So if, now that “the Wire” is over, you’re thirsting for a real journalism TV series, you can watch the complete “Deadline” over on Hulu.com.

“Deadline,” starring an epically proportioned Oliver Platt as a columnist at a NY tabloid, was a Dick Wolf affair that lasted on NBC for, oh, i don’t know, four or five weeks in the fall of 2000 before being canceled. For reasons I don’t recall the network dumped the remainder of the season, a couple of episodes at a time, the following Spring. It’s never been out on DVD.

It was no “Wire”; it was no “West Wing.” I said it was a Dick Wolf production. But it had its charms.

Platt was based on a Breslin template but is given a plummy Upper East Side background (the digs, too) and a tendency toward nastiness. Each episode found him in a moral quandary over one of his crusades, intermittently helped along by a “House”-style band of reporter-assistants. There’s always a couple of good twists and fairly (I didn’t say “entirely”) reasonable journalistic knots to untie as well.

The cast was pretty elevated: Platt; Hope Davis as an editor and his ex-wife, with whom he has a messy relationship; Lili Taylor as the gossip columnist; Tom Conti as the top editor; and Bebe Neuwirth as Platt’s editor. While no one involved had the stomach to accurately portray what goes on a paper like the Post, the producers made do metaphorically by just having most of the paper’s staffers—reporters and editors—follow a “boff first, ask questions later” policy with potential story subjects.

And Platt’s allowed to be Platt, and not always nice. In one early episode he’s implicated in a murder. We don’t realistically think he’s guilty, but within the confines of the show some of his colleagues actually think he might have beaten a woman to death. I guess that’s why it got canceled.

To end “The Wire,” the searching, searing portrait of Baltimore that has held us transfixed for five seasons, creator David Simon looked into his soul for an ending. What he chose is less important than what motivated him to choose it. In interviews, he is fond of talking about the Greek tragedies, with their lessons of hubris, of talking back to the gods. But while hubris is definitely one of his faults, he has instead found himself, in this fifth and final season of this show, in a fix caused by a different character flaw.

Like James Stewart’s Scottie in that most modern of tragedies, “Vertigo,” he is caught up in an obsession. Scottie, having once had a glimpse of a dream of reality in the form of a woman named Madeleine, tries, when given the chance, when meeting her again, to turn his reality back into that dream.

As I recall, this plan does not end well for Scottie, and worse for Madeleine.

In this metaphor, David Simon is Scottie, and “The Wire” is Madeleine. We, the viewers, are Midge, fetchingly played by Barbara Bel Geddes, who I feel does us justice.

And it is unfortunately “The Wire” that ends up falling off the mission bell tower.

. . .

And so this entrancing series ends tonight, after three amazing seasons (one, three and, particularly, four); one quite good one (two); and, finally, one (five) that will forever be given an asterisk, which will lead readers down to this kindly, explanatory notation: “Mr. Simon took leave of his senses during the final season, making comparisons difficult.”

Indeed, after eight puzzling and frequently preposterous episodes, and one compelling one (the ninth, last week, which caught us off guard) we now have a tenth and final one, which reminded us a lot of episode five, about which we wrote: “Simon has presented us with a show divided neatly in two, leaving half the show to two ruinously silly plotlines and the other to ramped-up action and mordant plot twists as good as anything the show has yet offered.”

In point of fact, the scenes tonight involving the street, for the most part, remain reverberating and shocking. We see Michael reborn, the re-invented existential child of Marlo Stansfield and Omar Little. And as for Marlo himself, our last sight of him—alone on a corner, escaped from a civilized party, bleeding, grinning with some odd triumph—is a truly postmodern image, a man outside of our society, yet suddenly detached from his own as well, and suddenly exhilarated, recklessly, by the alienation. For caring enough about his personality to conceive of this portrait, Simon (and his amazing collaborators) must be given credit for a perverse humanism and a willingness to follow their creations to uncomfortable, challenging places.

And yet, from this abstract, shuddering tableau we are jerked back by Simon’s infantile obsessions with his old employer, the Baltimore Sun. While we were pleased, last week, to see some of those obsessions held back, if only for 58 minutes or so, they are arisen again this week through much of the 93 minutes HBO allowed him to close out his series.

His fabricator, Scott “Smeagol” Templeton, claims to have seen the imaginary serial killer of homeless men in the very act of abducting a new victim, into an unmarked van right outside the Baltimore Sun offices. (While the front of the Sun faces busy Calvert Street, the rear seems to open back into a Boschian scene of homelessness and depravity. Sort of like the wardrobe in “The Chronicles of Narnia.”)

Now, our man McNutty in the police department invented one serial killer; Templeton, not to be outdone, invented his own as well. It’s not clear from his story which of these two imaginary characters is the one committing this particular imaginary crime. Anyway, Templeton’s nemesis, intrepid city editor Gus Haynes, is believing none of this, as would any other sentient being. Since Simon has populated the upper Sun management of his show with fancypants effetes who, being cartoons, are not sentient, they eat up everything Smeagol says with a spoon.

Having to watch these scenes next to those of Stanfield and the rest of the drug-gang developments is disconcerting, like flipping between “The Godfather” on one HBO channel and, oh, I don’t know, “Beethoven’s Third” on another. (Or “The Godfather III.”)

Talk on the internets is that Simon had to crunch a normal 13-week season down into ten, and that’s why so much of the plot developments this seasons have been so rushed. Many threads are being wound up tonight, with complex emotional and political responses being limned almost too quickly to grasp or challenge. It kinda went like this:

Gregs tells Daniels and Perlman about McNutty’s fake serial killer; they tell the mayor, who tells Rawls and Daniels they must cover it all up or they will be forced to take the fall; Daniels is willing to do so, but Perlman, his lover, reminds him it will cost her career, and his ex wife, also, says –

Wait a minute. Why would Rawls and Daniels have to take the fall? They say, “Hey we caught a cop falsifying evidence. Indeed, he even abused the bodies of dead people to do so. (Ew!) Lock him up and throw away the key!” Why would they be implicated? And Perlman? She is in the city attorney’s office. What did she do wrong? It’s not her fault the cops misused a wiretap.

OK, anyway, Daniels’ ex wife, too, says if he makes a stink the city council president will bring up that slip from his early career and it will sink him and her career on the council. Meanwhile, Levy, Marlo’s lawyer, smells something wrong in the prosecution case, and forces Perlman to offer a deal, so Marlo gets off. So McNutty and Freamon go have a drink, and –

Wait a minute; why would Daniels’s ex wife be compromised? How come Clay Davis can get away with wholesale corruption and remain a viable political figure, but not the ex Mrs. Daniels, for some unspecified crime twice removed from her? And how does Marlo get off scott-free? Why is public or political pressure a factor in an imaginary homeless killer (as if folks cared what happened to homeless folks) but not when the mastermind of the city’s drug underworld and a mass murder of no small skills himself walk way from this lineup of heinous charges?

OK anyway, then-

Wait, we have more questions. Why aren’t McNutty and Freamon more incensed at Marlo’s getting off? Of all the bureaucratic foul-ups and absurdities over five seasons of “The Wire,” isn’t this by far, by far, the worst? And … why doesn’t Perlman just use her incriminating tape-recording to get Levy summarily arrested, removing him from Marlo’s case and leaving the gangster at the mercy of a less-sophisticated representation? And… why doesn’t the state use the threat of the death penalty to try to turn Chris Parlow against Marlo? And … to get back to McNutty’s fake serial killer, don’t so many folks know about it at this point that it would be impossible to keep it a secret? Would a meeting of fully half a dozen people, including the mayor and the two top police commissioners, convene to discuss an obstruction-of-justice conspiracy? And …

. . .

Unfortunately, the questions about the police department thread pale next to those in the newsroom. The silliest thing about the episode is a shot in the closing montage, as Smeagol accepts his Pulitzer, while the Fancypants Duo look on proudly. It’s telling that, over ten episodes, Simon never got around to telling us what Templeton would get his Pulitzer for.

After the homeless serial killer becomes big news, we are told that Templeton is out covering the homeless, focusing on “the Dickensian aspect.” But we never hear what stories, exactly, he’s working on, or how the paper expects to win a Pulitzer behind it, besides a reference that in some way the governor (!) has taken action because of something the Sun wrote. (Homeless is such an over-covered story that it’s hard to imagine why a big-city paper would take it on as a Pulitzer project. The idea that a paper can win a Pulitzer for merely writing about quote-unquote the homeless is another example of the crayons Simon is using in his portrayal of the newsroom.)

The intrepid Haynes collects a file on Templeton’s offenses, but we never see him present the evidence, and we never hear how the editors respond. Instead, various Sun staffers are disappeared, like the bodies in the vacants. (You can see Simon in the corner of one shot in the newsroom, seemingly unconcerned about his inadequate plotting.) The problem, here again, are the crayons Simon is coloring with. The mini-scandal at the Sun that he got his panties in an uproar about involved a few small but disturbing stories by a reporter named Jim Haner; in “The Wire,” Templeton is making up quotes, characters, whole stories; he invents calls to himself from a serial killer, embellishes war stories from a homeless vet and even puts himself at the scene of an attempted kidnapping! And then Simon sets all of that against a pair of mincing top editors who beam with pride at everything Smeagol does.

. . .

In the end, Simon let his didacticism, and his knuckleheaded leftism, get in the way of his show. Besides our last glimpse of Marlo, there was the clever scene of Syndor chatting up Judge Phelan, an homage to the conversation McNulty had with the judge in the very first episode, so many years ago. Those few seconds made us happy; but that just makes us think about how Simon pulled his punches with the fate of McNulty, his grimy alter ego. (Why is Simon still out for Haner’s head, so many years on, but Greggs so quick to forgive McNulty’s crimes?)

We’re sorry to say we’re glad ”The Wire” is over, and we hope Simon will chill for a bit on the subject of the Baltimore Sun. That’s to much to hope for, however, based on this just-posted interview with Simon on Salon. Here’s a key passage:

The issue that’s being debated here is whether or not a second-tier regional paper—that once covered its city, that was trying to get better at explaining the nuances and the particular details of life in the streets of its city and in its boardrooms and its council chambers and in city hall—is becoming thinner and thinner. And what they’re able to capture of the city is thinner and thinner. That’s what we depicted. And incredibly, the entire onanistic, self-absorbed, psychically wounded, worried-about-tomorrow world of journalism had nothing to say about that.

But of course, Hitsville and many other places explained that Simon’s vision of journalism was narcissistic and blindered. Simon wants the Sun to have foreign bureaus and not care about the Internet. In this regard, his vision coincided perfectly with the Sun’s management and that of its corporate owners for many years. It was only after that became financially untenable that the cuts came. Simon attributes the drop-off in younger readers to the Internet, when of course that has been a steady trend in newspaper for decades.

Simon also tries to portray those who criticize his show as journalists touchy about criticism of the industry. That, too, isn’t true: actually, his critics have said, almost uniformly, only this: That his obsessions have created bad art.

————

If you’re interested, Hitsville’s analyses of this season of “The Wire” are available below …

Episode one: As a journalist, David Simon is a pretty good showrunner
Episode two: David Simon continues to go crazy
Episode three: David Simon and the obsession that passeth all understanding
Episode four: “They call me Mr. McNutty!”
Episode five: David “McNutty” Simon and the Quantum of Solace!
Episode six: McNutty says, “I drink your milkshake!”
Episode seven: Preposterouser and preposterouser!
Episode eight: Whenever I call you friendo!
Episode nine: The Passion of the McNutty

… with additional tangential expatiations on David Simon’s growing leave-taking of his senses here and here.

Finally, there’s a list of a lot of the ancillary reading of this season of “The Wire” here.

Much as we hate to admit it, the penultimate episode of the fifth and final season of “The Wire,” shown tonight on HBO, was a true and brilliant return to form for David “McNutty” Simon, the crackpot genius whose comic failings we have been charting with such gusto in this space. The show was full of drama and pathos; chilling images, absurdist red herrings and the thrilling plot turns; marvelous acting, complex political maneuverings, and loose ends brought together mordantly. Indeed, all of the things we have known and loved about this show—all of the things that have been so irritatingly absent this season—were back.

The universe is a ticking clock; but the earth is, as the poet said, an old chaos. We are accordingly buffeted by precise mechanisms and random events; each of these forces play their roles tonight. It is a delight to see the various pairings here—Daniels and Perlman; Levy and Herc; Marlo and Chris—ponder their workings and their mischief. And clocks, too, play a role in Marlo’s downfall, Freamon’s redemption, even McNutty’s foolish imaginary serial killer, as the time runs out on Kima’s forbearance.

Watching “The Wire” this season has been much like a succession of painful dental procedures. We know, we believe, it will end sometime, but it scarcely makes the individual steps on the journey less discomfiting. And it hasn’t helped as own suspicions grew, with each passing visit, that the person in whom we’d entrusted ourselves—David Simon—was taking leave of his senses.

We don’t know whether it is due to a Dostoyeveskian moment of lucidity or an accident; a respite, sheer chance, or a incipient mutiny on the part of his crew or perhaps his masters at HBO as the fifth season progressed; but we are just happy that this particular episode didn’t suck beans the way the others have, and we are suddenly and giddily optimistic about the last.

(The last episode, according to the HBO schedule, will be 93 minutes long; if you are Tivo-ing, it might be smart to record the immediately following program as well, so you don’t lose the final three minutes. The TV sites are reporting, incidentally, that there will be no on-demand version of the last episode available the week before its formal showing.)

The bad old days of the dual imaginary serial killers are behind us. The aftertaste lingers, but we have distractions. Now that the absurd and unbelievable plot contortions of Scott “Smeagol” Templeton’s abuses are past, we can savor a chase: Intrepid city editor Gus Haynes is out to expose the fabricator, and the hunt is limned with a great deal of style and intrigue.

Similarly, over in the police department, we hear almost nothing of McNutty’s own serial killer itself, though he is now dealing with the consequences of his creation. But we’ve forgotten about it in any case, because Freamon’s wiretapping of the Stansfield gang produces the information the department needs to haul in the whole lot—Marlo, Chris and Cheese among them. This too, is handled with drive, economy and panache of “The Wire” of old, like the cop lying in a field doing surveillance slapping bugs.

After episode after episode of utter foolishness surrounding Clay Davis, even that thread of the show pays off, in an underplayed but powerful tête-à-tête between the mountebank state senator and a very cool Freeman. After several episodes in which he chewed the scenery, delighting his partisans but not impressing the rest of us, actor Isiah Whitlock Jr. here gets to play Davis down: reflective, sharp and lethal. We’re delighted to see as well that the Davis plot strain is brought back into the main action.

Now, not everything is hunky dory:

° Since David Simon’s bugaboo is the Tribune Company, we are forced to listen to more of his proselytizing. One character utters this cludgy line: “These newspaper chain guys just don’t give a fuck, do they?” It’s amazing how the ear of Simon and his writers, generally so resonant, go tinny in the newsroom. Indeed, the show still flirts with the narrative incoherence that has been driving us batty this season, all because of Simon’s nostalgia for the good old get-me-rewrite days. For example. Haynes asks a veteran reporter at the paper to look into Templeton’s stories. “Quiet, subtle, discreet,” Haynes says. So the reporter walks into the paper’s library and announces, “I need you to give me a global printout of everything under Scott Tempelton’s byline… all of it, every edition!” You can also see how far back in the past Simon is living, as well. Neither Haynes nor the reporter was familiar with the internets, a mysterious contraption that lets one read the work of newspaper reporters in the comfort of one’s home, with the help of a newfangled device called a “personal computer.” (Every newsroom in the world, incidentally, also has an in-house computer database of the stories it publishes.)

° We have refrained from mentioning this in the past, mostly from exhaustion at charting the manifold exasperating plotting this season. But we will note here that the chances of a lawyer like Levy hiring an ex-cop like Herc and making him part of his inner circle of drug-ring conspirators is slightly less than zero. However this plays out, whether Levy figures out that Herc gave the cops Marlo’s phone number or not, the initial implausibility of this makes the whole thread a joke.

° And Simon can’t resist getting in some new Pulitzer digs at his fancypants top editors. Simon is so wrong on the subject of newspapering that you just want to smack him. Does he really think that trying to win Pulitzer prizes is a bad thing? You can chuckle at the process, but the same sort of routines go on at the NY and LA Times and most other good newspapers. The editors at the Sun are just getting their staff into the game, trying to get them the national recognition they deserve. In “The Wire,” as the effete editors smack their lips, it’s like something out of “I, Claudius.” Simon remains a knucklehead.

Some other interesting aspects of this episode:

° The word “evacuate” turns up again, this time in its scatological sense. In the first episode, Simon’s mouthpiece, Haynes, makes a big deal about a reporter’s using the word “evacuate” incorrectly. Simon and Haynes were wrong about that, on about five levels. There’s a certain justice here in the word being used here again in this sense, because Simon was full of crap the first time he used it.

° There are two plot threads to watch next week. One is Levy: Who is his source in the court house? What will become of Herc? The other is the internal police investigation that we assume will occur after Kima spills the beans on McNulty’s crazy scheme.

° Something must be done about Steve Earle’s facial hair.

° There was a dig at Showtime’s “Dexter.” “Check this out,” Dukie says to Michael, pointing at a show on the TV. ”There’s a serial killer, but he only be killin’ other serial killers!”

° We have to note the passing of Snoop. If memory serves, we first caught a glimpse of her spraying a corner from the back of a motorcycle. Her arresting presence came again at the start of the fourth season, buying a gunpowder-driven staple gun with a street patois that was both touching and filled with menace. As Chris’ horrifying sidekick, stoic and frighteningly amoral, she embodied the show’s most degraded humanity, but also one of its most elegant tropes: Amid this unfortunate city’s thousands of unfortunates, she was an urban success story, performing admirably in a position perfectly suited to her talents.

* And we say goodbye to Bug and Dukie as well and perhaps Michael too. While in this season Simon has gotten a little precious about it, there is an enormously touching strain of humanism that has run through the portrayals of many of the supporting characters, no matter where they end up. (Part of this is due to the participation of novelist George Pellicanos, who has shown himself a master of this in his crime novels.) While our glimpse of Namond is two pat by half, there is something truly Dickensian, in the most elevated, and bleakest, sense of the word, as we see Michael and Dukie part, one a child and one with no more childhood to fall back on. Dukie recalls a moment he and Michael shared from one of the first episodes of last season, a moment any child might invest with deep significance: an ice cream after a scary run-in with an opposing gang. Michael is sad about parting with his makeshift family, and does his best to humor Dukie. But in his face you can see something missing as he endeavors to conjure up in his mind the moment from his childhood. He tries, but he can’t remember.

————

If you’re interested, Hitsville’s analyses of this season of “The Wire” are available below …

Episode one: As a journalist, David Simon is a pretty good showrunner
Episode two: David Simon continues to go crazy
Episode three: David Simon and the obsession that passeth all understanding
Episode four: “They call me Mr. McNutty!”
Episode five: David “McNutty” Simon and the Quantum of Solace!
Episode six: McNutty says, “I drink your milkshake!”
Episode seven: Preposterouser and preposterouser!
Episode eight: Whenever I call you friendo!

… with additional tangential expatiations on David Simon’s growing leave-taking of his senses here and here.

Finally, there’s a list of a lot of the ancillary reading of this season of “The Wire” here.

The fifth season of “The Wire” is David Simon’s Iraq. Backed with faulty intelligence and a cadre of wacked-out true believers, he picked the wrong target and went in unprepared. Slightly desperate, he gambled on a plot surge (I can continue this metaphor indefinitely, if I needed to) two episodes ago: the death of Prop Joe, a poignant a moment as the show has yet offered, which is saying something; and the menacing return of Omar. It can’t be gainsaid that things are slightly better; yet, as in Iraq, that just brings matters down to the realm of ongoing disaster, and there’s no end in sight.

I have, frankly, nothing new to say about McNutty’s invented homeless serial killer or the machinations of Smeagol of the Sun, the brooding fabricator whose “precious” is fame as a reporter. Their plot lines come together early on tonight. If McNutty had not created the killer, Smeagol, it turns out, would have had to invent him, which, actually, he does in any case. This is complicated, so I will go over it again: McNutty invented a serial murderer of homeless men, who does not actually kill people; Smeagol, independently, created a fake call to himself from his own killer, who, in addition to not actually killing anyone as well, doesn’t actually exist either. This creates the very real possibility that the two imaginary serial killers might bump into each other on the street while they were not killing people.

In this context, it makes perfect sense that McNutty would call Seamgol and pretend to be the serial killer and talk about the people he isn’t killing; fortunately, at the time he calls, Smeagol isn’t on the other line with his imaginary killer talking about the people he isn’t killing. Meanwhile, back at the police station, McNutty’s plan has finally paid off and he is suddenly dispensing manpower throughout the department. (Why the department would hand such responsibility to the guy who has systematically alienated every one of his bosses is not explained.) The other of the show’s cast members, meantime, politely refrain from asking any of the myriad obvious questions that would expose these quizzical scenarios, and from merely snickering in disbelief as well.

Those of us who watch with no little concentration each week are at a loss to explain what is happening; at this point it all involves helicopters, cell phones placed in kryptonite-lined bags, and a magical device, sported by Freamon, that looks like a cross between a Blackberry and a Kindle and … well it’s not clear what it does. Clarke Peters is looking slightly sheepish, these days. Forced to recite the worst lines of dialogue “The Wire” has yet proffered while explaining what the device does, he tries to keep a straight face by imagining that he is Alec Guinness in “Star Wars,” expatiating about the Force. But we can see it is hard on him. Like Bunk, Peters didn’t sign up for this.

Bunk is now coming into his own; he was the first character we saw this season, and his story arc suggests that he, along with intrepid city editor Gus Haynes, will ultimately be our hero. Bunk’s had at least two previous moments on “The Wire.” In season one, he and McNulty inspect a murder victim’s apartment, digging up evidence and piercing together what happened, uttering nothing but variations of the word “fuck.” And in season two, there’s a fabulous moment when McNulty gets called in the middle of the night to come pull Bunk together after a sexual misadventure. (Bunk had cheated on his wife; afterwards, at the woman’s apartment, drunk as a skunk, he tried to burn his clothes to hide any olfactory evidence of his actions. Bunk had, fortunately, taken the clothes off before embarking on this plan of action, but hadn’t quite thought through what he would then wear home instead.)

Bunk is now methodically trying to nail Marlo using good old-fashioned police work. The repercussions of McNutty’s plan confront him at every turn, however, and much of the time his eyes are afire with anger. His counterpart, at the Sun, is Gus Haynes, in David Simon’s universe a saintlike figure, now hot on the trail of Smeagol’s deceptions. Since he is Smeagol’s boss, he could just ask him about this in person, but “The Wire” is at pains to show that Mrs. & Mrs. Fancypants Editors, who lisp a lot and beam with pride whenever Smeagol is around, would take the fabricator’s side.

Haynes is left to grit his teeth when he sees his nemesis get front-page play with his latest self-aggrandizing story about getting called by an imaginary serial killer, so he goes to a corner watering hole to hang out with some cops and do some police work of his own. He doesn’t even notice Richard Belzer at the bar.

The Clay Davis story line comes to fruition this week, abruptly, amid a compressed time frame so extreme it seems like Davis hires a lawyer just before court that day, sits through the trial—voir dire, testimony, deliberations and verdict—that afternoon, and gets out in time to get on that evening’s news to crow about his exoneration. This sequence may be the most cartoony, unbelievable event in “The Wire” thus far this season, which is also saying something.

Our last best hope is Omar, who is now … God, wrathful and omnipotent. His most compelling scene comes when he grabs one of Marlo’s henchmen on a side street. He recognizes him as former muscle for Alvin Avon Barksdale, now shuffling drugs around for Marlo. Omar’s modus operandi right now is merely to wound Marlo’s myrmidons, leaving them to deliver his taunts at Marlo back to the boss. After what might be described as an intriguing disquisition on the difference between the practical and transcendental concepts of free will and moral responsibility, Omar shakes his head with irritation and spatters the guy’s brain against a wall.

Making an appearance on Michael’s corner shortly afterward, Omar seems frail and vulnerable. (Whether this is a feint remains to be seen.) Omar is thinking large about the world he inhabits in a way he didn’t before. In the past he has been an articulate defender of “the game”’s rules. He seems now to be losing patience with it.

Marlo, incidentally, is MIA this week, as are Chris and Snoop. Their absences aren’t building the desired tension; rather, given the tediousness of the fake serial killer story and the Clay Davis trial, we just feel a bit ripped off. One of the many sadnesses of Iraq is the resources squandered. In David Simon’s quagmire, Omar and Bunk are all we have to remind us of what we are missing.

————

If you’re interested, Hitsville’s analyses of this season of “The Wire” are available below …

Episode one: As a journalist, David Simon is a pretty good showrunner
Episode two: David Simon continues to go crazy
Episode three: David Simon and the obsession that passeth all understanding
Episode four: “They call me Mr. McNutty!”
Episode five: David “McNutty” Simon and the Quantum of Solace!
Episode six: McNutty says, “I drink your milkshake!”

… with additional tangential expatiations on David Simon’s growing leave-taking of his senses here and here.

Finally, there’s a list of a lot of the ancillary reading of this season of “The Wire” here.

Watching “The Wire” these last few weeks is like dealing with a bad case of mental tinnitus. Try as you might, you can’t get that racket out of your head.

The racket is your brain saying, “… but, that just makes no sense!”

Since David Simon, the creator of “The Wire,” went down this crazy trail, he’s left so many open questions that it’s hard to focus on what’s happening on screen. Each week, the insane stuff that had left you quizzical last week gets trumped by whole new implausibilities. For example: As we have seen, Detective Jimmy “McNutty” McNulty has invented a serial killer of homeless men. He’s done this because the city is not giving the department enough resources to continue to pursue Marlo the supervillan and his two horrifying familiars, Chris and Snoop. McNutty’s logic has been unclear from the start; if the powers that be didn’t care about all those bodies in the buildings, why would they care about a few homeless guys?

That was the annoying buzz in your head from last week’s episode. This week, there’s a new one. McNutty’s serial killer has (fictitiously) killed five homeless guys thus far. But during the same period, Snoop and Chris have dispatched six! (The three in the home invasion, Prop Joe, Hungry Man and Omar’s backup.) Why does McNutty have to invent a serial killer when there are already two running around?

“The Wire” still has a lot going for it. The screen shudders whenever Marlo or his gang are present. And Omar is back, too.

But is it just me or are the episodes increasingly becoming dominated by the parts of the show that are implausible? And is the inferior stuff beginning to seep into the good parts? Tonight, for example, we see several characters come to hear that Prop Joe was killed. Everyone just takes the news in stride. But wouldn’t the death of one of the city’s major drug lords be of some interest to, you know, the police who are pursuing the drug dealers? Bunk is chasing a drug dealer, Marlo. He hears that one of the other city kingpins, Prop Joe, has been killed. Does he then think, Hmmm, maybe there’s a connection? No!

Isn’t this, you know, odd?

McNutty’s new gambit is so complicated it beggars description. His original plan was to invent a serial homeless killer and then get to apportion out the new detecting resources that came his way to the Marlo investigation. (The show doesn’t explain how he would be able to do this, but whatever.) The mayor holds a press conference declaring that the city would make the homeless-killer investigation his top priority, but McNutty discovers to his chagrin that the new resources don’t magically appear. (In what has become another mark of the weaknesses of “The Wire” this year, no one at the press conference asks the mayor the obvious question, namely whether the city would actually devote more resources to the investigation.)

Due to some other developments that are too dreary to relate, McNutty takes his scheme to a whole new level, to somehow invent new homicide victims without actually having to produce human carcasses. Here again, things in “The Wire” just get preposterouser. In the new logic of David Simon’s fifth season, folks will somehow care more about dead people who don’t actually exist, again as opposed to the real dead bodies Snoop and Chris are leaving all over town.

There are other weaknesses, too; Simon’s lancing way with a plot development and the arc of a given episode are weak tonight. Last week, Omar leaped out a fifth-story window when Chris and Snoop ambushed him. We learn what happened to him a few minutes in tonight—he apparently hid in janitor’s closet of the apartment building. Since Chris and Snoop have been combing the neighborhood and the city’s hospitals looking for Omar, it’s kind of strange they didn’t just think of looking in the nearest place a guy who’d hurt himself jumping out a five-story window might have crawled to.

Doh!

Then Omar limps out—in full daylight, plainly wounded and vulnerable. Wouldn’t he wait until night? The episode ends tonight on McNutty’s dreary homeless scheme; wouldn’t it have been a lot more dramatic to have Omar AWOL the whole episode, only to come crawling malevolently back to life at the end instead?

One other odd thing: As we saw last week, fabricating reporter Scott “Smeagol” Templeton claimed to have been called by McNutty’s serial killer. (The one who doesn’t exist.) McNutty doesn’t even find it odd that the reporter has done this. Anyway, David Simon has been desperately trying to come up with a way to make McNutty’s fake killer plausibly help out the department’s Marlo investigation. This being “The Wire,” they want to tap someone’s phone. I’m no detecting expert, but are wiretaps really an effective tool against a serial killer? Did they catch Jeffery Dahmer or the BTK killer that way? If you know who the killer is, you can just follow him, right? What’s he going to say on the phone, “No, I can’t go bowling tonight, Bert—I, uh, have to go look for a drifter to kill.”

Anyway, McNutty and the ADA go to talk to their old friend Judge Phelan about trying to tap the phone of the serial killer. They actually spend a few minutes discussing tapping the phone of Smeagol. Phelan pooh-poohs the idea, framing the issue of being one of getting into a pissing match with the paper. (“You don’t want to pick a fight with anyone who buys ink by the barrel,” he says, har de har har.) Still, he makes it seem as if tapping the phone of a reporter gathering news might somehow be an option. Has that ever happened?

But, leaving all that aside, why was McNutty trying to get a tap on the phone of a reporter he knew was making the whole story up? Presumably he just wants the tap for permission to go after Marlo’s phone. But wouldn’t the tap expose Smeagol’s deception if he said he’d been called a particular time but the tap revealed no conversation took place?

That voice again! “But, that just makes no sense….”

————

If you’re interested, Hitsville’s analyses of this season of “The Wire” are available below …

Episode one: As a journalist, David Simon is a pretty good showrunner
Episode two: David Simon continues to go crazy
Episode three: David Simon and the obsession that passeth all understanding
Episode four: “They call me Mr. McNutty!”
Episode five: David “McNutty” Simon and the Quantum of Solace!

… with additional tangential expatiations on David Simon’s growing leave-taking of his senses here and here.

Finally, there’s a list of a lot of the ancillary reading of this season of “The Wire” here.

David Simon’s star has fallen so low that when Newsweek does a story on him, it’s “online only.” (Link via Romenesko.) It’s an “exclusive Q&A,” too, which translates loosely as “the only online place Simon has talked to this week.” All that said, the writer, Devin Gordon, tries to get Simon to address some of the criticisms of the show, from the preposterousness of the faked serial-killer storyline to his one-dimensional newsroom characters.

The writer asks Simon if the cops’ falsifying evidence to create the killer has any basis in reality. Simon says it does—”We didn’t stretch it very far at all”—but he’s talking about a small bit of medical-examiner minutiae. And he continues to besmirch the integriy of the Sun editors he worked with, conflating his criticism of one reporter there with Jayson Blair and Stephen Glass, which are fundamentally different issues. The rest of it is his usual blather.

Also:

• There’s a cover story from the Washington City Paper, which has had but a brief cameo in our story thus far. It’s about failures the writer, Mark Athitakis, sees in the fifth season of “The Wire,” problems he sees as a violation of a contract David Simon struck with viewers early on:

For the first time [… Simon’s] frustrations start to muck not just with the believability of his characters but with the rules of the peculiar social order he’s invented. One of the central arguments of The Wire has been that, despite various political and economic upheavals, despite all the futility in its world, characters stay relatively constant. Omar never points his shotgun at a citizen; Bubbles remains genial, self-sacrificing, and concerned with fair play regardless of whether he’s using; Freamon, who rode a soul-crushing job on the pawnshop detail for 13 years before earning a position worth his intelligence, takes his time and would rather fuss over dollhouse furniture than get involved in BPD administrative squabbles.

Simon has done serious damage to this premise this year in an effort to make his case against corporate media by giving money—or its lack—such character-morphing power. Money has always been short in The Wire—the angry God who made Simon’s Baltimore may well have first intoned “You’ll just have to do more with less” instead of “Let there be light.” But this time around financial concerns are strangely disproportionate, a wrecking ball that arbitrarily reshapes character. HBO has thus far only made seven of the season’s 10 episodes available to reviewers, and Simon may yet right the ship. But it’s thudding to a close, stuck in a stereotypically TV-like world it’s heroically avoided until now.

Athitakis is a former colleague of mine; his piece is worth reading.

• Meanwhile, over in the New York Observer, Tom Socca, who covered the Baltimore Sun as a media critic for the Baltimore City Paper back in the day, weighs in on the reality of the Sun during the Marimow-Carroll-Simon era. (Simon has targeted Marimow and Carroll as ethically challenged fancypants who played Pulitzer-inspired melodies on their fiddles while the Sun burned; others, like Hitsville, have heatedly defended them.) (The Baltimore City Paper isn’t related to the DC version, incidentally.) Here’s Scocca’s take:

The Sun that I covered for Baltimore’s City Paper in the ’90s was the Sun of Mr. Carroll and Mr. Marimow. It was redesigned and ambitious and on its way to Pulitzer glory. It was also a damaged and declining newspaper.

How can both those things be true? It comes down to a disagreement about the purpose of a newspaper. Mr. Carroll and Mr. Marimow’s Sun was a place for young, talented reporters to do ambitious stories. It was not particularly dedicated to covering the news in the city of Baltimore.

[…]

The tragedy of The Sun is that Mr. Carroll and Mr. Marimow probably did mean well. But they were brought in from Philadelphia by bosses in Los Angeles to run a Baltimore newspaper. Their idea of journalistic excellence was an institutional abstraction.

Scocca also gives his take on the Sun mini-scandal that animated David Simon so.

• David Simon talks with Nick Hornby in “The Believer.” Simon is at his best, Hornby at his worse. There is something annoying about people like Hornby, most of whose writing you have to admire, when they practice journalism—celeb scribes who write with a palpable species of insecure narcissism. Specifically, you get the sense that even when they are writing about someone else, every sentence they write is designed to polish their own self-image, which for some reason they always seem to think is in need of burnishing.

For example, here’s the lede graf of Hornby’s piece on Simon:

Three or four years ago, I got an email from a friend in which he described The Wire as the best thing he’d ever seen on TV, “apart from Abigail’s Party.” Here was a recommendation designed to get anybody’s attention. No mention of The West Wing, or The Sopranos, or Curb Your Enthusiasm, or any of the other shibboleths of contemporary TV criticism; just a smart-aleck nod to Mike Leigh’s classic 1977 BBC play. It reeled me in, anyway, and I went out and bought a box set of the first series.

You can start with the inevitable subject of the first sentence (”I”); proceed to the obscure cultural reference, designed to show off the arch and sophisticated repartee in which he and his friends communicate; and then marvel as Hornby (this is my favorite part) gilds the lily by hammering home the fact that Hornby and his pals don’t traffic in the TV references others of the intelligensia might.

It’s quite a tour de force, made even better by the next graf, an extended discussion of Hornby’s own comparative take on the show: “[I]t struck me that Dickens serves as a useful point of comparison … ” It struck Hitsville that a quick Google search of “david simon,” “the wire,” and “dickens” might confirm this usefulness, which it did, revealing that … the comparison had already appeared on some 12,000 internet pages.

Anyway, when Hornby shuts up, Simon is just fabulous here, displaying his charms at their best. Who else beside David Milch talks like this?:

Much of our modern theater seems rooted in the Shakespearean discovery of the modern mind. We’re stealing instead from an earlier, less-traveled construct—the Greeks—lifting our thematic stance wholesale from Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides to create doomed and fated protagonists who confront a rigged game and their own mortality. The modern mind—particularly those of us in the West—finds such fatalism ancient and discomfiting, I think. We are a pretty self-actualized, self-worshipping crowd of postmoderns and the idea that for all of our wherewithal and discretionary income and leisure, we’re still fated by indifferent gods, feels to us antiquated and superstitious. We don’t accept our gods on such terms anymore; by and large, with the exception of the fundamentalists among us, we don’t even grant Yahweh himself that kind of unbridled, interventionist authority.

But instead of the old gods, The Wire is a Greek tragedy in which the postmodern institutions are the Olympian forces. It’s the police department, or the drug economy, or the political structures, or the school administration, or the macroeconomic forces that are throwing the lightning bolts and hitting people in the ass for no decent reason. In much of television, and in a good deal of our stage drama, individuals are often portrayed as rising above institutions to achieve catharsis. In this drama, the institutions always prove larger, and those characters with hubris enough to challenge the postmodern construct of American empire are invariably mocked, marginalized, or crushed. Greek tragedy for the new millennium, so to speak. Because so much of television is about providing catharsis and redemption and the triumph of character, a drama in which postmodern institutions trump individuality and morality and justice seems different in some ways, I think.

And he gets better from there.

• From the Baltimore City Paper, a piece discussing whether the Baltimore Sun of “The Wire” is the Baltimore Sun of real life. In it, Simon, in his more self-delusional mode, says this:

“… [I]t has to take place in a world in which the internet is transforming journalism in the ways that it’s doing, in which buyouts and cutbacks and layoffs are a fundamental part of the industry,” he continues. “That’s happening nationwide. And in which there is a continuing concern over the–how should I put this?-over the priorities of out-of-town newspaper chain ownership. I think these are all legitimate criticisms that have to be addressed if the piece is going to be meaningful because these are the fundamentals in newspapering today.”

Emphasis added. But it is one of the crushing criticisms of the show this season that he addresses this issue not at all. To cite one of many examples where this is absent in the show, in the first episode Gus Haynes is allowed to act all exasperated because people are watching a fire and not covering it. In real life, the paper’s 24-hour internet desk would have had the story up immediately, with digital pics sent in from the scene soon after.

That Balt CP story, incidentally, was by Bret McCabe from earlier this month. He just posted an exasperated “Enough Already” piece.

• McHabe also noted an Onion sally into “Wire” humor, which falls flat. TV critics are the only people who watch “The Wire.”

• A blog on “The Wire” called “The New Package.” Spirited and supportive posts from a number of contributors. Lots of good links.
• A very, very long essay in Baltimore Magazine by David Simon himself, detailing a little bit of tsuris he got from the mayor of Baltimore after he started filming the third season. (Link via Romenesko.) That prompts a logorrheic defense of his show:

Is it too much for the other America to see itself reflected in one television drama, to have—amid all the wealth and beauty and self-gratification—a single viewing experience to call their own, a solitary drama that addresses itself to their world? The Wire is the one continuing series set in the shadowland of the ghetto, in the America that we have discarded politically, economically, and emotionally. Are we saying, that for the sake of Baltimore’s civic image, that it’s one drama too many?

Besides one cheap aside he stays away from the subject of the Sun, however, so it’s one of his least crazy public pronouncements in recent weeks.

• David Simon takes to print yet again, bloviating about a newspaper’s past glories in the Washington Post. What’s frustrating about Simon is that he’s only half wrong about a lot of things, but he exacerbates the issue by being such a noodlehead about what he’s right about, and being such a jerk about what he’s wrong about, that I personally can’t take him seriously.

• That said, see also this: The David Simon journalism test!

• David Carr in the NYT slices up Simon’s newsroom fantasies here, but nicely.

• Jack Shafer does the same thing in Slate, a lot less nicely. Personal to D.S.: Warning! Contains actual facts about the newspaper industry!

• The Columbia Journalism Review has a notable feature story on David Simon’s journalism demons. Exactingly reported, large in scope, and well written, it plumbs powerfully the obsessions that have compromised the fifth season of Simon’s TV show, “The Wire.”

• Hitsville’s original position paper is here, with episode updates chronicling the ongoing car wreck in episode two here and episode three here. Yet more here.

• A discussion of the reporter the thought of whose nefarious deeds keep David Simon up at night to this day is here.

• Salon’s weekly discussion of the show continues here.

• Slate’s TV club continues here.

• In Huffington Post, John McQuaid zeroes in on the confusion of Simon’s beef with newspapers (via Romenesko):

I don’t get The Wire’s “Sun” plotline. It’s interesting. I want to see where the show goes with it. But its diagnosis about what ails the business doesn’t make sense.

David Simon seems to have taken a bunch of industry trends and put them in a blender with an admixture of his own resentment and nostalgia. And what came out, in contrast to the show’s amazingly cool, disciplined eye for every other aspect of urban society, has so far been the worst possible thing for a drama, both preachy and sentimental.

• Mark Bowden’s essay on Simon and “The Wire” in the new Atlantic. Many levels of irony here, not least that the writer is a friend of Carroll’s and Marimow’s. There’s also a bonus Simon freakout, somewhat denatured by boundary issues on Bowden’s part.

• Margaret Talbot’s New Yorker profile.

• David Folkenflik’s NPR report.

• The NYmag.com item on Simon’s “evacuate” issues … and Simon’s wacky response. (Link via Romenesko.)

• The Ubiquitous Marketing blog, including thoughts from PRWeek exec editor Keith O’Brien, and a long response from Simon, mostly about remarks David Plotz made in Slate. (Ditto.)

O what tangled webs we weave, when we wuin “The Wire” with wacky wengeance, as Scott would have said, had he spoken like Elmer Fudd and been a “Wire” fan. Tonight was the fifth episode of the fifth season of “The Wire,” the amazing TV show David Simon has driven off the deep end in its final season, driven by a mad obsession with his former employer, the Baltimore Sun. Just as with last week’s episode, Simon has presented us with a show divided neatly in two, leaving half the show to two ruinously silly plotlines and the other to ramped-up action and mordant plot twists as good as anything the show has yet offered.

Let’s take the bad first. The mien of David Simon’s alter ego, Jimmy McNulty, or McNutty, as we fondly call him, has turned wholly cartoonish; he’s feverish, sweaty and distracted on a good day; on a bad night, as we have seen, he can be found in a roadhouse parking lot, giving it to a bar chica over the hood of his patrol car. Bunk won’t talk to him, Beadie is about to dump his sorry ass, and his kids barely acknowledge his presence.

McNutty, however, is our hero; like David Simon, he’s been pushed to the edge by a bureaucracy that doesn’t care, a society that devalues street deaths, and hair products that are at a loss to contain his ever-more-disheveled locks. So McNutty is embarked right now on a tangled, over-elaborate plan to create a fiendish serial killer of homeless men. We are supposed to excuse his actions because they will supposedly get more money for the police department to capture the evil Marlo; the show is trying to make the logistics of this clear, but of course this is impossible, because it makes no sense in conception or execution.

It would be nice to say things are better over at the Sun, but they’re not. McNutty’s counterpart at the paper is named Scott Templeton, a Jayson Blair-type fabricator working on the paper’s metro desk. His crimes are being committed to advance his career, and are being abetted by some fancypants top editors, who lay off David Simon’s hardworking reporter buddies but make the way easy for young frauds like Templeton.

These two utterly implausible plot points come together this evening delectably. The plot is quickening! Templeton, who is not getting any support from intrepid city editor Gus Haynes, goes out and falsifies a call to himself from the serial killer. That will give him a big scoop in the paper. McNutty goes to the Sun to meet with the reporter and his editors, and lets them know that the killer has called the police department as well.

As the two fabricators faced each other across the table it reminded me of the Woody Allen movie—I think it was a Woody Allen movie—where he’s masterminding a bank robbery, only to find another robbery team there at the same time.

”The Wire” from the start has been predicated on meticulous, accreted bits of reality that catch you up in them and then sweep you along in their humanity and pain.

These utterly preposterous plot developments, culminating in this scene, are a good example of how off the rails the show has gone:

a) It’s hard to see how Templeton could hope to get away with his fake phone call. If the police find the killer, he might well be exposed as a fabricator. At best, he would be called out later at the paper for having been duped by a prankster.
b) For both the police and for Templeton’s editors, the key question would have been this: Did the caller say something that only the killer could have known? The answer to that question would dictate whether the story would get into the paper and whether the police would take it seriously. Note how the show took care not to have either party ask that obvious question.
c) Since McNutty knows the serial killer doesn’t exist, he also knows that the real killer didn’t call Templeton. So he knows either that the call is by a prankster or that Templeton is a big fat liar. In either case, why did he take the chance of telling the paper his own lie that the serial killer had called the cops, and buttress Templeton’s invented target of twelve bodies to boot? Doesn’t that just tell Templeton that McNutty was making things up as well?

A few other observations:

• The newsroom scenes were less unrealistic of any episode yet, Simon’s having by now run out of clichés. Well, almost run out of clichés. Haynes at one point utters the hoary maxim, “If it bleeds, it ledes.” If you recall, a couple of episodes ago, the original story about the homeless murders was relegated to an inside page, bumped by an l-i-t-e front-page features story on skydiving or somesuch. It’s another example of Simon’s wholly inconsistent portrayal of the newspaper. He’s ready to demonize it one way one week, and then romanticize it another way a week later.

• Apropos of nothing, can I say that “The Wire” is not the best TV show of all time, as so many commentators have opined? (Before this season started, of course.) The best show ever on TV would be “Seinfeld,” for its meticulous and devoted portrayal of a species destroying itself, all done without a hint of sentimentality. (The show gets extra points for doing it on broadcast TV, in the form of a 22-minute sitcom.) The second-best show ever on TV was “The Larry Sanders Show,” which besides great scripts and great acting found the depths of human degradation and the pits of human loneliness on … the set of a TV show, with millions of people watching. The third best TV show was “Absolutely Fabulous,” a tour de force of acting, directing and writing by Jennifer Saunders; the fourth and fifth best TV shows ever were “Deadwood” and “The Office” UK. “The Wire” may be the sixth, depending on how I’m feeling about “The Sopranos” on any particular day.

(Digression: There is, for example, about “The Sopranos” one weakness in its foundation that for me always made it thematically shaky. When all is said and done, the show was about a guy—a fat sociopath—beset by a whole lot of female problems: His wife, his mother, his sister, his daughter, his shrink, his girlfriend… This “Honeymooners” underpinning, which goes back to the very first scene of the series*, inevitably left a faint air of the cheesy undergirding the structure. What David Chase did with this template was something to behold, of course; over the years his production team mastered the technical possibilities of the medium. But thematically it never transcended these origins.**)

• People seem to like the Steve Earle version of the title song. They are nuts; you can hear him trying too hard. Earle’s one-note acting performance in the show (he’s the 12-step guy who’s always looking at Bubs with beseeching eyes), like his career these days, has turned him tiresome. Earle was once a great American songwriter with a great American mess of a personal life. (You gotta love a guy who for a big part of his career had more wives than he’d had albums released.) Even at his most dissolute, in the late 1980s, he had a guitar army that took the “Copperhead Road” album on tour and made you believe it. And, on his return some years later, you could see him play live and shiver the rafters as his massive band slipped into “I Feel Alright.” (Simon used the song to great effect to close the second season of “The Wire.”) But he’s since become shrill and unconvincing, desperately trying to gin up some soul in his collaborations with Del McCoury, and turning his live appearances and his albums into ever-more-sanctimonious harangues. He has became, in a word, a bore.

* In the very first scene of the show, we see Tony in the waiting room of Melfi’s office … seen from between the legs of a nude female statue. Now, what could that mean?
** Cf. the first line of the “The Godfather” [dir. F.F. Coppola, 1972]: “I believe in America!”

————

If you’re interested, Hitsville’s analyses of this season of “The Wire” are available below …

Episode one: As a journalist, David Simon is a pretty good showrunner
Episode two: David Simon continues to go crazy
Episode three: David Simon and the obsession that passeth all understanding
Episode four: “The Wire,” season five, episode four: “They call me Mr. McNutty!”

… with additional tangential expatiations on David Simon’s growing leave-taking of his senses here and here.

Finally, there’s a list of a lot of the ancillary reading of this season of “The Wire” here.

A scene in the most recent episode of “The Wire,” in which Mr. Fancypants Managing Editor tells intrepid city editor Gus Haynes not to swear in the newsroom, has struck a chord, particularly at Slate’s ongoing discussions of the fifth season, which has now moved to Romenesko as well. I would like to take the bait and make the argument for not swearing in the newsroom.

My first reason is aesthetic, mostly. As the episode plainly showed, the people who do swear in the newsroom are the buffoonish fat guys who stand around, talk loud and swear a lot. It makes for a newsroom culture that’s unpleasant and off-putting if you’re not one of the loud fat guys. Imagine trying to work in that scene in “The Wire,” while three of the office fuckheads stand around, with one offering up his oh-so-clever annotations of the mayor’s press conference, as the other two, who just happen to be his employees, laugh appreciatively.

Secondly, it’s a way to intimidate younger and quieter people. We’ve already seen Haynes berate a younger female employee for using a word wrong—he hollers at her across the newsroom and then announces her mistake to the whole office. I keep coming back to this because it strikes me as an extremely thuggish move on Haynes’ part, but it’s clear that in David Simon’s mind this is the essence of old-time newspaperin’. For me it is just icing on the cake that Haynes (and Simon) were wrong about the word in question, but then that’s a slice of real life as well. (The loud fat guys are often wrong.) But for the record, Haynes would have been being a jerk even if he had been right. (He was being a drama queen, too. That’s what editors are supposed to do: fix potential mistakes. What kind of editor announces it to the newsroom? Right: A dickwad editor.)

Those are the two professional arguments against it. The third is more existential, and it is this: If you think the problem with newspapers these days is petty little stuff like this, you’re as crazy as David Simon. While the Simon and the fat guys were standing around swearing in the newsroom, newspaper profits began to drop, younger folks started to grow up not reading the morning paper… and then the internet happened and the world changed. We may see a major daily newspaper go bankrupt in the next year or two. Are there actually journalists out there who think this is something to waste any time thinking about?

Which brings me to point four. What’s really wrong with journalism is that daily newspapers in the US for the most part did not take ownership of a changing delivery system for news. Period. Lest you think that this has something to do with their obsession with the bottom line, they didn’t take ownership of a changing delivery system for advertising, either. There are many other smaller issues involved, but those two simple sentences describe 90 percent of the problem. The questions daily newspaper employees should ask (and be asked) is, what did they do to help? Did they think about the future, embrace the internet, sound the alarm, advocate for change? Or did they sit on their fat asses, let the unions spar with management, and then sit around and whine about the good old days when the roof caved in?

___

All posts on “The Wire.”

Back to Hitsville’s home page.

“The Wire” in its fifth season has settled down into an unsettling dichotomous duality, as A.J. Liebling might have said. I can’t think of any television show ever that was so perfectly half-extraordinary and so perfectly half-preposterous.

In the former half, we have the Marlo-Omar-Prop Joe thread, finely wound and elaborately pulled tight. Tonight’s denouement had an emotional punch I don’t think I will forget soon, based as it was first on events in episodes one, two, and three seasons past and thus almost dreamily ungraspable, and second on a grace note or two early on in tonight’s episode (in a lawyer’s office, and then at one of those unfailingly hilarious drug overlord meetings in that sterile hotel conference room) and because of that sharply and wholly poignant.

It may be one of the more memorable episode endings in TV history. Most particularly, we can see in Marlo a figure who can transcend the show’s bleak streets and bleaker bureaucracies: a perfect and efficient god-dispensing beast, a Superman in the most alarming Nietzschean sense. David Simon, the brilliant, flawed creator of “The Wire,” has a crank’s view of what’s wrong with the world; in Marlo, a creation of his most malevolent impulses, he makes, paradoxically, his most elegant argument. Like a strain of bacteria that staves off each flawed insufficient vaccine—growing wiser and stronger in the process—Marlo prevails. If we don’t get it together, Simon seems to be saying, this is who we’re all going to be working for.

And then there is, sigh, the other half of “The Wire,” the one with McNulty (and now, even more preposterously, Freamon) embarked on a gambit that is, in both its conception and execution, something out of another, much dumber, show. (“The Wire: SUV,” with the Who singing “Down in the Hole” over the opening credits.) Paired with the Sun stuff, on which more in a minute, it’s enough to make you scream.

From here on in, I’m going with Bubbles’ pronunciation of his name: McNutty is on the trail of a guy, Marlo, who dumped 22 bodies in boarded-up housing. For reasons that have not yet been made clear, he thinks he can get some more attention for the department if there’s an imaginary serial killer around who kills homeless guys, as opposed to a real one who kills people who aren’t homeless and presumably have family.

As is stultifying clear, McNutty is going to hook up with the two young semantically and ethically challenged young’uns from the Sun, who are going to buy his outlandish story because they want to get ahead, and the Sun, led as it is by strutting brace of credulous popinjay editors, is just the place to do it. Bunk is very displeased with McNutty; I’m displeased with his creator, David Simon. It reminds me of something Bertie Wooster once said in an old Wodehouse book, which I just found on Wikisource:

”To be quite candid, Jeeves, I have frequently noticed before now a tendency or disposition on your part to become—what’s the word?”

“I could not say, sir.”

“Eloquent? No, it’s not eloquent. Elusive? No, it’s not elusive. It’s on the tip of my tongue. Begins with an ‘e’ and means being a jolly sight too clever.”

“Elaborate, sir?”

“That is the exact word I was after. Too elaborate, Jeeves—that is what you are frequently prone to become. Your methods are not simple, not straightforward. You cloud the issue with a lot of fancy stuff that is not of the essence.”

Exactly. Couldn’t McNutty could get the same effect by calling up the Sun and telling someone that the police department was disbanding the group that was solving 22 murders?

But no. Meanwhile over at the Sun, our hero, manly and intrepid city editor Gus Haynes, was being the life of the party, delivering some knee-slapping comments while watching a mayoral press conference at the news desk. But then Mr. Fancypants Managing Editor comes over to tell him that swearing is a no-no in the newsroom. In the David Simon universe, manly men should be able to swear at a newspaper. (They should also be able to publicly correct the word usage of young female Hispanic reporters, even when they don’t know what they are talking about, and possibly have a nip now and then and pinch a few bottoms as well, but Mr. Fancypants would probably rain on those parades, too.)

Also meanwhile, angry young reporter Scott Templeton, whom we know is a Jayson Blair-style maker-upper, husbands his resentments, piece by piece, like Smeagol. His precious is a job at the Washington Post, but the Posties, when he goes to visit, aren’t buying what he’s selling.

(When I saw Templeton approach the Post building, I was waiting for Simon, as a Sun loyalist, to throw a few barbs the Post’s way, but if they were there I didn’t catch them. I think he, too, is in awe of the paper.)

Finally, Simon continues to bang on the tedious drum that buyouts at a paper like the Sun would target a hardworking veteran police reporter like Twig, who has the department wired. As I wrote last week, I’m sure that some valuable reporters have been let go in the downsizing that has wrenched the newspaper industry over the last four or five years; but in the vast majority or cases, the whole point of the buyouts is to target the unproductive folks as a workaround of last-hired first-hired union rules.

Simon’s drumbeat on this issue doesn’t even make internal sense; the editors keep saying (with heavy-handed irony), “We’ll just have to do more with less.” Why would they let go the guys who are actually doing more? What’s that word for someone who’s being a jolly sight too clever….?

If you’re interested, Hitsville’s analyses of this season of “The Wire” are available below …

Episode one: As a journalist, David Simon is a pretty good showrunner
Episode two: David Simon continues to go crazy
Episode three: David Simon and the obsession that passeth all understanding

… with additional tangential expatiations on David Simon’s growing leave-taking of his senses here and here.

Finally, there’s a list of a lot of the ancillary reading of this season of “The Wire” here.

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.

———-

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

David Montgomery, in the Washington Post, takes a look at obsessions over the new season of “The Wire.” Journalistic narcissism takes a starring role, of course:

The Internet may be killing newspapers, but it’s great for fanning a ruckus among the journalists covering the funeral.

If all we had was print, we never would have had the poly-linked blogfest tempest over the final season of HBO’s “The Wire,” on sites like Slate.com, Poynter.org and something called Fimoculous.com, along with New York magazine’s Vulture blog.

[…]

Hyperlinks lead to hyperlinks lead to hyperlinks, until you get this on Fimoculous.com: “Vulture contested the copy-editing scandal, but today David Simon himself took issue with Vulture taking issue with David Simon taking issue with the word.”

Read down and there’s a sobering statistic, that the show’s 1.2 million viewers for the premiere is its lowest yet.

I quibble with one contention in the story:

Whether or not they fairly allude to real people, the fictional journalistic villains and heroes seem one-dimensional to some reporters who’ve watched. But then, wouldn’t members of the longshoremen’s union have said the same thing about Season 2, which featured the Port of Baltimore?

Actually, Simon’s brilliance heretofore was his multidimensional portraits. Frank Sobotka, the head of the longshoreman’s union, idealized the union as it stood when he was coming up in its ranks, but all around him were signs—a new generation attracted to drug dealing, an African American contender for his position, a political structure less sympathetic to union issues—that those days weren’t coming back. And of course his criminality, for viewers, decisively undercut that romanticism.

The trouble with “The Wire” this season is that, given Simon’s history in journalism, Frank Sobotka is basically running the show, and it’s not surprising how blindered Simon’s vision by contrast suddenly seems.

That’s the aesthetic issue. Hitsville’s concerns, detailed here and here below, go farther: They involve Simon’s honesty and his willingness to impugn the integrity and the motives of others when he disagrees with them.

For David Simon, if you’re a young and (perhaps not coincidentally, female and Hispanic) reporter and you use a word in a way that an old newsroom fuckhead (incorrectly) told you was wrong years ago, you’re a threat to the future of journalism.

In the end, after spending more than a few minutes reading the background that produced the Jim Haner post below, I think I know what enrages David Simon about his former colleague.

(Hitsville has been critical enough of Simon of late to warrant making clear here I am not being ironic.)

It’s a feeling certain journalists have about certain other journalists. You can be a serious, highly ethical professional and not feel it, but those that do know the feeling know what it means.

Curious? I am happy to be able to provide a test you can take at home. It’s for entertainment purposes only. Five years after the Baltimore stories cited above, Haner wrote a book about his experiences as a kids soccer coach. The Washington (D.C.) City Paper, which is not related to the Baltimore one, published a short feature about it. The test resides in the first paragraph of that story.

Of David Simon’s myriad cris de coeur about his time at the Baltimore Sun, the one that cries loudest is about a Sun reporter named Jim Haner. While he has gone unnamed in Simon’s recent writings and most of the commentary about Simon’s jeremiad against the paper in the current season of “The Wire,” it wasn’t always the case. In 2000, Simon was behind what is described as a lengthy article published in the October 2000 issue of Brill’s Content questioning the ethics of Haner. (Brill’s Content was a short-lived but to my mind engrossing and worthwhile magazine devoted to journalism and journalism ethics. It was founded by Steven Brill, the difficult but smart guy behind American Lawyer.) Haner, apparently much favored by Simon bêtes noires John Carroll and Bill Marimow, spearheaded the paper’s investigations into lead-paint poisoning, but was also used for various color pieces (more on which anon) and managed to catch the eye of local press critics after some high-profile mistakes.

I couldn’t immediately find Brill’s Content’s archives on the web, but the Haner story, from the tendrils left of it online, seems interesting. A few exhibits from the Baltimore City Paper, a not-unsubstantive alternative weekly:

* In February of that year, a press piece about an embarrassing correction/retraction of a story Haner co-wrote:

On Jan. 21, Gov. Parris Glendening visited Baltimore on a “fact-finding mission” about lead-paint poisoning, The Sun reported the following day. After “addressing community leaders” at a West Baltimore church, Sun staffers Jim Haner and Timothy B. Wheeler wrote, the governor “stepped into the crowd to chat” and “got an earful” from the Rev. Douglas Miles, a leader of the church-based activist group Baltimoreans United in Leadership Development (BUILD). “I told him two of my grandchildren have been lead poisoned in rental houses in the city,” the reporters quoted Miles as recounting. The event was front-page news, in keeping with The Sun’s drumbeat of commendable coverage of the city’s lead-paint crisis. The only problem was, it didn’t happen. There was no fact-finding mission; as the paper’s Maryland section reported that same day, Glendening was in town for a previously scheduled meeting with BUILD, a session taken up largely with addressing Baltimore’s drug problem. And far from giving the governor an earful, Miles says he never spoke with Glendening about lead paint that day.

(The Sun’s work on the lead-paint story, which isn’t available online, makes for great reading, incidentally. Here’s the essential thesis of the work:

After four years of often-contentious negotiations between doctors, property owners and children’s advocates, the General Assembly enacted a law in 1994 aimed at cutting down the state’s rate of poisonings.

The law, which took affect four years ago, requires landlords to register their properties and reduce lead-paint risks in return for protection from lawsuits. Lauded at the time as one of the strictest regulatory schemes in the country, it has accomplished little.

Maryland still ranks among the most toxic states in America, poisoning children at a rate more than 15 times the national average. And more than eight out of 10 of those children live in Baltimore’s slum neighborhoods.

The Baltimore City Paper piece also contains early echoes of one of Simon’s contentions against the paper:

This is, on the face of it, a severe breach of journalistic ethics. What’s particularly troubling is that this breach comes in the service of The Sun’s ever-more-vigorous program of self-congratulation. Thanks to several high-profile investigative series, the daily has become accustomed to affecting public policy, and its reporters and editors make sure to pat themselves on the back for that in follow-up stories. Readers have become mind-numbingly familiar with the phrases like, “The move came after The Sun documented. . . .” But then, such claims aren’t only for the readers’ benefit; they’re also directed at Pulitzer Prize judges, who place a premium on reportage that’s brought demonstrable results.

* A few months later, that correction and some other crimes earned Haner a short bitchslap of an item from the paper’s “Best of Baltimore” issue, under the ironic hed “Best Parallel Universe.” The piece also mocks his writing style, notably about a passage from a story Haner wrote about the Preakness: “Favorite Fusiachi Pegasus didn’t just lose by a neck after a rough ride; he was ‘[b]eaten in the buttery mud of Pimlico like a three-legged carnival pony with a belly full of hookworm.’” (Now that’s color writing! “The Wire” fans will note that the ambitious reporter in the show Simon is using as his Haner stand-in not-so-coincidentally earns a passing praise from the paper’s editor for his handling of a Preakness color piece.)

* Around the time of this item, the Brills Content piece was published. Again, I can’t find it online, but this third City Paper piece gives an in-depth account of it and its fallout in the Sun newsroom. It contains this passage, with emphasis added …

Much of the response to the Brill’s article has taken the form of angry, defensive polemics, with Sun scribes and editors endeavoring to discredit both Pogrebin and Simon while minimizing Haner’s acts as factual errors of the sort that every journalist makes on occasion. A weakness of the piece is its dependence on the accusations of celebrity journalist Simon, who left the paper on bad terms in 1995, and who approached Brill’s with his suspicions about Haner. Simon’s isolation—no other Sun writers would go on record with similar complaints—and his admittedly chilly relations with the paper’s current brass leave him open to questions about his own motives. It has been relatively easy for Haner’s defenders to dismiss the brouhaha as Simon’s problem, not Haner’s or The Sun’s.

… and for what it’s worth includes some strong support for Haner from other Sun editors. The writer, Tom Chalkley, sums it all up thusly:

As to whether Haner’s admitted missteps and overreaches are mere flukes or tips of an iceberg, I’m watchfully agnostic. I do give considerable weight to the judgment of editors—weighing, at the same time, the vested interest editors have in their best or most exciting writers—and I do believe that Pogrebin’s story suffered from some of the same tendentiousness Haner is accused of. When a reporter is charged with playing fast and loose with facts, it behooves the rest of us not to play fast and loose in assessing the situation. Particularly, we shouldn’t assume that Sun editors’ public defensiveness means that Haner wasn’t privately taken to the woodshed when his errors were uncovered. The guy has been reprimanded, publicly corrected, and now pilloried in a national magazine. Enough, already—for now. The real issue here isn’t about Haner—it’s about standards.

Reading all of these, one has mixed reactions. It’s worth noting that even the hostile City Paper doesn’t call for Haner’s head. On the other hand, the question left unanswered is what exactly Haner and the Sun’s explanation was for the original (quite rococo) Glendening error; how exactly did Haner come up with the bizarrely, pompously inaccurate contention that the governor had come to the city on that “fact-finding mission”? Was it something Haner wrote—or something, possibly, that crept its way into the story in the editing process as the editor and writer worked to tart the story up? (Once in a while, amidst ethical or error imbroglios at newspapers, the paper can be oddly uncondemnatory of the writer; the answer could be that there is joint culpability of writer and editor that makes it difficult to punish the writer exclusively.)

That aside, Haner’s no Stephen Glass. There were obviously screw-ups, but he’s also an unquestionably serious reporter. (Though I noticed the same year he was a Pulitzer finalist the judges in their wisdom gave the Washington Post’s Stephen Hunter a prize for film criticism, which is not a good indication of their acuity.) It’s really hard to see how Simon with a straight face can cite Haner in the same sentence as Glass and Janet Cooke. That kind of talk is what is making Simon look like such a nut.

David Simon continues to let his personal demons degrade the quality and integrity of his unforgettable TV show, “The Wire,” which had the second episode of its final season tonight. Until these last weeks, the show’s most noticeable weakness was the visualization and a lot of the casting of the dockworkers-union thread in season two: A few of the stevedores’ scenery-chewing seemed out of place in the show. Now, however, we have the ongoing train wreck of Simon’s working out his grudges against John Carroll and Bill Marimow, two editors from his years at the Baltimore Sun. The two cases he’s building involve a) editors focusing on winning Pulitzer Prizes and b) the same editors allowing a reporter with patently substandard work to get undeserved prominence in the paper.

A) is a classic example of the horseshit Simon is peddling. As I said before I think Pulitz