Wendell Pierce at the inauguration.

You probably know him as Bunk, a k a Detective William Moreland, who teamed with Detective Jimmy McNulty in HBO’s The Wire. Or maybe music’s your thing, and you know him as Antoine Batiste, the trombonist who fronts Antoine Batiste and his Soul Apostles on Treme, another HBO hit.

As the star of two shows that have earned cult followings, plus memorable appearances on Law & Order and Third Watch, it’s likely you know New Orleans native Wendell Pierce from somewhere.

Mr. Pierce was on hand Monday for the inauguration of President Barack Obama, and while he was there to celebrate the country’s leader, he had plenty of time for the dozens of fans who stopped by to pay homage. He was exceedingly gracious, smiling through autographs and handshakes and making time for anyone with a camera.

Though his job likely puts him in a tax bracket most can only dream of, Mr. Pierce seemed to identify with Mr. Obama’s populist message, joining in the applause when the president spoke of the “shrinking few” who do very well and the “growing many barely making it.”

Bunk proved he’s not just another bobblehead in pancake makeup when one well-wisher asked what he was up to these days. Pierce rolled through the on-screen projects he’s part of, before the fan interrupted to ask about the “real work.”

“That’s the acting. What about the things you’re doing in New Orleans?” asked the man, who was in from New Jersey.

“We’re trying to rebuild,” Mr. Pierce said. “Always trying.”

Since Hurricane Katrina, Mr. Pierce has made rebuilding the battered city his cause. To that end, the actor and two partners are opening a chain of grocery stores in the city designed to serve “food deserts”—low-income neighborhoods that have been without access to quality fresh food since the storm. Mr. Pierce was also instrumental in the construction of a green community in Pontchartrain Park, the neighborhood where he grew up.

It’s no surprise Mr. Pierce trekked to D.C. for the inauguration. He served as a surrogate for Mr. Obama during his campaign and was a visible presence at the Democratic National Convention last fall. He also raised at least $50,000 as one of Mr. Obama’s team of celebrity bundlers. What was a nice surprise, however—and possibly a very early sign of the harmony the president said he would seek in his second term—was seeing a Hollywood star stand in the cold for as long as it took his many fans to wrangle their iPhones into Instagram mode.

George Soros

Tonight, the Institute of International Education honors a group of high-rollers who’ve helped protect the rights of scholars worldwide, including full-time philanthropist and sporadically engaged GOP bogeyman George Soros and Western Union CEO Hikmet Ersek. Senator Pat Leahy of Vermont will be helping present the awards, and Kofi Annan will be in attendance as well ... Meanwhile, a man perhaps more powerful even than Mr. Leahy, HBO auteur David Simon (The Wire, Treme), conducts a conversation with ProPublica investigative reporter A.C. Thompson about the challenges of turning real life into compelling fiction. We’d attend, but every time we think about putting in The Wire, we end up watching a Gossip Girl rerun!

Institute of International Education gala, Cipriani Wall Street, 55 Wall Street, 6:30pm cocktail reception, 7:30pm dinner and awards, tickets and information can be found at iie.org; ProPublica/David Simon panel, Cantor Film Center, 38 East Eighth Street, 8:30pm, open to the public, information can be found at propublica.org.

Memo to NYPD: This man is not his character from The Wire.

First it was Breaking Bad's Giancarlo Esposito (or "Gus Fring") who came forward with his story of being stop-and-frisked by the New York Police Department. Over the weekend, while the controversial police tactic was being protested, another actor—this time, from David Simon's inner-city crime epic The Wire—noted his own experience with the policy.

J.D. Williams—who played Preston "Bodie" Broadus for four seasons on The Wire—spoke to Capital New York about his experience with the policy:

"I might get recognized, but [police are] not sure where they know me from. So, a lot of times an officer might think he's arrested me before. But then usually by the time they walk up on me, it's come to them and they're like 'Oh!'"

He also explained he knew many people who had been stop-and-frisked, and was familiar with the practice.

Capital got some video as well:

fkamer@observer.com | @weareyourfek

But then, Carrie Bradshaw finally landed Mr. Big, the entire Fisher family died, Tony Soprano stopped believin’ in a New Jersey diner, and Tommy Carcetti became governor of Maryland.

By the time Sue Naegle arrived from United Talent Agency to take the network’s top job in 2008 (alongside co-president Richard Plepler and president of programming Michael Lombardo), the programming larder was looking bare. “We walked into a schedule that was mostly empty,” she told The Observer. And what could be better? “From a development and programming perspective, that’s the dream.”

Recently the network has gone on something of a programming binge, putting forth its most aggressive new slate in memory. Luck, the horseracing drama from director Michael Mann and creator David Milch, debuted in January to respectful reviews and strong ratings; it was then swiftly renewed for a second season—then even more swiftly cancelled last week due to the on-set deaths of three horses (or perhaps, some speculated, due to a precipitous drop in viewers). Last month saw the debut of a new Ricky Gervais comedy, Life’s Too Short (his third for the network), and next month, HBO will debut two new comedies, the youth-oriented Girls and the political farce Veep, as well as the second season of the fantasy epic Game of Thrones. Summer will bring Aaron Sorkin’s latest look behind the scenes of something (this time it’s a cable news show). An adaptation of The Corrections is filming now, and A Visit From the Goon Squad is reportedly in development.

It's about time. HBO, which got its start airing heavyweight boxing matches, came out swinging. After years in which the broadcaster came to define quality television, its lessons are visible up and down the dial. The hourlong contemporary adult drama in The Sopranos mold is now standard-issue. The buzziest Sunday night drama this year was Downton Abbey, on PBS.

The competition will heat up still further later this year, when Netflix debuts an hourlong drama of its own, the David Fincher-directed House of Cards, to be followed by the revival of Arrested Development and the women-in-prison series Orange Is the New Black. (Original programming from Hulu and Amazon is said to be just around the corner.)

But between HBO’s genre hits (Game of Thrones, True Blood), its sepia-toned period curios (Luck, Boardwalk Empire), its noble if ignored charity efforts like the New Orleans drama Treme, and its low-risk comedies (whatever passing fancy Ricky Gervais happens to alight upon), HBO now seems as unsure of how to present itself to the world as Carrie ransacking her shoe closet—and at the very moment networks like Showtime, AMC and FX are ascendant.

Did every channel learn from HBO’s success except for HBO?

“Their brand to me is, truthfully, a little bit dated version of high quality,” said Mo Ryan, a longtime Chicago Tribune television critic, currently at the Huffington Post. “HBO is doing what HBO does: hire big-name talent to do expensive projects, and take chances on a few things that don’t cost them very much money. Their approach is safe and predictable. That leads to competent programming, but it doesn’t lead to the next Homeland.”

Showtime’s hyper-paranoid counterterrorism thriller picked up the Best Drama Golden Globe this year and has put a creative defibrillation paddle to that network’s collection of aging hits. Those series, greenlit by Showtime’s former president of entertainment, Robert Greenblatt, gave the network a clear identity, hinging on dramedies about women with secrets—Weeds, Nurse Jackie and The Big C among them—and blood-and-camp drama tentpoles like Dexter and The Tudors. (Mr. Greenblatt has since been called to the majors and is now running NBC.) Other competitors have also used programming to brand themselves. AMC does meditative and highly watchable dramas about men in difficult situations (The Walking Dead, Breaking Bad, Mad Men), for instance, whereas FX has specialized in black comedy and heightened violence (Justified, Louie, and the departed Nip/Tuck and The Shield).

HBO is still an extremely valuable component of Time Warner, and its subscriber numbers remain the highest on premium cable. But rivals are gaining ground. In the final quarter of 2011, HBO added 190,000 subscriptions after two declining quarters (just in time for Game of Thrones), while Showtime and Starz added 700,000 and 595,000, respectively. (That said, Starz and Showtime are more flexible in setting promotional rates with cable providers.)

In part the problem appears to be one of marketing: Having seen its longstanding identity—as the home of quality entertainment for grown-ups—adopted by so many upstarts, the channel seems to have lost its bearings. When asked about HBO’s brand, Ms. Naegle replied, “I think about this a lot.” She cited the series Enlightened, a half-hour program starring Laura Dern, as one that is core to the network’s identity. “I don’t think that show could exist any other place,” she said, noting that within HBO, it was called “a half-hour hour,” presumably in light of its unusual mix of big themes and a stunted running time.

“For us, it’s a signature HBO show,” she added. “But I don’t think everything needs to have a signature feeling.”

The brainchild of director Mike White, Enlightened centers on a spiritually adrift woman in a competitive, ugly world. It’s a frequently brilliant show, but a quirky one—seeming at times custom-made to be unjustly ignored. It was recently renewed for a second season despite averaging fewer than 200,000 viewers per episode.

But the show exemplifies HBO’s longtime strategy of cultivating relationships with talented showrunners and letting them do more or less whatever they want. Mr. White, who was one of Ms. Naegle’s clients when she was an agent, said that he’d received precious few notes on the series. “They were just along for the ride,” he said.

Alan Ball of True Blood (who’d also been represented by Ms. Naegle), said that the only network notes he received for his show about sexed-up vampires and werewolves tended to ding him for not going far enough, an unusual critique from a network, and a welcome one. True Blood is HBO’s biggest hit, but Mr. Ball is more focused on art than commerce. “I don’t care about the number of people who watch the show,” he said. “I’d rather have a smallish audience than a gazillion people.”

The network’s taste for heavyweight talents hasn’t always worked out. For every True Blood, there’s been a Treme or two. Meanwhile, TV’s breakout series have lately come from writers’ room veterans stepping up to run their own shows, a group that is in short supply on HBO these days. “Where is the talented writer-producer who no one’s ever heard of who has industry experience?” asked Ms. Ryan, citing Vince Gilligan, the creator of Breaking Bad, as a case in point. An equally apt example might be Matthew Weiner, who was hired to write for The Sopranos on the basis of his spec script for Mad Men, a project HBO ultimately turned down.

One could write an alternate history of HBO beginning on June 10, 2007, in which Mad Men—or an equally groundbreaking series—made its debut immediately following The Sopranos' finale. Former chairman and CEO Chris Albrecht had resigned just a month before, following an arrest for domestic violence, and president Carolyn Strauss would soon be ousted. After The Sopranos cut to black, though, HBO introduced the world to John From Cincinnati, a faux-mystical surfer drama created by Deadwood auteur David Milch.

The post-Albrecht, post-Tony period was a time of reckoning for HBO, not least because Mad Men also premiered that summer. Ms. Naegle told The Observer that the first script she read for HBO—during a Mexican vacation she took just before starting the new gig—was Game of Thrones, which grew into a flagship hit. “These shows bring 10-part movies into your home every Sunday night. They are big shows,” she said, adding that both Game of Thrones and Luck were logistically difficult but worthy of the network’s efforts. “With Luck, we’re dealing with horses! They don’t behave like actors.”

She was right about that. Shortly after we spoke, a third horse died and the show was cancelled.

The lesson? Placing a big bet on a tested thoroughbred might seem like a prudent move, but anything can happen when the horses round the home stretch. Ms. Ryan defined Boardwalk Empire as an exemplar of the sort of big HBO bet—a visually complex and lavish melodrama, studded with marquee names—that has increasingly failed to pay off. “It’s a structural exercise that does not have a vibrant emotional core,” she said. “That’s emblematic of what’s wrong with HBO. I just don’t get a spark from it.”

Among those working to fill the void is Starz, under the leadership of none other than Mr. Albrecht. “Instead of being all over the place in our originals, we’re trying to concentrate on ones that are larger-than-life, theatrical, fun, and entertaining,” Mr. Albrecht told The Observer of shows like Boss and Spartacus. “Those are the words we’re using for our brand.”

The game has changed since Mr. Albrecht was running HBO. “At that time, we were just looking for great shows with great show-runners and trying to bring a different sensibility into the way shows were originated,” he said. And to some extent, that spirit remains. Girls creator Lena Dunham didn’t even have a pitch prepared when she first met with Sue Naegle. “I wasn’t pounding the pavement trying to get Girls out there,” said Ms. Dunham, whose show is also produced by comedy consigliere Judd Apatow. “What HBO does is champion a creator,” she added.

Ms. Dunham, who wrote, directed and stars in her show, has become an indie darling due to the critical success of her irresistible debut film, Tiny Furniture. Still, it remains to be seen whether her propensity for emotional unguardedness and ribald humor will play among mainstream audiences. In one episode, a character brings cupcakes to an abortion clinic for an impromptu party; another character is portrayed as a dolt for being obsessed with Sex and the City (she calls herself a Carrie). Asked about the double-edged homage, Ms. Dunham said, “It was our way of going, ‘We get it, these are our predecessors.’” But Sex and the City was television for the masses; Girls is a boutique entertainment for what is likely to be a tight-knit cadre of devoted fans.

Not that such numbers necessarily trouble the boss. “Our passion for shows is not about proving ratings success,” Ms. Naegle said. “Really it’s about how we’re feeling about something creatively and how we feel about something fitting into our brand.”

HBO hasn’t had a zeitgeist-hit comedy since Entourage—and longtime favorite Curb Your Enthusiasm is prone to long hiatuses. We asked Ms. Naegle why more recent efforts—like the just-canceled trio Hung, Bored to Death, and How to Make It in America, the various Ricky Gervais series, and Enlightened—had had a hard time connecting with audiences.

“What’s your definition of HBO comedy success?” she asked.

We cited Carrie, Larry, and Vinnie.

“You would say something that feels like it’s generating something culturally,” she said. “Cable comedy has had a broader definition of success. With Girls and Veep, I’m not putting extraordinary pressure on the shows to perform in a way shows in the past have.” She added, however, “Eastbound and Down gets great numbers.”

Where HBO has enjoyed some branding success is in the area of original movies. Brian Lowry, Variety’s chief TV critic, noted that the one-off films, while not broadly popular, are central to HBO’s image as a high-class outfit: “That’s the only reason the movies exist, strictly so they can show they have movie stars. Game Change was a good rating for HBO, two million viewers. But the bigger payoff was that it was on every goddamn cable network. Someone said to me once, pay cable is like a really nice coffee table book. You don’t always have to be flipping through it to be glad you have it.”

The original movies also tend to fare well during awards season, where HBO’s series have lately been passed over. AMC and Showtime both leapfrogged the network in terms of total nominations for series programming in 2010, and Mad Men has taken the Best Drama statue four times running—most recently defeating Boardwalk Empire and Game of Thrones.

It’s one more way in which HBO’s brand identity is slowing eroding, which might be the network’s biggest problem of all—especially as the ascendancy of à la carte viewing platforms like DVRs, Netflix, Hulu, and AppleTV separate programming from its source. “Brands are and will become increasingly more important as technology continues to disconnect networks from our individual attributes,” Mr. Albrecht explained. “What we would like to be is not commoditized as the pieces but commoditized as the brand.”

In the early days, Mr. Albrecht recalled, “the brand at HBO was ‘It’s not TV.’ A lot of people have copied that mantra even if they’re not stating it. In a sense, as HBO has dropped it, everything is trying to not be TV.”

The network that redefined television recently rolled out a new slogan: “It’s HBO.” The ardent hope among TV fans is that that’s still enough.

Mr. Simon hasn't said exactly how he'll use the money, but he is not going to give it away. He's interested in advocating more seriously for the issues that he writes about in his shows. “One overt argument that The Wire was making is that the drug war is amoral and untenable,” Mr. Simon told The New York Times ahead of the MacArthur Grant announcement.

But Mr. Simon hasn't said anything about improving the state of journalism. Maybe that's a lame cause by now? It would be nice if he put some of this money where his mouth is. Mr. Simon, who worked as a crime reporter at the Baltimore Sun in the '80s and '90s where he drew a lot of inspiration for The Wire, spoke on the Senate subcommittee hearing about the Future of Journalism in 2009. "The day I run into a Huffington Post reporter at a Baltimore zoning board hearing is the day that I will be confident that we've actually reached some sort of equilibrium," Mr. Simon told the subcommittee, chaired by Senator John Kerry. He was sitting next to Arianna Huffington. "You know, the next 10 or 15 years in this country are going to be a halcyon era for state and local political corruption. It is going to be one of the great times to be a corrupt politician, all right?"

Mr. Simon expressed his disgust with old and new media companies alike, saying that they were colluding in a way to end some of the most important journalism (namely reporting at a local level). "Well, a plague on both their houses," he said. (Mr. Simon echoed these thoughts in an interview with Capital's Josh Benson in June.)

In his recent interview about the grant with The Times, Mr. Simon expressed a lack of confidence. “Obviously, I’m very grateful but I have a vague sense of not belonging,” he said. Mr. Simon lamented that past winners had done “tangible things to improve conditions.” But it seems like Mr. Simon already has a great idea about how to improve conditions. Go to work on a new model for local reporting. $500,000 might not pay for a newsroom, but Mr. Simon must have ideas about how to put the money to work. Other people have tried, and it's defnitely not an easy problem to solve. It might even take a genius.

"As an ink-stained scribbler the last 10 years, I've sat in the same chair in our family room, eating ham sandwiches, very much alone." says [writer David] Eddie, a journalism graduate from Columbia University, who also pens an advice column for The Globe's Life section. "But working on The Yard is a lot of fun and very social. . . . We've had a lot of laughs, pinning cards on a wall, bantering jokes back and forth. To be honest, this is the best time I've had in years."

Neel Shah may on to something.

It was after 11 p.m. on Saturday, May 1, in the foyer of the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C., where the incongruous combo of the chef Bobby Flay and CNN correspondent Wolf Blitzer were co-hosting a Capitol File after-party for the White House Correspondents Association Dinner. Mr. West was standing right where Kim Kardashian had fought her way through a clamoring mob a few minutes earlier, while her escort, Greta Van Susteren, played the patient handmaiden.

"This isn't about politics," said Hardball host Chris Matthews. "It's about the scene. Wherever you have a lot of people together at an event like this, good-looking people show up. And they just stand around. So you'll notice groups of good-looking people just standing around because they've heard there's a scene. And since they make it on looks, they must be seen."

All the pretty faces made the party planners nervous. Press people asked reporters not to bother the guests inside. Security was tight: Lists were dutifully double-checked; IDs were required.

In the ballroom, Mr. West sauntered along behind two of his co-stars-Michael K. Williams (the scar-faced bandit Omar) and Sonja Sohn (Kima, the tough lesbian cop)-who were holding hands (unromantically) and making a beeline for a back staircase, where a beefy security guard protected the entrance to a VIP balcony.

Mr. Williams whispered in the guard's ear, but nothing happened. The group stepped aside while others were let up. Mr. Williams patted his brow with a cloth, and tried again. Ms. Sohn sat down on a ledge.

Desiree Rogers-the former social secretary blamed for letting the infamous gatecrashers past White House security-floated down the stairs in a red dress, followed by a waiter with a big tray.

Mr. Williams tried again, but the security guard was unmoved, and the group finally trudged off. (They would go on to surface at the glitzier Vanity Fair party later in the night.)

It's a Reunion!

With Mr. Simon's involvement, it should come as no surprise that Treme as like a de facto reunion of The Wire. As such, the cast features many familiar faces that disciples of Mr. Simon's former series will surely recognize: Wendell Pierce ("Bunk") and Clarke Peters ("Lester"), both veterans of The Wire, are part of the new series' sprawling ensemble.

When the Levees Broke...

Wanting to keep things as real as possible—and simultaneously help with the economy of New Orleans—Mr. Simon shot the series locally and even hired many non-actors from the area to take roles. Included in this local flavor is Phyllis Montana LeBlanc, a New Orleans native and Hurricane Katrina survivor whom Spike Lee memorably showcased in his documentary, When the Levees Broke.

R.I.P. David Mills.

One of Mr. Simon's longtime friends and co-writers, David Mills, died on the set of Treme at the end of last month from brain aneurysm. He wrote two of the episodes from this season of the show, the third and seventh.

How Do You Say...

There's no accent over the second "e" in the title -- but Treme is indeed pronounced "truh-MAY" and not "Tream." This may not seem like a big deal, but it's essential information if you skip the show but can't resist pretending you saw it on Monday morning.

Treme premieres Sunday at 10 p.m. on HBO.

Well, you can write a Talk of the Town for The New Yorker, which is what David Simon, Baltimore Sun reporter–turned–executive producer of The Wire and Generation Kill, did this week.

Mr. Simon's A Lonesome Death takes the recent passing of William Zantzinger, whose conviction for manslaughter and assault in the death of a hotel barmaid named Hattie Carroll inspired Bob Dylan's 1963 song "The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll," as an opportunity to look back at an interview he attempted to hold with Mr. Zantzinger 25 years after the incident.

Mr. Simon found Mr. Zantzinger to be "a disappointing lump of a man, with small dark eyes and black hair thinning from behind." Furthermore, Mr. Zantzinger didn't prove the easiest interview subject: he mostly told Mr. Simon that "The song was a lie. Just a damned lie" and spoke of his respect for Ms. Carroll's 11 children. But Mr. Simon did bring one interesting detail to the meeting that piqued his interviewee's interest:

The Hollywood Reporter: