I love watching The Wire, but lord am I sick of reading about it.
You can’t open a newspaper, magazine or blog these days without encountering some bloated “think piece” (ahem) or critical “roundtable” (is that like a circle jerk?) about the awesomeness of David Simon and Ed Burns’ labyrinthine, muckraking urban soap opera, which began its fifth and final season a few Sundays ago. What was once a trickle of laudatory press plugs is now a deluge; when they aren’t shitting themselves over the demise of their last decent drama series, HBO execs must be pissing themselves with glee over the free PR.
Blame self-infatuated journalists. (Ahem again.) The focal institution in The Wire’s latest season is, as you’ve no doubt read, the much-diminished Fourth Estate, represented by a fictionalized version of real-life newspaper the Baltimore Sun, which joins that city’s police department, port, city hall and school system as a component of the series’ relentless social critique. Simon was a crime reporter at the Sun for 12 years and left in 1995 when he grew demoralized over cutbacks instituted by its out-of-town corporate keepers, the Times-Mirror Company. His ire was specifically directed at the company’s local agents, former Philadelphia Inquirer editors John Carroll and William Marimow, who became Simon’s editor and managing editor, respectively, not long before he fled the Sun.
Simon has famously said that this pair “were tone-deaf and prize-hungry and more interested in self-aggrandizement than in building lasting quality at the paper,” a contention that this season of The Wire’s newsroom thread has latched onto like a pit bull. Among the faux Sun staff, which includes good-guy city editor Gus Haynes (played by longtime Simon collaborator Clark Johnson) and lovable-curmudgeon copy editor Jay Spry (Donald Neal), is a go-getting cub reporter named Scott Templeton (Thomas McCarthy), who isn’t above piping a quote or inventing a source from scratch in his quest for journalistic greatness. He’s backhandedly encouraged in this endeavor by blowhard executive editor James Whiting (Sam Freed) and weasely managing editor Thomas Klebanow (David Costabile), both of whom are pointedly resistant to their seasoned hacks’ reservations about Templeton, and who are plainly modeled after Carroll and Marimow. This, Simon and his creative team contend, is what happens when newspaper higher-ups start thinking more about fame and the bottom line and less about pursuing and printing the truth. This being The Wire, I assume the season’s later episodes will show how this moral failure affects the people on Baltimore’s socioeconomic bottom rung.
Exaggerations and expository slop aside, the newsroom storyline doesn’t strike me as outrageously off-base, especially in a narrative that’s famous for its elaboration on true-life characters and actual events. (The aforementioned Spry, for instance, is named after one of Simon’s Sun colleagues.) But while most of the media hosannas for this season have been gushing, many have made a point of calling Simon out for using the show to take revenge on his ex-bosses.
Online, alt-journalism fixture Bill Wyman has gone to extremes on his blog Hitsville, writing that “Simon’s portrait of Marimow is not just unfair; it verges on the psychotic.” In a long, comparatively sedate feature in this month’s issue of The Atlantic Monthly, Wire-head and former Inquirer reporter Mark Bowden—who calls Carroll and Marimow “notable newspapermen who are my friends”—portrays Simon as an embittered hack untempered by age or experience. And in a January 16 Washington Post piece, David Montgomery allows Carroll to respond to Simon’s perceived slights and say, “To parade Bill or me as some kind of cost-cutting agency of a brutish corporation is preposterous.” Simon himself has weighed in with multiple responses to the responses, most notably to a weeklong, early-January blather-fest on Slate called the TV Club—otherwise known as editors Jeffrey Goldberg, David Plotz and John Swansburg, who predictably insist that Simon is “obsessed by the injustices wrought against the Sun.”
The sudden logophilia suggests that Simon has struck a nerve or two, but the Slatesters may have nailed it when they called their trepidation over the newsroom subplot “contempt born of familiarity.” Another reason journos have their shorts in a wad over the Sun scenes is, of course, that journos tend to be self-obsessed, maniacally image-conscious and quick to close ranks when one of their own gets jabbed (c.f. Montgomery’s Post piece and Bowden’s Atlantic apologia). The spilling of so many words on what amounts to a fraction of The Wire’s series-encompassing arc says so much about journalistic self-regard, in fact, that it may well back up Simon’s dim view of the current state of the trade. Besides, as Montgomery wrote of the general pissiness over how the paper’s muckety-mucks are portrayed in the show, “[W]ouldn’t members of the longshoremen’s union have said the same thing about Season 2, which featured the Port of Baltimore?”
Maybe so, but longshoremen don’t have a ready soapbox from which to express their aesthetic assessments, nor the tiresome sense of entitlement that would lead them do so with abandon. And that’s what really rankles about the flood of Wire articles: It adds up to reams and megabytes of bad, de facto TV criticism, and thus a degradation of the form. Guys like Bowden, Goldberg, Plotz and Swansburg (but not Wyman, who, despite the occasional high dudgeon, is a generally astute observer) appear to watch little television besides The Wire, and are thus quick to jump on the “it’s best show in the history of television” bandwagon—a claim that only a genre-snob TV neophyte would make, and one that was likely coined by some HBO flack first anyway—without exhibiting any grasp of the medium’s actual history. Little wonder that their swooning/catty verbal hissy fits take issue with Simon’s portrayal of his erstwhile managers while dodging The Wire’s wider assertion that American journalism has become just another corporate billy club.
That said, I’m not in love with Season 5, either, largely because it strikes me as superfluous. Though I’d never begrudge Simon the opportunity to end The Wire on his own terms—something David Milch was denied when HBO prematurely pulled the plug on Deadwood—Season 4 was its heart-crumpling high point and made for a graceful, complexly open-ended culmination of its larger story. In it, a privileged few of the show’s characters pulled ahead (mostly, but not exclusively, undeserving ones); many fell behind (primarily young African-American men set on various paths to early extinction); and most were just lucky enough to break even (for the time being, anyway).
In that context, the long, enigmatic static shot of a Baltimore fringe-suburb street that closed the season was neither accidental nor meaningless. This, it implied, is as good as it gets for increasing numbers of urban Americans, and the relative peace it captured was as poignantly precarious as anything else in The Wire. In spite of the subsequent scenes shot and broadcast and the countless words spilled since—including mine—nothing else remained to be said.