0
0
“They snatch a Pulitzer or two and they are up and gone from this place. For them that’s what this is all about. Me? I’m too f—— simple-minded for that. I just wanted to see somethin’ new everyday and write a story with it.”
Speaking of industry awards, the Emmys are now officially dead to me. Industry awards are notoriously contentious, but after five years of watching the Academy snub the most intelligent drama ever produced on television in favor of solid but much more cliché-reliant fan favorites like The Sopranos and Boston Legal, I just can’t play along with their game anymore. After five seasons of failing to recognize The Wire, the best drama in the history (or at least my history) of American television, the Emmys have zero credibility with this reviewer.
The public and the Emmy nominators may have missed it, but the critics didn’t. You’d be hard-pressed to find many television critics who haven’t heaped lavish praise on the Baltimore-based saga of police, drug dealers, junkies, schoolteachers, blue-collar workers, and white-collar politicians—and, in the fifth and final season, newspaper reporters and editors. Both of our current presidential aspirants have even named it among their favorite television programs.
There may be a lot of reasons why The Wire never caught on as a popular favorite during its weekly broadcast, from its slower pacing to its embrace of street vernacular to its relentlessly challenging moral (and amoral) outlook. The best way to watch a series like this, so often referred to as a novel for television, is by way of seasonal DVD collections. With the recent release of the complete fifth season, you can now do just that. And take my word for it, you should.
The show was created by former Baltimore Sun newspaperman David Simon and former Baltimore police detective and schoolteacher Ed Burns. And, in its fifth season, The Wire grants a brief view inside the Sun’s newsroom while tying up a great many storylines that ran through the series. Many critics found Simon’s fifth-season depiction of the struggling newspaper less convincing than earlier seasons, due to its bottom-line and prize-focused management and dishonest reporters cast against the almost saintly city desk editor whose quote opens this article. While there may be merits there, the season holds up as a whole, offering an engaging view of why some of the most relevant stories disappear in the race for sensationalism and ad revenue.
It’s in that second purpose where the fifth season does its best work. It wouldn’t be in the nature of the show, not to mention being a complete let-down, to wrap up each story neatly and send all of the characters off to their just deserts. Good things happen to bad people, bad things happen to good people, and all variations in between as the institutions that are the real target of the series’ so-real-it’s-scary drama just keep rolling right along over all of them.
I still retain some hope that David Simons and Ed Burns will at least see some Emmy recognition for their current HBO miniseries, the Iraq War-based Generation Kill. Even then, it will feel like too little, too late. Many of those involved with The Wire have claimed that they’ve made peace with the lack of mainstream award recognition for their show, and some have even gone so far as to say they’re proud of never having been nominated. For five seasons, they did things their way and ended the story on their terms. For from being simple-minded, they offered a glimpse at what series television is capable of better than anyone else. That’s the kind of feat that outshines any little gold statuette.
