David Judah Simon is an American author, journalist, writer, and producer. He worked for the Baltimore Sun City Desk for twelve years (1982–95) and wrote Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets (1991) and co-wrote The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood (1997) with Ed Burns. The former book was the basis for the NBC series Homicide: Life on the Street (1993–99), on which Simon served as a writer and producer. Simon adapted the latter book into the HBO mini-series The Corner (2000).
He was the creator, executive producer, head writer, and show runner for all five seasons of the HBO television series The Wire (2002–2008). He adapted the non-fiction book Generation Kill into a television mini-series, and served as the show runner for the project. He was selected as one of the 2010 MacArthur Fellows and named an Utne Reader visionary in 2011.Simon also created the HBO series Treme with Eric Overmyer, which aired for four seasons. Following Treme, Simon wrote the HBO mini-series Show Me a Hero with journalist William F. Zorzi, a colleague at The Baltimore Sun, and on The Wire.
In August 2015, HBO commissioned two pilots from Simon's company Blown Deadline Productions. The first drama, The Deuce, about the New York porn industry in the 1970s and 1980s, would star Maggie Gyllenhaal and co-producer James Franco with shooting in New York in the fall of 2015. The second drama is an untitled program exploring a "detailed examination of partisanship" and money in Washington politics, to be co-produced with Carl Bernstein.
