Words by Matthew Mundy

The Wire Season 5 Method Man & Prop Joe

If you’re David Simon, creator of The Wire, you recently had a problem. After completing the show’s fourth season, widely acclaimed as the best season of the best show on television, you were on top of the world. Despite the continued (and puzzling) Emmy lockout of the series, critics throughout the industry lauded your show as not only the best show on television, but perhaps the best American television show ever. Your baby, a show that takes Baltimore - and urban America more broadly – and holds it under the most searing of moral lens, had won first prize. And then some. It was some heady stuff.

There’s always a but, of course, and this one was rather significant – you still had to come up with a fifth season. Topping the fourth season – a heartbreaking and stunningly realistic look at how No Child Left Behind and the school system had tragically failed the predominantly black youth of West Baltimore – was impossible. Dealing with these schoolchildren, four in particular – Naymond, Dukie, Randy and Michael – raised the emotional stakes in a way that dealing with adults could not. So, what do you, a grizzled former journalist from the Baltimore Sun, do?

The Wire Season 5

What slowly emerged during those first four seasons was a hyper-realistic – albeit depressingly dystopic – view of the American city. Critics compared it to great literature – Dickensian, they called it. Without resorting to cloying sentimentality or convenient plotting, The Wire had painted a portrait of a city – and a country – that had failed its most vulnerable citizens. Its portrait of a permanently entrenched black underclass, left in the dust by an economy that had long ago decided it could operate fine without 8-10 percent of its population, was staggering. Simon et al. showed the war on drugs for what it is – a repugnantly narrow-minded and short-sighted policy that, in the interests of plugging the dike of a tragically unstoppable force, has criminalized an entire sub-population that have little other economic opportunities to turn to. The characters that peppered this world – the gut-wrenching junkie Bubbles, the cop-in-the-thrall-of-his-vices McNulty, the gay, lone-wolf gangster Omar, the ice-in-his-veins new prince of the drug trade Marlo, and the struggling-to-make-good, former street soldier Cutty – made it all the more realistic and heartbreaking.

What, then, is next? I was surprised, briefly, at the decision that the show made, but now, as we round the stretch into the last half of the final season, it makes perfect sense. The show has trained its sights on the newspaper industry, particularly the Baltimore Sun and it has taken them to task in a way that has earned the show, and Simon in particular, both accolades and criticism from his former colleagues. It has taken the industry to task for ignoring the plight of the underclass, for forgoing the long story – the detailing of the slow-motion destruction of these communities – for the short, sensationalistic sideshow, the myopic obsession with the scandal. In their bloodlust for prizes, They have failed their readers, and – more importantly – their city’s most vulnerable.

The Wire Season 5 Scott & Alma

The Wire has also spared no feelings in its portrayal of the ruthless disembowelment of the modern newsroom by its corporate masters, those who deign a 20-percent profit margin to be of more importance than good journalism. The recent ghosts of newspaper past haunt the screen as well, from the vicious job cuts to the Stephen Glass-ian machinations of the young journalist who, more than anything, wants to move up the newspaper ladder and get himself the hell out of Baltimore.

The ghosts of Simon’s newspaper past also haunt and it’s here that the show has, however briefly, lost sight of the forest for the trees. The contempt Simon holds for his former editors at the Sun, John Carroll and Bill Marimow, a disdain by now legendary, permeates every scene in the newsroom. His scorn for them, which he claims results from their misplaced ardor for prizes at the expense of good journalism, threatens to overwhelm. We’re often left with one-dimensional caricatures of these editors, rather than the full-bodied complexity of the rest of the show’s cast. This is a minor gripe though, as the rest of the season – as per usual – has been superlative.

We’re halfway done now, and everything seems to be hurtling down the tracks to a conclusion (or a collision?) that I’m almost afraid to see, knowing the show’s propensity for rewarding its viewers’ adoration with the – unfortunately – realistic results of characters’ choices. There are no happy endings in The Wire, and I like it that way, because as Simon himself is likely to point out: There are no happy endings in this part of America, either.