By Curt Schleier
If there is a show bleaker in its outlook than THE WIRE, I do not know what it is. It actually makes global warming look like a good thing. And by bleak I don’t mean that the show is bad. On the contrary, it is the best drama on the air right now. But it is so overly negative in tone it is almost oppressive.
In David Simon’s Baltimore, no good deed goes unpunished. The special unit of cops that has done the best work is disbanded for financial reasons. Once again, the do-nothings triumph. As McNulty (Dominic West) so poignantly says about most of the department’s deadwood, these “guys couldn’t catch the clap in a Mexican whore house.”
Meanwhile Thomas Hauk (Dominick Lombardozzi), a cop who was canned, winds up doing private investigations for the drug dealers’ lawyer and earns three times the salary he did before.
There are small victories – a state senator looks as though he will be indicted and Avon Barksdale (Wood Harris) is in the joint, but the streets still remain the same.
The themes that will dominate the show this its last season are becoming clear. Creator-writer-executive producer Simon cut his teeth as a journalist at the Baltimore Sun, once the great paper of H. L. Menken. But the not so fictional version of the paper in the show has fallen on harder times once media conglomerates took ownership; Simon isn’t taking that lightly. While the story centers on a (not so) fictional Sun, it is typical of what’s happening to and at newspapers around the country. The current Sun editor, James Whiting (Sam Freed), is obsessed with winning awards, not fact checking, and there is a reporter on the paper, Scott Templeton (Tom McCarthy), happily willing to make up his own quotes if it will get him a good byline.
In the latest round of cutbacks, news bureaus in place for 80 and more years have been shut and the most seasoned and expert journalists (and the most highly paid) are forced to take buyouts. As a result of these cutbacks, the paper is missing out on stories it routinely would have had.
Moreover, the paper is increasingly susceptible to being manipulated. When Mayor Carcetti wants to can his police commissioner, Ervin Burrell (Frankie R. Faison), he does it by planting a story in the newspaper to test reaction of the community. While I know this sounds like it doesn’t make for compelling viewing, it does. What is presented here as fiction is really happening across the country, and people smart enough to watch THE WIRE these last four years are smart enough to appreciate the drama of America’s media going up in corporate flames.
Meanwhile, Baltimore’s top drug dealer, Marlo Stanfield (Jamie Hector) has a problem. He has too much money on hand. So he asks Proposition Joe (Robert F. Chew) for advice. Joe shows him how to launder cash through a fake Caribbean-based church charity. Of course, that doesn’t stop him from working to expand his empire further. But how can you blame him when corporate executives do the same thing.
Finally, McNulty has been driven over to the dark side – but with good cause. Though he is a drunken adulterer, his heart is in the right place as he mutilates the dead body of a homeless person. His goal: to make a natural death appear a murder. And not just a murder. He wants it to look like it was part of a spree by a new serial killer. Daft you say? So does his partner, Bunk Moreland (Wendell Pierce), who wants no part of whatever McNulty is cooking up.
McNulty’s idea is to force the mayor to fund a task force like the one he just disbanded. This will enable McNulty and Freamon (Clark Peters) to go back and investigate the unsolved murder of 22 drug dealers they were working on when financial cutbacks disbanded their group. Ingenious. And so is this show.