All the book-based movies and TV shows adapted by David Simon, ranked

Gary, Fran and their teenage son DeAndre live in the slums of West Baltimore. Now Gary and Fran are estranged and their existence is day-to-day, hand-to-mouth, doing anything to satisfy their addiction. DeAndre has a chance, through getting his head down and staying in school, of escaping the abject poverty his parents live in, but he has his own problems.

An arresting, gritty police series set in a Baltimore precinct, where detectives of the Baltimore Police Department’s Homicide Unit learn that being a cop can sometimes be murder. Dealing with the numerous murders are Detective John Munch, Lt. Al Giardello and Det. Meldrick Lewis. Early episodes of the show were inspired by the book “Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets” written by David Simon.

The first 40 days of the war in Iraq as seen through the eyes of an elite group of U.S. Marines who spearheaded the invasion along with an embedded Rolling Stone reporter. A vivid account of the soldiers and of the forces that guided them in an often-improvised initiative.

Mayor Nick Wasicsko took office in 1987 during Yonkers’ worst crisis. When federal courts ordered public housing be built in the white, middle class side of town, it divided the city in a bitter battle fueled by fear, racism, murder and politics.

David Simon, a reporter for The Baltimore Sun, spent four years on the police beat before taking a leave of absence to write this book. He had persuaded the Baltimore Police Department to allow him access to the city’s Homicide Unit for calendar year 1988, and throughout that year he shadowed one shift of detectives as they investigated cases, conducted interrogations, executed search and arrest warrants, and testified at trials.

Baltimore, 2015. Riots are erupting across the city as citizens demand justice for Freddie Gray, a 25-year-old Black man who has died under suspicious circumstances while in police custody. Drug and violent crime are surging, and the city is reaching its highest murder count in more than two decades. Facing pressure from the mayor’s office turn to a rank-and-file hero, Sergeant Wayne Jenkins, and his elite plainclothes unit, the Gun Trace Task Force, to help get guns and drugs off the street.

The Plot Against America imagines “an alternate American history told through the eyes of a working-class Jewish family in Newark, New Jersey, as they watch the political rise of Charles Lindbergh, an aviator-hero and xenophobic populist, who becomes president and turns the nation toward fascism.”