The Wire's Final Season and the Story Everyone Missed

Well now, it's been a week since The Wire's final episode and a certain calm has descended, leaving a little less agita and a little more reflection. A moment for one last question:

That wasn't too vicious, was it?

Sure there was a fabulist and, yeah, he snatched the big prize. Couldn't resist, sorry. That was a bit beyond the historical reality; at the historical Baltimore Sun, he was a mere Pulitzer finalist. And okay, the city editor, the honorable fellow, the one for whom journalism was an ethos, he got slapped down and thrown to the copy desk. We did that, too, because hey, to criticize such a newsroom culture did indeed carry those risks in Baltimore.

But the fifth-season story arc began with a wonderful bit of adversarial reporting on deadline -- good, clean newspapering it was. And at the end there, that other fellow wrote a very sincere narrative about a very real and genuine soul. Righteous journalism that makes a good reporter get up in the morning.

True, the top editor had to get up on a desk amid the deluge of the internet and the declines in circulation and advertising. And yeah, he gave the more-with-less talk to maintain morale and it rang a hollow because at this point, buyout upon buyout, the grey ladies are down to bone already. But he was sincere in his grief. He hated closing those foreign bureaus and cutting back further in the newsroom. But what can you do? The suits in Chicago are running scared.

All in all, the last season of The Wire wasn't that cruel a portrayal, was it? There was some love in there for the ink-stained wretches. A few funny lines, too. Tell me you didn't laugh at the burnt-doll harem in the photog's trunk. C'mon, it's okay to smile.

Ah, fuck it, who's kidding whom?

It was way worse than you thought. Any of you -- save for a couple sharp journos who were able to stand back just far enough to realize what the real critique was. Lowry got it, and tellingly, he used to work for the L.A. Times but is now a step or two removed from a metropolitan daily, writing for Variety. And a couple of others at alternative weeklies figured it out - again, perhaps, because they're less vested than everyone at the big, vulnerable dailies.

But the rest of you blessed, scribbling souls? Not so much as an offhand reference, and that goes not just for the journalists displeased enough with our newspaper tale, but for the larger number of commentators and critics who thought we did swell. No one went near the theme; everyone stayed dead-center and literal, oblivious to the big-ass elephant in our mythical newsroom.

Let's be clear, though. I'm actually rigorous about letting criticism of the show stand without arguing back. I'll rant a bit about journalism, or the drug war or any other issue that I rub up against. But if you didn't enjoy The Wire this season, then let's concede for purposes of this little note that you are correct. We sucked. The writing was a train wreck, the characterization limp, the acting and plotting, shameful and shameless both. Jumped that shark in high-topped Nikes, we did.

Okay, I don't actually agree, but neither would I argue. We said what we wanted to say and now everyone else is entitled to talk back without some counterbitch finding them. So let's happily concede that all criticism stands and get to the real fun.

Because the thing I can't leave alone, the thing that makes me giddy as a schoolgirl is this: Whatever else I am -- a traitorous apostate to newsprint, the angriest hack in television, a kicker of small dogs -- you must acknowledge that I am now, also, the newly crowded King of Meta. That's right. I am your new lord sovereign of buried, latent, subtextual argument. I dragged it past sarcasm, past cynicism, and all the way to balls-out snide. Crown me up and kneel, ya bitches.

Here's what happened in season five of The Wire when almost no one -- among the working press, at least -- was looking:

Our newspaper missed every major story.

The mayor, who came in promising reform, is instead forcing his police department to once again cook the stats to create the illusion that crime is going down. Uncovered.

The school system has been teaching test questions to improve No Child Left Behind scores, and to protect the mayor politically and to validate a system that is failing to properly educate city children. No expose published.

Key investigations and prosecutions are undercut or abandoned by the political machinations of police officials, prosecutors and political figures. Departmental priorities make high-level drug investigation prohibitive.

Not the news that's fit to print.

Drug wars, territorial disputes, and the assassination of the city's largest drug importer manage to produce a brief inside the metro section that refers only to the slaying of a second-hand appliance store owner.

Par for the course.

That was the critique. With the exception of the good journalism that bookended the story arc -- which is, of course, representative of the fact that there are still newspaper folk in Baltimore and elsewhere struggling mightily to do the job -- the season amounted to ten hours of a newspaper that is no longer intimately aware of its city.

And here comes the meta:

In Baltimore, where over the last twenty years Times Mirror and the Tribune Company have combined to reduce the newsroom by forty percent, all of the above stories pretty much happened. A mayor was elected governor while his police commanders made aggravated assaults and robberies disappear. School principals in Baltimore and elsewhere in Maryland were obliged to teach test questions to pump scores at the expense of meaningful curricula. Politicians then took credit for the limited gains that were, of course, unsustainable as the students aged into middle school. Politically sensitive casework was butchered or pursued selectively by political interests and departmental indifference. Notable killings and machinations in the drug world were the talk of the streets.

And yes, in real life, there wasn't much written about such in my city. Amid buyout after buyout, the Baltimore Sun conceded much of its institutional memory, its beat structure, its ability to penetrate municipal institutions and report qualitatively on substantive issues in a way that explains not just the symptomatic problems of the city, but the root causes of those problems.

The Sun began doing so in the 1990s -- before the internet, before the Tribune Company did its worst -- when beat reporting and any serious, systemic examination of issues was eschewed in favor of "impact" journalism, special projects and Pulitzer sniffing. It continued doing so into the present decade as the Tribune Company followed the Times-Mirror buyouts with even more ruthless abandon. And now, with the economic vise that is the internet tight around her, The Sun - like so many once-worthy regional newspapers -- is fighting for relevance and readers.

It's admittedly easy enough, if you are writing a fictional television show, to sit in a diner booth or on a bar stool with a police lieutenant or an assistant principal, an assistant state's attorney or a political functionary and have them tell you the good dirt, knowing as they do that fiction is a safe abstraction. Fiction makes everyone comfortable and talkative; journalism -- good, probing journalism -- is a much harder, much more rigorous task. It is time-consuming, expensive, deliberate and demanding.

It would not have been easy for a veteran police reporter to pull all the police reports in the Southwestern District and find out just how robberies fell so dramatically, to track each individual report through staff review and find out how many were unfounded and for what reason, or to develop a stationhouse source who could tell you about how many reports went unwritten on the major's orders, or even further -- to talk to people in that district who tried to report armed robberies and instead found themselves threatened with warrant checks or accused of drug involvement or otherwise intimidated into dropping the matter.

It would be hard for a committed education reporter to acquire the curriculum of a city middle school and compare it to what children were taught before No Child Left Behind reduced teaching to rote repetition, or to track a rise in the third-grade test scores into the fifth or seventh grade and thereby demonstrate how temporal and false the gains actually were. And to get teachers talking, even on background, about their anger and frustration at this flummery?

That kind of trust comes slow.

But absent that kind of reporting, we will all soon enough live in cities and towns where politicians and bureaucrats gambol freely without worry, where it is never a risk to shine shit and call it gold. A good newspaper covers its city and acquires not just the quantitative account of a day's events, but the qualitative truth and meaning behind those events. A great newspaper does this routinely on a multitude of issues, across its entire region.

Such a newspaper was not chronicled on The Wire. There were still good journalists in our make-believe newsroom, and they did some good work -- just as there are still such souls in Baltimore and every city laboring in similar fashion and to similar result. But there used to be more of them. And they covered more ground, and they knew the terrain in a way that they no longer do.

I confess I thought that journalism was still self-aware enough to get it, that enough collective consciousness of the craft's highest calling remained, that reporters still worried about what their newspapers were missing.

We certainly expected more attention from the media. Write a television story arc about the betrayal of the working class, the fraud of the drug war or the lie of No Child Left Behind and you can't get off the entertainment pages. Maybe an education magazine writes a column on inncr-city curricula, or a libertarian website revisits the idea of drug decriminalization.

But suggest that high-end American newspapers have been gutted by out-of-town ownership, besieged by the internet and preoccupied by a prize culture that validates small-trick and self-limiting "impact," rather than seriously evaluating problems? Now you've got the full attention of the media.

We are grateful for ink. Always.

But for all of it to amount to a forest-and-tree farce? To argue about whether Whiting is more venal or one-dimensional than Valchek? To debate whether Gus Haynes is more of a hero than Bunny Colvin? To wonder whether anyone would be disciplined for cursing in a newsroom, or why they made the top editor wear those suspenders, or whether it was a cliché to have a fabricator driving the overt plot? To argue about whether the drama had become arch or unsubtle? And to studiously avoid any sustained discussion about whether the depicted newspaper is, in all respects, capturing the meaningful narrative of the depicted city? And whether that is an accurate critique?

When we were beating the story out, Bill Zorzi wondered whether -- in the final episode -- it might be necessary for Gus Haynes to vocalize the theme, to turn to Alma or Luxenberg or some other character and say, "We're so thin, and we waste what little resources we have left on the wrong things. I wonder what's happening in this city that we don't know about. I wonder what we're missing?"

But no, show don't tell is the rule. To have the city editor saying such things would have been, well, arch. And unsubtle. As it is, I argued, any good journalist will -- if he or she loves the business -- follow this story and wince at the stories systematically missed, the undiscovered and unreported tales of the city known to viewers for four seasons. As wounded and onanistic and self-absorbed as the profession has become, there are still plenty of people for whom that matters above all.

So I talked Zorzi down on that one.

My bad, Bill. My bad.

David Simon, a reporter for the Baltimore Sun for thirteen years, is the executive producer of HBO's The Wire. The drama's final season, depicting a Baltimore newspaper, concluded last week.

Comments

[owenrol]

I love the Wire, but season 5 was a letdown. It had a couple of great episodes (54, 59), but Simon's summary really disappoints me. Dough Boy in Boys in The Hood, said it best, "either they don't know, don't show, or don't care about what's going on in the hood".

Simon attempted to show us why we don't get relevant news, but he muddied it up with the serial killer thing. He missed an opportunity to teach us, because he was too angry with journalism in general.

You could not expect a reasonable person to say, oh Prop Joe got killed and since Gus Haynes didn't know who he is, then the institutional knowledge in the paper is gone. What would have made more sense would have been to have Gus know who Prop Joe was and try to follow that story line, and have the serial killer thing get in the way. Or just get rid of the serial killer thing and have the reporters question why the investigation of Stanfiled is ending, when it seems like Stanfield is getting more powerful. That's just a couple of suggestions. There are others.

Great show, but c'mon Simon, don't be simple. We didn't get the point because it was not made well.

[mayagurantz]

I don't know what's worse--the disappointment of Season 5, or the fact that you would shift the blame for it onto your fans.

Perhaps the reason that the entire viewing world of The Wire didn't get Season 5 is because it was, for the most part, a poorly executed, narratively sloppy, often silly mess. The care with which you constructed morally complex, intricately run, decaying institutions in Seasons 1-4? Absent. The panoply of richly drawn, difficult to love and impossible to hate human characters that we've absorbed into our imaginations for the past 5 years? Nowhere.

The promise of Season 5--that we would see the worlds we came to know in Seasons 1-4 reduced and misunderstood and miscommunicated by the media that should act as the conduit to the greater world--reduced to the punch line of "they miss every story"?

We expected more than that. We expected more than the bad-guy fabulist and saintly city editor--it bore almost the entire narrative weight of the Baltimore Sun storyline, and made everything else in that world seem like an afterthought or expositional/moral sketch. You blamed the top editors for everything; in another Wire, you would have shown us who those guys have to report to.

Oh, David. We'll always have the first four years of the Wire.

[Hugh G. Johnson]

Love the wire. Watched it religiously, but....

You're joking, right?

I mean, talk about a non non-story. It's like saying that nobody talks about air anymore.

I don't know if I should laugh, or cry. I used to think you were a genious, but now me thinks you Coo Coo for CoCo Puffs. Sorry.

[Aries198]

I only caught the last and final season of The Wire and enjoyed the Sun story line especially. I did notice that the reporters and editors missed the big stories and that they could be played by those who had a story to spin. I did wonder if the old seasoned police beat reporter wasn't "retired" in a cost saving move if the Sun would have been able to sniff that one out. By cutting a reporter with good inside contacts, who was trusted by his sources, who knew the players, if they lost more than they saved. The newcomers just couldn't smell the crap that the older, seasoned hand could.

That I think is the problem with lots of media today. Many of the old-style reporters, especially at the local level, are cast away for the new, the hip, the cutie, the 18-25 demo and true journalism is forgotten. The stories missed by local newspapers and TV stations are amazing. And currently, how many true hard news radio stations still exist? Most radio stations may not even play locally but are satellite fed from its corporate studios. Talk radio does not a news radio make.

I have heard from very reliable sources (i.e. those old grizzled hard news pros now teaching journalism because the papers/stations don't want them) that local TV newscasts often are mere advertising vehicles. That many local folks coming to them with a news story or a concern are directed to the advertising department if they want their topic covered by the local "news." I guess product placement occurs everywhere.

The last great TV show based at a newspaper was the old "Lou Grant." I find it interesting that it is not running on any cable outlet nowadays. Several other drama attempts to follow a TV news theme failed. I think the issues Mr. Simon brings up that go on in a big city paper or even a 24/7 cable news network would be interesting fodder for a new TV drama, although it would have to air on an HBO to tell its story truthfully. Hint...hint.., Mr. Simon.

I also find it humorous as well as sad that often, despite our 24/7 cable news networks...I have trouble finding up-to-the-minute news 24/7!! So often we have quasi-documentaries, political/financial/news-is-me/entertainment/talking heads where headline news used to be. I rue the day CNN took off their wonderful only hour devoted to world news "World News Today" for more political BS. Maybe I really want to know what is happening in Timbuktu at 3 a.m. on a Saturday!

[jerseypal]

Ditto for Philadelphia. City Hall courtyard is a pigsty, but our mayor, governor, and Hillary Clinton don't notice, neither do the Philadelphia media, print and tv. Walking through City Hall the day after Rendell endorsed Hillary and observing open dumpsters filed with trash, and the generally filthy conditions of the inner courtyard and entranceways, and having seen the happy faces of Nutter, Rendell and Clinton on television the day before, I wondered: how do these people pick their way through all this garbage to talk the great talk? The Inquirer hasn't printed a decent expose since Frank Rizzo retired, probably because they've been halfway in bed with everybody elected mayor since then. TV news here is a complete joke, more of a government publicity department than an actual reporting profession. Well, we get the media we pay for, and deserve. Just so with government, schools, leaders, et al.

[BNAUGHTY]

Don't sweat it too much DS, much love and mad props. To echo the sentiments of some posters below, the only problem with season 5 was that it was the final season.... damn!!!! Get back at us with some new sh*t soon!!!

[Sioen]

Thank you for what is easily the best show of all time. I loved all five years, even if I don't have HBO (hey, torrents deliver it faster at a better quality).

And I thought you made your point well. It's the feeling I have every day at work, when I edit the skimpy stories about city hall and the lush, involved stories on investigative topics that are little more than sideshow.

Sideshow is what we do now, though. There was a time when the dearth of media outlets and the culture of the day meant that advertisers needed newspapers. If they wanted to sell, they came to us. That allowed us an enormous amount of freedom to take our job seriously.

Now, however, we need them significantly more than they need us, and they know it. So we do what any vaudeville performer does when the crowd is threatening to move on to the next tent -- we pull off our top, and we dance even harder. We bring in the amazingly flexible boy who can put his...

You get the idea. But until news organizations start to do things independent of the NEED for advertising dollars, the media will only continue to degrade, and the country will only continue to degrade, and it makes me think of another lesson from The Wire:

As long as we all continue to do what we are doing, all the same shit will continue to happen. Nothing's going to change unless people change it. But most of the journalists I work alongside, bless their earnest hearts, just want to finish their day and go home. Maybe they all need to watch The Wire again.

[rzan]

I don't get HBO, so I have to wait until each season comes out on DVD. I have to admit it took me awhile to get into the Wire. I guess I am kind of superficial. But at some point I was hooked and totally involved. There has never been anything that even comes close to this series. I look forward to the fifth and final season.

[lifterus]

You said in an interview once that if you did a sixth season, it would focus on immigration as it is an important aspect to Baltimore that the show never addressed. All us fans can do is hope and pray you come around to it some day. Maybe just do a miniseries (like that final Deadwood movie that was supposed to happen). Maybe not even call it The Wire. New characters, but maybe an occasional cameo from the alumni.

[naturallight]

Will the Iraq series be half as realistic? Cannot wait.

Why did HBO end the Wire? Its gotta beat the carnival crap and gay funeral home garbage.

As for your media commentary: I will take your word for it. I think you've earned the credibility.

[baltbail]

wait, you're telling me the baltimore sun misses major stories that occur in baltimore? i don't believe it!

[lainey]

The Wire is/was sheer brillance David. Your commentary on the world in which we live goes far beyond Baltimore. You showed the contradictions that lies within us personally, as well as the corruption of media, government, school systems, families, etc; all by the way, designed to lift up Americans, yet nonetheless have come to tear us down. The characters were all people to whom we could somehow relate-- either through disgust, likability, looks, humor, or integrity. You captured it all, and for one hour a week, my mind was challenged, my soul was sad, and still, my hope was maintained. Heres to all of us who still believe that children should learn in the best of conditions, politicians should truly serve one term, police could be better if given the proper resources they deserve, the media should tell the truth and most important, we should all value our most precious commodity...children.

[NoMoreDrama]

My only problem with the Final Season was that it was about five seasons too short. I didn't really miss the whole "real story" of unreported news. Lately, I just assume it as an unreported fact. What always got me about the series, especially the final season, was that the solutions to major problems were staring everyone in the face. It was the few with character and vision, that saw the answers and pursued them to their own detriment. Mc Nutty sacrificing everything to nail Marlo, Bunny's part in a school program that could've helped the mayor, the kids, and the school system, Gus defending the institustion of journalism, and Freamon going all out on a wire tap scheme. For all the good those with conviction pursued, the power of stagnant, status quo thinking reduced the possible outcome to a side-step, negotiated, reorganization of the problem. Leaving the solutions up to anyone else who dared risk what they had to lose, for something as intangible as progress.

P.S. Omar was the best villain ever. Oh indeed.

[wordworker]

HuffPost's Pick

kudos and great thanks for the many families that we invited into our lives for the past five years.

i certainly pity the poor fool journos who managed to miss the story about missing the story, but since that's apparently what they do...

while the various series arcs may have proved depressing for many viewers, (in an interview i've seen with Sonja Sohn, even she admits to Bubbles being for her the only "character of hope"), this season truly showed the unfortunate state of our common conciousness, and the logical and perhaps inevitable decay of the fourth estate should in no way surprise, enrage or further sicken any thinking person.

the simple fact that there is a "Fox news" channel speaks volumes to our intellectual disintegration;

that is has an influence and audience that watches for any other reason than "the car crashes" and accepts the "reportage" any more seriously than one would read The Onion should send a shiver down the spine, and it does, mine.

as the microprocessor doubles in speed every eighteen months, so does the world, it seems, and whether we as a species can actually keep up with our handiwork is a question i've often asked.

honest, artful expression of the human experience has seen many a tribe through long nights and harsh winters - may this have been just one in the long string - past and future.

ww

[moreless]

David,
The "scribbling souls" didn"t miss it; they were too afraid to write about it. Fear is epidemic in the newsroom today. No such thing as job security when unions cut deals with the company to get around seniority like they did in Philly last year. Charlatans, interested in only profit margins, are destroying the paper that I used to deliver as a kid, and where my photographs appeared for over 15 years. I"m out, I"m glad, but I"m pissed they"re getting away with it.
Watching the final season of The Wire felt like a gift to all that have been forced to take a buyout or suffer a layoff from a job we once loved, working for a newspaper.
If our paths ever cross, the drinks are on me.

[BDLamb]

Brilliant series! What's next?