David Simon continues his walk off the deep end in this, the third episode of the last season of “The Wire.” McNulty is doing the same thing, which makes it clear that this trope—the determined, romanticized fool destroying himself and the people around him in pursuit of a deranged pipe dream—has been the central recurring theme of “The Wire.” Examples include McNulty, union boss Frank Sabotka, and police Major Bunny Colvin. In each case, feeling aggrieved but with quote-unquote rightness on their side, the character steps over a clear line and enters a dark side. Tragedy ensues.

A few weeks ago I wrote that McNulty was Simon’s stand-in. But now I realize that, as a guy with a baroque messianic complex, he’s one of many—and we are sadly seeing it reenacted in real life, as Simon has taken his show on a detour to settle old scores at the Baltimore Sun. While the rest of “The Wire” this season is not as lame as the newspaper vignettes, those scenes, paired with McNulty’s preposterous scheme, have the show’s delicate balance and carefully cultivated realism all out of whack. The madness continues:

• McNulty’s plan to create a serial killer in order to focus public attention on crime shouldn’t make sense even to himself. The victims are all homeless men. If the city doesn’t care about two dozen drug executions found in boarded-up buildings, why would they care about a few strangled homeless guys? Why this labored plotting before bringing in Freamon to talk sense to him at the end of the episode? (And do attractive blondes in bars really make out in public with guys who look as if they’re going to throw up any moment? And then have sex over the hood of a car in an open parking lot? Is that considered a good date these days? )
• Simon’s ideas about what ails newspapers remains muddled and romanticized in an almost childlike way. When the paper in “The Wire” announces downsizing, there’s a passing mention of the internet, but otherwise it is no part of the daily lives of the characters. The young reporter who covers the home invasion, for example, would in real life had come back to the paper and rushed to get the story up on the Sun’s web site and gotten her jollies seeing it be the lede story on the site for the better part of the day. (A much better subtext for this part of the story would have been younger reporters who understood what stories worked better on the web versus older ones who didn’t get it.) The idea that a twentysomething reporter would care about hard copy is a stretch.
• It’s hard to talk about age and newspapers; it’s a delicate subject involving the lives of thousands of men and women across the country who have devoted their lives to daily newspapering. There are a lot of hardworking and talented older folks at dailies, and a lot of callow younger ones. But it’s fair to say as well that a problem unions make for papers is that they make it hard to fire older folks who don’t work much any more. (Note how Simon doesn’t mince words on this score when it comes to the police department.) Conversely, younger and talented hires are the first to go under union rules when layoffs come. The buyout sequence in tonight’s episode (as opposed to direct layoffs) conveniently allows Simon to work around this uncomfortable truth. Management prefers buyouts, too, because it allows the company to get around the “last hired/first fired” rule and target staffers who aren’t producing. Simon turns this around to make it seem as if management is using the buyouts to get rid of valuable older people simply to save money. While I’m sure this could happen I think it is more the exception than the rule at almost any paper, and certainly not likely at a paper with pretensions toward excellence like the Sun. The scene as a whole is yet another example of the way Simon flirts with big lie techniques in his propagandizing this season.
• Similarly, much is made tonight over the paper’s shutting down its foreign bureaus. The Sun is a venerable paper with a heralded tradition of international reporting, but that was before the average Baltimorean had access to daily NYT delivery, much less CNN and the BBC. In the modern news era it is senseless for a local paper to have correspondents all over the globe when it can’t cover its own backyard. (Last week, the intrepid city editor makes a big deal out of the fact that the paper didn’t have a reporter covering transportation issues. Why didn’t he suggest then that the paper stop spending more than a hundred thousand dollars a year on a Beijing correspondent?)
• Later, that editor and a police reporter being forced out have a long conversation in a bar, swapping nostalgic, floridly told paeans to newspapers. This sort of fetishization of the metro daily as it existed for a couple of older white guys is another way Simon has blinders on. There is so much more news out there today; who cares how people read it? He’s welcome to be nostalgic. As someone who worked his way through school as a daily newspaper reporter I share the feelings. But I don’t confuse it with actual journalism.
• In a very blunt contrast to these men’s men, quoting Mencken in a bar, the top editors of the Sun are beyond caricature, both dressed as Mr. Fancypants and solemnly intoning Simon’s bugaboo incantation, “doing more with less.” The managing editor, delivering the downsizing news to the newsroom, even delivers his lines with an Andy Dick lisp!
• Finally, our intrepid city editor gets a scoop himself this week, which turns out to be helping a scumbag politico float a trial balloon. That’s not journalism, and it’s not helping the community. A couple of episodes ago the same editor was browbeating a young Hispanic reporter for using a word incorrectly, which, as we saw, he was 180-degrees wrong about. And this is Simon’s hero.

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All of Hitsville’s writing on David Simon and “The Wire” is here.