The Wire Season 5 Episode 3

Spoilers abound in this review for Sunday’s episode, now available on Comcast OnDemand.

David Simon’s The Wire has been so great so consistently based a lot on Simon’s worldview: fiercely liberal, anti-corporate, a proponent of America’s lost people, and distrustful of any institution except maybe labor unions. He has told us a story for the last four-plus years that is politically charged, seen from the perspective of a pissed-off Baltimore resident who is disgusted with the turns his city and our country have taken in the Bush years.

In the first four seasons The Wire focused on institutions and circles of people that Simon was removed from by at least one click. He is a former Baltimore Sun reporter, who left the paper when offered a buyout, a budgetary measure in which a company saves money by incenting senior staff (read:  more highly compensated than younger staff members) to retire early. In telling us stories of police, dock workers, junkies, drug dealers both at street level and the top rung of the US drug trade, kids, educators and politicians he was narrating the lives of those who he knew and had covered as a reporter. Now, in Season 5, The Baltimore Sun itself becomes a part of the story, as Simon takes on the media in the final 10 episodes of his masterpiece of a drama. And in doing so, he may be headed down a road in which he tarnishes the reputation of that masterpiece.

I think Simon is too close to the newspaper to tell the story objectively, something that a reporter should always do.  Roger Twigg, the police reporter in The Wire is a clear alter-ego for Simon: a little stocky, balding, hanging out on the loading dock having a smoke with the other veterans of the staff. In Episode 3, he’s offered a buyout and takes it, saying now is the time to start work on the Great American Novel. Simon has spoken in interviews about his disgust for the brass at The Sun who were managing the paper when he left, and–again to the detriment of The Wire–he has transferred that disgust directly to the characters of Executive Editor James C. Whiting III (third, get it? There have been others just like him) and Managing Editor Thomas Klebanow (awfully close to Marimow, the surname of the Editor at The Sun when Simon took his buyout.)

In The Wire Whiting (White, get it? He’s corporate) is completely aloof. He is out to cut jobs, saving money, and to win Pulitzer Prizes by telling the “Dickensian” story of Baltimore denizens. (The real Sun would go on to win two Pulitzers under Marimow, telling those Dickensian stories.)  Whiting favors Scott Templeton, an ambitious young reporter who bemoans the lack of news in Baltimore and who dreams of hitting it big at “The Times or The Post.” Templeton is another target of Simon’s wrath: he’s emblematic of the young reporters who remained at The Sun after buyouts. In Season 5 of The Wire Templeton fabricates everything, from phony quotes attributed to high-ranking city officials to entire stories: a black kid in a wheelchair who skipped school for opening day at Camden Yard. Templeton can offer no photo of the kid, no last name, just a bunk story–which Metro Editor Gus Haynes sees right through. (As a spoiler to future episodes, Templeton will make up a whole lot more.) Simon’s dislike for Templeton is clear.

The problem with the Whiting, Klebanow and Templeton characters is that Simon does not treat them the way he has treated every other character on The Wire: fairly, balanced, and with dignity despite their (sometimes many) flaws. The people at The Wire’s paper are all one-note characters. On the other hand, Gus Haynes and some of the other veteran members of The Wire’s Sun are all seen as pure: they know more than the younger staff and their bosses, they don’t make mistakes, they love newspapers and reporting more than prizes.

Simon can’t see any of the newspaper characters clearly because, probably, of his bitterness with the real Baltimore Sun. When Whiting gives his blessing to Templeton’s entirely made-up story about the wheelchair kid, you wonder how it’s possible that this man ever became the managing editor of a major newspaper. The character in that way is not a genuine, believable person, which runs 180 degrees opposite of The Wire’s tradition of reality.

In Episode 3, after Twigg has taken his buyout, a story is leaked from City Hall: Burrell will be fired by Carcetti, Rawls will be acting police commissioner while Cedric Daniels is groomed to take over the job. Twig is inactive, so Haynes gives the assignment to Templeton. Templeton asks who Daniels is and Twigg, still at his desk, gives us an oral history of Cedric Daniels, not missing a single detail.  Simon is telling us what The Sun lost by putting the older staff out to pasture before their time, and it’s a good moment, a moment that’s far better, and far more illuminating that any of the other moments so far this season in the newsroom. Unfortunately, Simon then reverts to having Templeton deliver a phony reaction quote, again hammering home that Templeton is a one-note character.

Away from The Sun, McNulty is falling deeper into alcoholism, causing him to make bad decisions as a detective. He’s adding evidence to old case files and planting an item on his most recent body, furthering his attempt to create a serial killer in hopes that the mayor will put money into the police department that McNulty can use to chase Marlo, who he states is “a real serial killer” with 22 bodies on him. I had a hard time believing in McNulty’s actions in Episode 2, but I can accept that his alcoholism has clouded his judgment. What we’re seeing is the McNulty who existed before the first minute of The Wire: the McNulty who drove his wife away, the McNulty who was out of control. The McNulty of the past 4 seasons has been somewhat of a McNulty in remission, trying to get his life back, but now he has completely lost control due to his drinking problem. Harder to swallow though, is the end of Episode 3, when Lester Freamon agrees to work with McNulty on stringing along his lie. Freamon, like McNulty, has long been dissatisfied with the politics of the police department, and we’ve been told of some bad judgment on his part early in his career. However, we’ve also seen Freamon in the past argue with McNulty over Jimmy’s bull-headed nature, and he’s currently assigned to the Clay Davis case, chasing the money that he desperately wanted to work on in Season 1, working what he and Sydnor have discussed as being a “career case.” I know he wants Marlo, but I also think that his partnering with McNulty on the creation of a serial killer is even more out of character than McNulty strangling already dead bodies.

At the beginning of Episode 1, Bunk says “The bigger the lie, the more they believe.” Obviously this–and “More With Less”, the title of Episode 1 and a quote we’ve heard from City Hall, the police brass, Whiting and Klebanow–is the theme of Season 5. We’re left to wonder how far McNulty can go on his lie, and how far Templeton can continue on with his. Will Simon give any kind of balance to Templeton, to Klebanow, to Whiting? Will the latter two show us that they know enough as the top dogs at The Sun to finally question Templeton’s stories, as Gus and other veterans at the City desk already have? Or will Simon try to live with his lie that everyone is complex except his former bosses and younger co-workers? That would be a shame.