The Wire, Season Five
This morning I finished my second complete viewing of The Wire, and I’m more strongly convinced than ever that it is the best TV ever made.
Enough has been written about how great the show is, and if you haven’t watched it, I urge you to do so immediately. It’s available from iTunes or on DVD.
What I want to write about here are some of the specific issues raised by the fifth and final season.
For me, although I’ve done so in the past, a ranking of the first four of seasons is pointless. Each of them is different, and each of them is brilliant. Taken together, they form an astonishingly moving and powerful picture of a modern city on the edge of collapse. They do it without ever resorting to the kind of flashy – or convenient – plot lines of a show like CSI. Much is left to us to imagine, and the hallmark of the show is ambiguity. Who are the good guys? Are drug dealers – like Bodie for example – necessarily evil? Are senior policemen to blame for the obsession with statistics rather than quality police work, or is it the politicians? Is it even the politicians, or is it us, the voters, who cannot see the system in the round?
For all of these reasons, The Wire is the most important piece of television I’ve ever seen.
But season 5 is nowhere near this level of quality. On the first viewing, it was a tremendous disappointment, and that feeling is only reinforced on the second go-round.
The BBC have now finished their screening of the complete show, so it seems reasonable to discuss details of the plot here. If you haven’t finished watching it yet, I should warn you that there are heavy plot spoilers in what follows. Seriously, don’t read the rest if you don’t know how the series ends.
I think it comes down to this. In the final season, the show relinquishes ambiguity and makes clear who the bad guys are. We are given at least one character – Gus Haynes, the city editor of the Baltimore Sun newspaper – who is wholly good. We are given at least four characters who are wholly bad – Scott Templeton, the Sun reporter who manufactures portions of the serial killer story, his two editors, and the Republican governor of Maryland, the last of whom we never see on screen.
None of these four characters is allowed to show why they behave the way they do. In Templeton’s case, it is overweening ambition and self-regard that makes him force the story. At no time is there ever an honest motive behind his deception. This sets him apart from McNulty and Freamon (who I’ll come to in a bit) who cross the line in the name of a perverted sense of justice. McNulty even gives voice to this plot flaw in the final episode when he confronts Templeton: “I know why I did it, but fuck if I can figure out what it gets you in the end”.
This weakness in the story inevitably comes across in the acting too. We are shown the same basic scene over and over again as Templeton petulantly reacts to Haynes’s rigour by snatching his keys and notebook and heading out of the office, leaving his swivel chair spinning. Templeton’s frustration is not justified, and so Simon can’t give him words to express it.
The Templeton problem is made worse because of the comparison with two entirely good characters: Haynes and Mike Fletcher, the young journalist who follows Bubbles around. Early on in the season, Haynes is shown waking up in the middle of the night and calling in to the paper to check that he got some minor stat the right way around in a piece he edited. He’s the uncompromisingly correct journalist. He serves his readers and the memory of his great, honest predecessors, and will not bend on anything. He has no flaws, beyond an admirable propensity to tell the management to go fuck itself.
Fletcher is a much more minor character, but again he’s given a preachy storyline. Having followed Bubbles around, he writes a highly personal story, but is reticent to publish it unless Bubbles gives his consent, much to Haynes’s approval, even though Bubbles knew that the story was the plan all along. There’s nothing wrong with this behaviour at all: it’s the right thing to do. But it feels so clunky next to Templeton’s transgressions that it feels unnecessary. Yes, there are ethical journalists, we get it, but we don’t need them to be saints. Frankly, to any British viewers of the show, the idea of a golden age of scrupulously honest journalists telling it straight is a ridiculous idea in the first place.
The problem is made still worse by the fact that we know that Templeton is making quotes and stories up all along. With what little ambiguity is left after the convenient quotes in his opening day story, we are left in no doubt at all once he manufactures a quote from Nerese Campbell on how Daniels has been sticking the knife into Burrell. We know for certain that he’s full of shit.
Templeton’s two editors are slimy, self-satisfied and amoral chasers of a Pulitzer prize, which they duly win. They are explicitly told by Haynes and the police that Templeton is a liar but they carry on regardless. Time and again, they ignore good journalistic practice for the sake of their own glory. Again, Haynes spells this out, when he explains that they’ll be gone from the Sun as soon as the prize is in their hands. While they’re at it, they let experienced reporters go in order to keep their own high-salaried jobs.
The governor is less of an issue, perhaps, but the problems Carcetti faces with funding the schools and his inability to provide adequate funding for the police are a direct result of his snub. It’s this funding gap that leads McNulty and Freamon to take the course they do.
I can’t think of a character in the preceding four series who is painted in these black and white terms. To take just one example of characters who would be painted as completely evil in any other show, Avon Barksdale and Russell “Stringer” Bell, as we are shown, are part of the drugs trade because that’s the position they’ve been forced into by their background, and it’s their only realistic chance of autonomy in their lives. They have a kind of code – one that falls apart in the denouement of season 3 – and a kind of honour. They do right by their people.
None of this is true of Templeton or the editors.
It’s perhaps idle to speculate about why this flaw exists, but I believe it’s linked to the fact that the show’s creator, David Simon, was once a Sun journalist (he makes a very brief cameo appearance in the final episode typing away at a computer). Simon’s recent pronouncements on the newspaper industry show that he is a believer in the golden age, and has a strong view of why the newspapers have come to be so weak.
Such opinion is to be expected from a longtime newspaper man, of course. But it doesn’t have a place, unless given a counterweight, in The Wire.
It doesn’t matter whether we agree with his analysis of the newspaper industry or not. His handling of the drugs business, one of the most controversial public policy issues of the day, is balanced. He does not demonise drug dealers, and he does not laud cops. In season 1 there are as many useless mope cops as there are decent ones. For every Wee-Bey there’s a D’Angelo.
He even examines the legalisation option in season 3 with ‘Hamsterdam’. But he shows us that, while it has positive aspects such as cleaned up corners, the legalisation area itself is a vision of hell. There are no easy answers, that’s what he seems to be saying. Maybe we’re stuck with the drug problem. There are people who want to get high, and there are people who will help them do so for a price. Given that fact, how is society to proceed? There are no answers in The Wire, except possibly that the war on drugs can never be won. As Carver says in a memorable line “this ain’t no war; wars end”.
Weak as the newspaper element of season 5 is, the gigantic flaw in the season is McNulty’s phantom serial killer storyline. It’s bad enough when it starts – quite abruptly, at the end of the second episode – but gets significantly worse when Freamon joins the conspiracy after a couple of minutes’ thought. He previously sat out years and years in the pawn shop unit wasting his detective’s talents, and all of a sudden he can’t hack it any more in major crimes and helps McNulty go even further over the top.
Apart from it being out of character because of his patience – think of Lester calmly looking over his half-moons with a worldly disapproval, a shot we see repeatedly throughout the series – it’s also far too dumb a thing for him to do. Lester, above all, is canny and understands how to build a careful case based on highly technical evidence. All of a sudden he’s willing to throw all of that away to make a case that he knows will be torn apart by a competent litigator, and for what?
As with Templeton and the key-clutching flounce, we’re also treated to multiple repetitions of Bunk Moreland giving Jimmy the ‘think about what you’re doing, motherfucker’ speech. Bunk is one of my favourite characters in the entire show, and it’s painful to watch him being given such flimsy material.
The difference with this storyline compared to the Templeton one is that McNulty and Freamon act out of genuine frustration. They know there’s a case to be made against Marlo, and they do the only thing they can think of to make it, even if it is completely flawed.
McNulty in particular is given a wildly incredible set of stories in season 5. He’s back on the drink again and screwing it up with Beadie, then inside an episode he’s apologetic and off the sauce even at his own “wake” at Kavanagh’s. He’s gone from being told that he doesn’t understand the implications of his fraudulent case to suddenly trying to put the breaks on it when he sees Keema and others wasting their time with his “bullshit”.
As with Freamon, McNulty is too smart not to have seen that this was the inevitable outcome of his actions. Certainly he’s been blind to consequences in his personal and professional life, but he’s never actually made it more difficult for real police to do police work.
I’ve been very critical of the season, and I think I’ve shown how I’m justified in doing so. But it’s not all bad and, even as a flawed season it is still way better than most other shows ever made. A few things save it from disaster, many of them just the little touches you come to expect from The Wire, like the FBI profile of McNulty’s make-believe serial killer that is a perfect character summary of McNulty himself. But for me the highlight of the season is in the trajectories of two characters: Duquan and Bubbles.
To me, Bubbles is the most important character in The Wire. His story affected me more than any other, from pity at his beatings in season four, to genuine horror when he attempted to hang himself after Sherrod’s accidental death, to joy as he finally walks up the staircase from his sister’s basement to share a meal with her. I think that one shot of perhaps three or four seconds in the final montage is worth everything.
Bubbles is at exactly the middle of the problem that Baltimore faces. He’s a victim of the system that has failed the city. He’s not innocent – far from it – but he’s in the position he’s in because it’s the only alternative he’s been given. That he finds a way to get clean and enjoy the semblance of a normal life is testimony to the humanity of the show, and of the characters who are trying to make a difference, no matter how small, to the lives of the victims. What hope there is in the show lies here.
Duquan is the most sympathetic of the children who appear from season four onwards. His relationship with Pryzbylewski is beautifully muted and free of schmaltz. It’s the kind of sympathy that we feel ourselves as we walk past a homeless person, or someone else we imagine ourselves helping.
The summing up at the end of season five shows us that life in Baltimore is a cycle. Michael is the new Omar, Valchek is the new Burrell, Fletcher is the new Haynes and, most affecting of all, Dukie is the new Bubbles. As our heart lifts at Bubbles ascending to normalcy, it breaks as we see Dukie injecting himself at the stables. His shy smile stays with us as we watch him resign himself to a life of scrapping and scraping his way to his next fix.
For all the faults of the final season, these two characters redeem it and round out the entire show. It’s difficult to imagine ever seeing anything as good on our screens. It’s just such a shame that the writers gave us two such comparatively weak storylines as the fake serial killer and Templeton’s creative journalism. They leave an unpleasant stain on an otherwise exemplary piece of drama.
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Funny thing – I just finished rewatching season 5 myself. This morning, I thought I’d poke around the internet to see random thoughts. Take a look at David Simon’s March 17 2008 Huffington Post article – I read it just before I found your blog, and I have to say it helped improve my opinion of season 5. For sure, it’s the weakest at all and furthest from the realm of possibility (Faking a serial killer? Is that really how Freamon and McNulty end their obsessions? Really?). But Simon makes a strong and fantastically written argument about the point of season 5. You should check it out.