THE WIRE: SEASON FIVE – david simon – 9.0 / 10

During the first four seasons of The Wire there were two ways in which one could appreciate the show. On the surface there was a highly entertaining, deceptively realistic, often heartbreaking depiction of a collection of fully realized characters within an urban milieu that was unparalleled in the history of television. Underneath that there was a subtext that had something to say about the cause and nature of many of the problems facing our modern society. That The Wire functioned so well whether or not you delved into the Iraq War parallel of season three or thought much about the systemic dysfunction of institutions is what makes the series one of the all time greats. It works equally well as a treatise on modern life in America or simply as a damn fine piece of entertainment.

In season five, however, it becomes a little harder for the viewer to ignore the subtextual points that David Simon and Co. are making. Perhaps this is because the fifth season focuses a lot of its attention (and screen time) on the Baltimore Sun newspaper where, not coincidentally, David Simon worked for twenty years before moving into television. I imagine it was difficult for him to remain objective and evenhanded when dealing with that particular profession considering how displeased he was with the way the industry had changed since he first started working as a reporter. But whatever the reason, the parts of the show featuring the newsroom are often the most strident and heavy handed, featuring some of the more one dimensional characters the series has so far created. (Though it should be noted that even these characters (Templeton, Klebanow, Whiting and the rest) are still more fully fleshed out than most characters on any other show you’d care to name.) It’s very difficult for the audience to enjoy the newsroom scenes without occasionally thinking about what Simon was trying to say about the death of the newspapers and the impact this was having on both the newsroom and the culture in general.

That said, trying too hard to make your point is a very minor failure, maybe even an admirable one. It only stands out like it does because this show had previously been so masterful in submerging what it was trying to say underneath all the surface stuff. Even still, that doesn’t change the fact that what goes on in the newsroom is still pretty interesting. Though in the end it turns out to be one more in the long line of institutions depicted on The Wire as systemically dysfunctional, I found the peculiarities of how the newspapers are screwed up fairly entertaining.

The other major plotline of season five is the fake serial killer Detective McNulty manufactures in order to get the city, basically insolvent because of a school system $54 million in debt, to start paying for police overtime (or, as the cops say repeatedly, ‘real police work’). Though this storyline is, perhaps, a little over the top, the thorny issues it raises are worth the tradeoff. For instance, McNulty, the hero of the first three seasons, was always the one person who refused to play by the rules and was all the more effective because of it, occasionally even achieving something that looked like victory (a rarity on The Wire). He was the one character most viewers identified with and rooted for. But now here he is in season five manufacturing a serial killer to get the money flowing again. More than just simply a question of the ends justifying the means, this storyline raises questions about McNulty as a person and the viewer for rooting for him.

At no point during the entire fake serial killer fiasco do the writers ever let McNulty (or the viewers who might be rooting for him to get away with it) off the hook. Scene after scene shows the unintended collateral damage he’s caused. Whether it’s Kima Greggs interviewing the parents of one of the serial killer’s ‘victims’ or the two dead homeless men strangled by a copycat killer, there’s no way to see what McNulty has done as heroic. And yet, in the end, the people responsible for at least twenty-two murders are brought to justice because of McNulty’s fictional killer. So does that balance the scales? And if it does, does that justify further flouting of the law as long as the goals are admirable and the person going outside the law is righteous enough? Who should get to make that call?

These questions are further addressed in the primary story at the Sun newspaper where Scott Templeton fabricates much of his reportage and is eventually rewarded for it with a Pulitzer. Here is a man doing more or less the same thing as McNulty, going outside the rules to serve his own interests in the pursuance of his goals. And like McNulty, Templeton leaves a trail of collateral damage that negatively impacts many of those around him.

Obviously most viewers will be firmly opposed to what Templeton is doing and probably even openly rooting for the guy to get caught, punished and kicked off the paper. But many of these same viewers are also rooting for McNulty to get away with what he’s done. We can make all the distinctions we want about the relative virtues of each of these characters’ motivations (i.e. brazen self interest vs. self interest in service of a greater good) but cheering one on while rooting against the other is a contradiction that’s impossible to resolve. If you’re comfortable with allowing a man like McNulty to manufacture a serial killer in order to go after a mass murderer, then you can make no argument against allowing a man like Templeton to circumvent the rules for his own gain. If you condemn the one, you must condemn the other. And thus you also allow the killers of twenty two people to walk free.

In the end both Templeton and McNulty’s farces are allowed to stand because the institutions that these men serve cannot afford the blow to their credibility that revealing the truth would entail. And so The Wire, always obsessed with the dysfunction of institutions, ends with two great institutional victories (drugs on the table and a Pulitzer Prize) earned through a complete disregard for everything the institutions are supposed to stand for.

On top of that the writers have layered a parallel between these two stories and the run-up to the Iraq War when our government falsified intelligence in order to get the country behind a war it might not otherwise have pursued. Bunk Mooreland raises this connection explicitly in the penultimate episode when he says to McNulty, ‘It’s like war. Easy to get in, not so easy to get out.’ In the first scene of the season, Bunk has another line with great resonance on this topic: ‘The bigger the lie, the more they believe.’ In comparison to the lies told to us by our government concerning Iraq, Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction that supposedly posed a clear and present danger to the United States and its citizens, McNulty making up a serial killer and Templeton fudging a few stories seems incredibly minor.

By drawing this parallel so explicitly, Simon is cutting off potential criticism of the season’s storylines before they begin. To anyone who might look at McNulty kicking debris around at a crime scene then biting a dead body with a set of false teeth and think it was all too over the top and unbelievable, Simon seeks to remind them that our country is fighting a war where thousands of men and women have lost their lives because the people who were supposed to value the public trust they’d been given didn’t. To anyone who might look at Templeton wantonly fabricating quotes, people and eventually whole stories and think this sort of thing can’t really be going on undetected at our newspapers, Simon reminds them that before 2003 no one would have believed our government would tell outright lies to its people during the State of Union. The bigger the lie, the more they believe indeed.

There is also a none too subtle jab at the press, by now more or less universally acknowledged to have fallen down on the job in the lead-up to the war. Perhaps if they hadn’t been chasing prizes or trying to figure out how to ‘do more with less’ after the latest round of buyouts had decimated the staff, the newspapers might have actually investigated some of these false claims the administration was making. Just like, on the show, they might have realized what the death of someone as important to the citizens of Baltimore as Omar or Proposition Joe really meant and would have given them more than half a paragraph buried deep in the back of the paper.

But there’s no one person to blame because it’s not the individuals who are the problem. They are merely the product of the institutions they serve (as Deputy Commissioner for Operations Daniels often asserts). On just about any other show out there and certainly on every one of the dozen or so procedural law enforcement shows that litter the airwaves, it’s always the individual that’s the root of all evil. Once the good guys catch this person or people and put them in prison, order is restored and good triumphs. Victories, in the form of arrests or convictions, are conclusive and meaningful. Not so on The Wire. There the institution is the root of the problem. The individuals matter little. Putting one person or group of people in prison, firing one person or electing another has no real impact on the underlying institution and therefore no hope of having any real effect on the fundamental cause of the problem. One person, no matter how high minded or determined, has no chance, at least in the world of The Wire, of changing the system. Instead that person either becomes changed by the system or is driven out of it.

That’s not to say that the characters on The Wire aren’t fascinating in and of themselves. Their individual personalities and stories are incredibly compelling. But the final ten minutes of season five, and hence of the series itself, clearly shows that, in the view of Simon and Co. at least, the institutions aren’t changed by the people. It’s the other way around. Michael Lee bursts into Vinsen’s rim shop, shotgun blazing, becoming, in the process, the new Omar. Sydnor bitches to Judge Phelan about the bosses in the hopes that the judge will get some traction for his case, becoming, in effect, the new McNulty. Dukie ties off a vein in a darkened alley and cooks up a shot, becoming the new Bubbles. And so on and so on. The faces change but the system doesn’t.

It’s an incredibly cynical worldview but also one for which David Simon and his writers make a very convincing case. It’s sad to think that the Baltimore introduced in the first episode of season one is fundamentally the same Baltimore in the last episode of season five despite the best efforts of many dedicated men and women hoping to make it otherwise. But that sadness is tempered with enough happy endings for the individual characters that it feels just about right. In a world where it’s impossible to change what fundamentally ails the cities of America, it’s nice to know that at least the people we’ve come to know and love over sixty long hours of television ended up better than when they started. It’s the smallest of victories, of course, but it’s also the only kind we were ever going to get. And as much as we might have wished it otherwise, this has to be good enough.