I’ve just completed viewing all five seasons of The Wire. Going into Season Five, I was prepared for a big dose of mediocre TV, based on opinions stated here and elsewhere. I was pleasantly surprised.
It may not be their best season - Season One holds a special spot in my heart - but Five is some damn fine television. I enjoyed the newsroom stuff, McNulty’s scheme, and the Omar/Marlo war. And Prop Joe’s end was, to me, one of the all time greatest moments in the series.
So, I’m wondering why the disrespect (puts me in mind of The Godfather III, except GIII was more deserving of it). Is it the perceived lack of realism of McNulty’s actions (Hamsterdam didn’t seem to hurt Season Three’s popularity)? The Baltimore Sun storyline/characters? McNulty’s return to the bottle and his bad boy ways?
And there was plenty of Omar, which alone should give #5 a big boost.
Another question: Was it known at the time of production that Season Five would be the last? Was the show cancelled?
mmm
I thought season five was great… The serial killer storyline was a bit of a stretch, but there were a lot of highlights. Hell, the entire season was worthwhile for that image of Bubbles climbing the stairs in the closing montage. The worst season of The Wire is still better than most anything else on television.
To answer your other question, yes - I believe they did know that it would be the last season. The series almost ended after season 3, but David Simon was able to get HBO to commit to two more seasons… Which is why there’s kind of a 3-season arc w/ the Stringer/Avon stuff before moving onto Marlo.
I thought that the serial killer arc felt overly manufactured for the story compared to the rest of the series. The newspaper stuff had enough legs to stand on it’s own, and the wire detail could have gone on (in our imagination after the series end) with different people. McNulty and Freeman were both independent enough to get their asses booted for less fantastical reasons. Every other bit of writing on the series was totally believable, but not the serial killer stuff.
Much as I love the show, I’m glad it ended after season 5, as all the pertinent angles, the corners, the docks, the schools, the politics, and the press, had been explored. To go on longer would have resulted in diminishing returns.
I seem to be alone in liking the serial killer arc. I thought it was a good coda on McNulty’s character, he was going to keep pushing the boundaries until he finally went to far. And with the serial killer thing, he finally did. There was no way he was going to be able to keep his job after the serial killer started drawing so much attention.
I also liked how McNulty’s web of lies and the reporters web of lies merged together.
Gus is a weak character – without any faults whatsoever and probably a giant Mary Sue – and the editors in turn are comically eeeevvviiilll in their utter disinterest in the facts and love of schlock. All the newspaper staff are fairly bland and uninteresting - even Templeton is a bit of a cipher with no recognizable emotional life.
Since those characters are the basis for the season, and not one of them is interesting in any way, end result = boredom.
Don’t get me wrong - on it’s worst day The Wire was better than most TV ever made. But compared to the other seasons this one rates a very distant 5th.
This here. Season 5 is a drop in quality from the previous four, but it’s still better than most things you could choose to watch. It’s just that after the big anticipation of a new season, the drop in quality was kind of deflating.
Bits and pieces of the newspaper story were okay, but Hello Again is right about Gus – too perfect. I didn’t like Alma, either as an actress or a character. She’s the very definition of “flat”. And the bosses were unrealistically evil and unconcerned about what Gus was telling them about Templeton. But did Gus actually come right out and tell them Templeton was making shit up, or did he just hint? I don’t remember.
One scene that stands out was when Dukie went back to the school and the principal didn’t remember him. Prez remembered him, but you could tell that Dukie and his problems had been replaced by other Dukies with their own problems. So sad.
I had problems with S5 watching in real time, but when I rewatched S5 right after S4 on DVD, McNulty’s behavior made more sense. I’d forgotten how frustrated he was at the end of S4.
Actually, I thought the same as you the first time I viewed the series. However, I find that the season doesn’t hold up on repeated viewings (even though I liked the Marlo character more the second time around.)
The problem is that the serial killer plot, which I found quite amusing the first time, doesn’t really fit into the Wire universe. It’s too over-the-top. It leads to some funny scenes, such as the FBI making a spot-on profile of McNulty. But in the end, no, it’s too much of a theatre. It feels unrealistic, and even if we accept that it could work, it puts all the characters in an unrealistic situation, which is not as interesting.
mr. jp, do you mean the fake serial killer plot (the homeless with the ribbons on their wrists) or the real serial killer plot (the bodies in the vacants)?
I don’t know if Gus came right out and said, “I know for a fact that he’s making shit up.” But I’m pretty sure he told his bosses, “I strongly suspect this guy’s up to some shenanigans. We should investigate.”
I loved the whole series, but I agree that the portrayal of The Baltimore Sun newsroom was just too much of a caricature all around. Obviously, I wasn’t there in real life, but I don’t think even the worst newspapers are run by editors quite like those. It definitely seemed like a Mary Sue for David Simon, as Hello Again said. Maybe that’s how he saw his editors at The Sun when he worked there. But I bet there were a few more shades of gray, and that’s the real failure of Season 5, as there were so many shades in all the other institutions throughout the rest of the series.
One of my favorite scenes in season 5 is after Omar gets shot and someone (Bunk, maybe?) reads about it in the back pages of the Sun where it had just a tiny little blurb of a mention. Did a nice job of pointing out the way that the media decides what is and isn’t news - and how even though someone is a MAJOR character in the story that we’re watching, in the grand scheme of life in Baltimore, he barely rates a mention.
I thought it was even worse than that Bob. I thought somebody ran the police report past Gus in the newsroom and Gus decided not to run it. Showing, perhaps, that Gus wasn’t quite the infallible newshound he initially appears.
IMO one of the things that knocked the season down a few pegs was the way so many scenes echoed (or, less charitably, rehased) scenes from earlier seasons. Like when Omar once again talks the dealers into dropping their stash out the window of the safehouse. Or the repeated direct requote of lines from earlier seasons (e.g. McNulty’s famous “There are no fucking rules. The fucking game’s rigged.”). I know series tend to get all meta in their final seasons, but Season 5 was particularly guilty of this crime…
I think it was Prop Joe who suffered that ignominy, not Omar. But the point remains true…
I definitely agree with the “Gus is too perfect” sentiment. I read an interview with the creators in which they said that obviously he’s not perfect, because of how much story he’s missing about what’s really going on in Baltimore… I mean, I see a point there, but I think it’s a weak apology for a definite flaw.