He attributed the show's success on FX, a fledgling cable network, partly to the police characters being "at once good and evil".
Jason Moran's seemingly harmless and half-witted driver Carl Williams (Gyton Grantley) is also introduced, along with two police characters; Steve Owen (Rodger Corser and Jacqui James Caroline Craigig), the most prominent members of Task Force Purana.
In distinguishing the police characters from other television detectives, Simon makes the point that even the best police of The Wire are motivated not by a desire to protect and serve, but by the intellectual vanity of believing they are smarter than the criminals they are chasing.
This screenplay moved the focus from the pairing the hit man and the police detective characters to the characters of blinded night club singer and the hit man.
The crazy-genius police consultant character and its variations have so thoroughly colonized American TV over the last decade, from "Monk" to "House" to "Psych" to "The Mentalist," that CBS and the creator of "Elementary," Rob Doherty, should get credit for at least being honest about their source.
The skit a parody of "know your rights" YouTube videos pits a very white, try-hard Cross against Key & Peele's Keegan-Michael Key, a cop who doesn't give Cross's police brutality obsessed character anything to work with.
Some characters played by women band together as informal "fashion police," taunting characters who are badly dressed.
He also made him a Walsh type, akin to the police-officer character played by Spencer Tracy in the director's 1932 comic romance "Me and My Gal".
It's no accident that the writers have had success with puppet shows (Lopez with the stage production "Avenue Q," Parker and Stone with the 2004 movie "Team America: World Police"); their characters in this show, who have no emotional reality, are puppets of piety.
Yet this is only the second time he has stepped into the role of an upstanding police officer, a character which seems to be experiencing something of a renaissance in Indian cinema.
