AGE: 47
OCCUPATION: Author, TV writer-producer, gadfly
NUMBER OF TIME COVERS: 0
PREVIOUS APPEARANCES ON THE TIME 100: 1
PRO: This former Baltimore Sun reporter and Homicide author is co-creator of what many critics and culture vultures consider the best show on television, ever: The Wire, a sprawling Boschian opera of urban dysfunction, compounded by human weakness and doomed, defiant valor, set in the hellscape of modern Baltimore. It ended its fifth and final season this year, to much media ballyhoo.
CON: Even fans of the show concede that Simon's focus this season — the decline of newspaper journalism — was ill-chosen: Simon, who took a buyout from the Sun over a decade ago, clearly had an axe to grind, and did so noisily, clumsily, and, worst of all, tediously.