’m not going to vote for that woman. No. Way.”

IT'S SOMETIMES HARD TO REMEMBER SPIKE LEE is a funny man. The filmmaker, who turns 49 a few days before Inside Man, his 18th feature film, is released on March 24, has endured and enjoyed a long, bad marriage with the press, the tipping point a 1992 Esquire headline “Spike Lee Hates Your White Cracker Ass.” And while occasionally his films did little to reassure white people that he didn’t, in fact, hate their cracker asses, press like the Esquire article made Mr. Lee throw his hands up.

“That was the most damaging thing ever,” he said. “It wasn’t anything I had said in the article, nor was it something I meant, so that was the worst …. But what can I do? What can I do about that?”

This time around, for the marketing of Inside Man, Mr. Lee is nowhere to be found on the giant posters that have appeared citywide. And it doesn’t seem like a Spike Lee Joint—at first. The film’s P.R. has been focused on the hefty star power of Mr. Washington, Mr. Owen and Jodie Foster. It’s about a perfect and elaborately planned bank robbery with some Nazi blood money thrown in for good measure.

But it’s also about New York. On that count, Mr. Lee’s fingerprints are visible everywhere: blue skies over the Manhattan skyline, Denzel’s tough/soft cop’s quick-witted quips about life in the city, funny and uncomfortable jokes about post-911 racial profiling. Unlike fellow New York writer/director and rabid Knicks fan Woody Allen, Mr. Lee hasn’t yet totally decamped for a foreign city. Instead, as in 25th Hour, Mr. Lee manages to hit on exactly what it’s like to live here since Sept. 11, without the heavy-handedness of the sort of terrorism porn-shlock coming out this year. Even the music feels right.

He’s been getting New York right for 20 years now. In 1986, Mr. Lee made She’s Gotta Have It for $175,000. It went on to make $8 million. Three years later, Do the Right Thing was out with Oscar nominations for Mr. Lee’s screenplay as well as an acting nod to Danny Aiello (who curiously declined the invitation to talk about Mr. Lee). He lent his skills to commercial shoots and music videos and established his own production company, 40 Acres and a Mule Filmworks, on Dekalb Avenue. He’s been prolific, like Mr. Allen: Mo’ Better Blues in 1990, Jungle Fever in ’91, Malcolm X in ’92, Crooklyn in ’94, Clockers in ’95. In 1996 he released both Get on the Bus and Girl Six.

But then he switched directions in 1997 with the Oscar nominated 4 Little Girls, a painful look back at the 1963 Birmingham, Alabama church bombing. Eschewing traditional voice-over narration, Mr. Lee let the people who lived it tell their stories themselves.

“Spike’s devoted to giving a voice to people who can’t speak for themselves,” said Sheila Nevins, president of HBO's documentary division who produced 4 Little Girls and the upcoming Katrina film. “Gordon Parks said, ‘Never forget that the person in front of the camera is more important than the one sitting behind it’. When Spike does a documentary, he’s brilliant at having the person in front take over. He’s a zealot for getting it right.”

4 Little Girls was one of his most critically acclaimed achievements. But the critics have had other things to say about his films, too. David Denby, then at New York magazine, wrote of Do the Right Thing’s angry mob scene: “Lee appears to be endorsing the outcome, and if some audiences go wild, he’s partly responsible.” The New York Times reported that Mr. Lee’s portrayal of Jewish club owners in Mo’ Better Blues prompted the Anti-Defamation League to express its disappointment that he had “employed the same kind of tactics that he supposedly deplored.” In 1992, Mr. Lee requested that only black journalists interview him while promoting Malcolm X, and the public was outraged.

“In the beginning, I think people didn’t understand that this guy is in a new situation and he’s trying to do all these things,” said actor and longtime friend John Turturro, who has appeared in eight different Spike Lee films (“He pays me in Knicks tickets,” he joked). “The dialogue could have been a lot less … incendiary. Sometimes people really came out there swinging, and he was swinging back. He was younger. That’s what you do when you are younger.”

“I think sometimes Spike is not always the best advocate for his own work,” said Edward Norton, who starred in Mr. Lee’s 2002 film 25th Hour. (“One of my best experiences,” Mr. Norton said. “I can’t say enough good things about him.”) “Spike’s righteous indignation in public as a person leads people to believe that he’s a dogmatic person in some way. But the truth is, if you really look at his work, you see the soft heart at the center of the guy. His work is very compassionate.

“Spike, like very few contemporary American filmmakers, really consistently challenges audiences,” Mr. Norton continued. “He’s always making you do the work. And he engages you in this ride through the moral crisis of modern urban life, but then refuses to just button it up for you in some pat way in the end.”

Shelton Lee was born in Atlanta, Ga., to a jazz musician father (who provided the music for Mo’ Better Blues) and schoolteacher mother who called him “Spike” for his tough attitude, before moving to Brooklyn for most of his childhood. He matriculated at Morehouse College in Atlanta but returned to New York City to attend N.Y.U.’s Tisch School graduate program. His 45-minute film Joe’s Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads won a student academy award (a fellow student by the name of Ang Lee worked as the first assistant director).

Over the years, Mr. Lee has ridden the waves of gentrification in New York, watching neighborhoods change colors overnight. “Manhattan is too expensive, so people move to the East Village,” he said. “The East Village is too expensive? They move to Williamsburg. Now people are getting priced out of Williamsburg! New York City is not New York City if only millionaires can live here.”

Mr. Lee has spent the years moving in the opposite direction.

“I grew up in Brooklyn—first in Crown Heights and then we moved to Cobble Hill,” Mr. Lee said. “My late mother had the vision to say, ‘We should buy a home.’ We were one of the first people to buy a brownstone in Fort Greene—this was when the getting was good,” he said. “Back then, Atlantic Avenue divided Cobble Hill and Brooklyn Heights like opposite sides of the train tracks. Now when you see young white professionals walking down Myrtle Avenue,” he cracked up, “there are white linen tables on the sidewalk! I never would have thunk it.”

Now Mr. Lee—who would have thunk it?—resides on the Upper East Side.

Everyone in Fort Greene knew where the Lees—his wife Tonya Lewis, and children Satchel, 11, and Jackson, 8—lived, and when some developed a habit of ringing the bell, the family decided it would be a wise decision to move. They started off in Soho but then, surprising many, moved to the Upper East Side in 2002.

“I never ever, ever thought in a million years that I’d live on the Upper East Side,” Mr. Lee admitted. “But here I am and I’m enjoying it.”

The family took over the house where famed turn-of-the-century stripper Gypsy Rose Lee once lived (a home rumored to have been bought for her by lover Otto Preminger) from famed American-flag painter Jasper Johns.

“Jasper Johns? He didn’t leave a drop of paint. Not a drop,” said Mr. Lee. “Not a paintbrush, not a drop of paint, nothing. But he did leave a VHS tape of the This Is Your Life show that had Gypsy Rose Lee on it. The show was filmed in the house.

“Early on, my son said he used to see Gypsy Rose. My wife, she was like, ‘Oh, you don’t see anything,’” he went on, still laughing. “But I believed him.”

STILL, THESE DAYS, MR. LEE IS PREOCCUPIED with another town. He was at the Venice Film Festival, glued to CNN, when Hurricane Katrina flooded New Orleans. He said he knew right away that it was a story he wanted to tell; the forthcoming HBO documentary is slated to premiere in late August.

“I don’t think the last eight years have been a good moment in our history, under this President and administration,” he said. “There are people down there six months later who are still in despair. They still don’t have a home. They’re still waiting for FEMA.” He paused. “That should be a play—Waiting for FEMA! Down there, FEMA is a dirty word.

“Before Katrina, New Orleans was 80 percent African-American,” he continued. “What’s it going to be like when the majority of its black citizens have spread out—given one-way tickets, I might add. Can you imagine? Those people got on those planes, when they were being evacuated and they weren’t told where they were going. So you get on a plane and fall asleep—and your black ass is waking up in motherfucking Anchorage, Alaska!”

Last October, he tussled with Tucker Carlson (“the guy in the bow tie”) on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher when Mr. Lee said he’d be including in his documentary the conspiracy theory that it was the U.S. government who bombed the levees.

“Here’s the thing,” he said. “Even today, a large part of the African-American community of New Orleans thinks that those levees were bombed. Now, whether that is true or not, that should not be discounted.” He rattled off past government trespasses: 1927’s Great Flood of Mississippi, when the levees were, in fact, blown up; the flooding of the Ninth Ward during Hurricane Betsy in 1965; the Tuskegee syphilis experiment.

“So, in the collective mind of African-Americans, it is not some science-fiction, hocus-pocus thing to say that the government is doing stuff,” he continued. “Even if it didn’t happen, you cannot discount it and dismiss it as Oh you people are crazy. It’s what people think—talk to Jewish people. Because of the Holocaust, you know, anything that happens, it’s like, ‘Oh! It’s starting again.’ And I’m not going to fault someone of Jewish ancestry that feels like that because that happened! This is history.

His voice grew louder. “No one is saying to Jewish people, ‘Oh, you’re crazy!’ So if you use the same analogy, then it’s not so farfetched. It is my duty as a filmmaker to let them give their opinions, and there are people who will swear on a stack of bibles that they heard an explosion down there.”

Would he be shocked if it turned out to be true? “No. No, I would not,” he said.