Baltimore Sun TV critic David Zurawik lights into David Simon on the occasion of the last episode of “The Wire.” Throughout the season, Zurawik has been in the tough position of having to critically assess a show that is set in his own newsroom. He deals with the conflict issue forcefully …

Simon is offering a highly personalized, vendetta-driven mythology of an era that never was at The Sun, and I feel no conflict in pointing out its flaws—as entertainment or purported truth.

… and, with the sadness many of us feel for this damaged show, delivers a unflinching epitaph:

Instead of the richly detailed, darkly comic, existential sense of police work that fans of the show have come to savor, the Simon-scripted finale has Detective Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West) and other homicide investigators superficially bouncing from corpse to corpse like characters in a lightweight network crime drama. […]

The tame way in which McNulty’s odyssey ends is a major disappointment—a dramatic cop-out that seems more suited for the Hallmark Channel than HBO.

[…]

What distinguished The Wire from every other series on television over the years was its heightened sense of anger and righteous moral outrage. Simon’s greatness came from his ability to channel anger into art like no one else in the business.

But this year, as the series moved into a fictionalized version of his old newsroom, the anger seemed to control Simon. The Wire lost its heart and its way.

Meanwhile, Slate continues its analysis on the season here. In part 62, my friend David Plotz lists his top 13 “Wire” moments. Among them:

7 ) Snoop buying the nail gun in the opening scene of Season 4.

8 ) Stringer Bell’s funeral-home meetings in Season 3, particularly his efforts to enforce Robert’s Rules of Order. “Do the chair know we gonna look like some punk-ass bitches out there?”

And a good part of the staff of Salon, “Wire” fetishists all, wrap up the show here. Besides Heather Havrilesky’s penetrating farewell chat with David Simon (guaranteed to raise the blood pressure of anyone who’s had just about enough of his newspaper theories), Salon editor Joan Walsh also has a short chat with Wendell Pierce—who plays Bunk in the show. Walsh met him at a development conference in New Orleans; Pierce is spearheading a movement to rebuild the city’s Pontchartrain Park, the neighborhood he grew up in. Says Pierce:

This was an African-American middle-class neighborhood in the 50s. It’s built around a golf course designed by Joseph Bartholomew, who’d designed other golf courses in the area that he couldn’t play on—he’d play secret matches on them no one could know about. He designed this one, he said, to have a place African-Americans could play, “a game I love for the people I love.” We’re trying to rally the second generation of Pontchartrain Park residents as a call to action, to save it. You can find out all about it at PontchartrainPark.org.

Walsh, an old friend of Hitsville’s, was in town the night of the “Wire” finale; here’s an action shot, taken by her daughter Nora, of the First and Only Annual “Wire” Finale Competitive Blogging Championship at Hitsville World HQ:

To all who tolerated Hitsville’s “Wire”-mania, thanks for reading.

Now, back to charting the fuckery of the music business!