We're All Living Season 5 of "The Wire"
The oft-criticized last season of the acclaimed series, a satire in which institutional America is totally overrun by fraud, now looks ahead of its time
When The Wire came out on HBO in 2002, I was blown away by the TV series that reinvented the cops-and-robbers story as a clash of competing criminal bureaucracies. While the contemporary Lost was supposed to be a cheery metaphor about the afterlife, The Wire was a true story about life after the death of the American city, where players on either side of the dope trade in zombie Baltimore needed toughness, moral fiber (“A man must have a code”), and wit to survive in urban purgatory.
A longtime Baltimore Sun reporter, creator David Simon had a little Melville in him, crafting his epic so close to truth he risked having it downgraded to great journalism. Every detail not only could happen, it probably did (many of the subplots were based on true stories, with actual characters appearing as human Easter eggs). But when the much-anticipated last season came out in 2007, a show that required no suspension of disbelief was rewritten as an absurd satire in which an improbable fraud infects the police, journalism, politics, and the courts at once. A beyond-fan, I was confused by what I thought was a silly, cynical, and needlessly angry spoof. Some die-hards agreed, with the Washington City Paper decrying plot twists that seemed “disloyal both to the real world of journalism and to the world of The Wire.”
This week, though, when the hit the media put on Joe Biden after his debate performance reminded me of a Wire drug assassination, I rewatched the last season and realized Simon — who long ago became one of the most humorously abusive and unlikeable trolls on social media — was right all along:
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