The dish

The Wire, season five.

If you’re new to these recaps, you should start with my notes on previous seasons – on season one; season two; season three; and the longest post, on season four.

I’ve held off a bit on writing about season five of The Wire for two reasons. The obvious one was work – the end of spring training is always a sprint between daily games, keeping up with draft stuff, and, you know, actual assignments, like columns and podcasts. But I also wanted to create some distance between myself and the material (I finished the series on the 23rd, watching the last two episodes back-to-back on a flight home from Charlotte) to see if my impressions of the season would vary in time.

They really haven’t, however: Season five just wasn’t that good. It’s a sad ending to what was otherwise such a phenomenal achievement in television.

There’s a laundry list of problems with season five, but I’ll limit myself to three. One is that the entire season feels rushed. The show adds another setting, the Baltimore Sun newsroom, and cast of characters, including old Homicide favorite Clark Johnson. Yet without shedding many characters from previous seasons, we’re left with the same sixty minutes per episode spread out over an ever-increasing number of subplots and characters, so the newsroom folks don’t get the development they need, and every one of them remains two-dimensional after the series finale – particularly the setting’s villain, Scott Templeton, whose motivations are never sufficiently explored. The increased character density means we also get less time with series stalwarts like Omar, McNulty, Marlo, and Carcetti, all of whom receive plot treatments far more superficial than what we’ve seen before. The explanations, if you could call them that, for McNulty falling off the wagon and into a ditch fell far short of the standards set as recently as season four for character development and background. Add to all of those issues the shorter season length, ten episodes instead of twelve or thirteen, and the need to tie up as many storylines as possible before signoff and you have a season that feels like a compliation rather than a coherent set of stories.

The second is co-creator David Simon’s proximity to the material. The Templeton storyline is Simon’s vengeance on a real-life coworker at the Sun, Jim Haner, whom Simon accused of fabricating quotes and events while also accusing the Sun‘s editors and management of protecting their star reporter. Templeton is a flawed character, but is more fleshed-out than the simpering managing editor Thomas Klebanow (who talks like a damned grief counselor) and executive editor James Whiting, both of whom are depicted as willfully blind to Templeton’s malfeasance because they only see the potential for awards and a Hail Mary play to save the newsroom. I have no problem with Simon wanting to use his platform to decry plagiarism and fabrications by reporters, but it watched as if no one edited him down from his pulpit.

And finally, the serial killer storyline, the one thing that ties just about everything together other than the Omar plot, was so implausible and so far out of left field that I found myself wishing I could skip through those scenes (I couldn’t, because the series is otherwise so tightly plotted that you can’t skip anything, ever, or risk becoming hopelessly lost) and get back to the routine street violence. The idea that straightlaced Lester would be so consumed with his desire to nab Marlo that he would engage in an illegal endeavor that would jeopardize not just his and McNulty’s careers but would jeopardize the case against Marlo and the careers of people like Cedric Daniels is too far gone for my suspension of disbelief to encompass it. Yeah, I caught the parallels between Templeton’s fabrications and McNulty’s, but that literary flourish doesn’t justify the departure from four seasons of severe realism.

There were literary flourishes within the season that did pay off for me as a viewer, however, especially the underlying conceit that the players may change, but the streets will remain the same until the structures that govern (or fail to govern) them fall. Avon Barksdale fell, to be replaced by Marlo, who will be replaced by someone, perhaps Slim Charles. Omar’s gone, but Michael has stepped right into the void. One addict, Bubbles, escapes the streets, only to be replaced by Dukwon, with their closure scenes airing back-to-back in the final episode just to hammer that point home. The government’s continued cycle of rewarding superficial stats over honest results, and politics over performance, was actually the funniest part of that final montage, one bit I won’t spoil in case any of you haven’t seen it; I’ll just say it took me a while to figure out who was going to fill that void because the choice was so unlikely (and, yet, so ultimately predictable). That self-referential aspect, the way loops always close and minor characters (like Lester’s girlfriend) resurface, remains one of the series’ most enduring qualities for me. Those closures also give the series as a whole that novelesque quality absent in most series – these massive story arcs and entrances and departures of characters mirror those of great Russian novels and require degrees of attention and skill absent in so much modern fiction in all media. I just wish the final season had played out differently.

* Because I know someone will ask, I’d rank season five as the worst, and four as the best – but you can’t really call season four the best without attaching it to the groundwork laid in season three, can you? Season three didn’t stand well on its own for me, but the 25 episodes in those two seasons combined, slightly longer in episodes than a standard network season (and about a season and a half in show minutes), beat any season of any other TV show I’ve ever seen, and it’s not that close. I still maintain that season two is unfairly maligned, however; it was different, but in a good way, and even seeds planted on the docks bloomed in the series’ final few episodes.

* One thing I’ve puzzled over far too much is which Wire actor was most deserving of some recognition from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences, which completely whiffed on the series while wasting Outstanding Drama Series nominations on the likes of Joan of Arcadia, CSI, Boston Legal, and Heroes. (The Wire received just two Emmy nominations that I can find, both writing nods, one for S3E11, “Middle Ground,” and one for the series finale, “-30-.” It appears the Golden Globes can’t even say that much.) My answer was far from certain after four seasons, but season five clinched it: Andre Royo, for his portrayal of Bubbles. It probably didn’t help his cause with award committees that his subplot was always in the background, or that the character’s required range only became evident over multiple seasons, but his performance was the most compelling in a series full of compelling performances. Only Seth Gilliam as Carver saw his character develop that much over the full five years – but we all know the award shows love a good addiction storyline.

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