David Simon writes on the Huffington Post about the final season of "The Wire:"
Because the thing I can't leave alone, the thing that makes me giddy as a schoolgirl is this: Whatever else I am -- a traitorous apostate to newsprint, the angriest hack in television, a kicker of small dogs -- you must acknowledge that I am now, also, the newly crowded King of Meta. That's right. I am your new lord sovereign of buried, latent, subtextual argument. I dragged it past sarcasm, past cynicism, and all the way to balls-out snide. Crown me up and kneel, ya bitches. Here's what happened in season five of The Wire when almost no one -- among the working press, at least -- was looking:
Our newspaper missed every major story.
The mayor, who came in promising reform, is instead forcing his police department to once again cook the stats to create the illusion that crime is going down. Uncovered.
The school system has been teaching test questions to improve No Child Left Behind scores, and to protect the mayor politically and to validate a system that is failing to properly educate city children. No exposé published.
Key investigations and prosecutions are undercut or abandoned by the political machinations of police officials, prosecutors and political figures. Departmental priorities make high-level drug investigation prohibitive.
Not the news that's fit to print. Drug wars, territorial disputes, the assassination of the city's largest drug importer. A brief inside the metro section that refers only to the slaying of a second-hand appliance store owner.
Par for the course. That was the critique. With the exception of the good journalism that bookended the story arc -- which is, of course, representative of the fact that there are still newspaper folk in Baltimore and elsewhere struggling mightily to do the job even as their newsrooms are bled dry -- the season amounted to ten hours of a newspaper that is no longer intimately aware of its city.
The biggest things that have happened this season were ignored by the fictional
Sun. The reporter who resorted to fabrication couldn't report on the massive fraud of the serial killer case, because he would expose his own lies in the process. The death of the most notorious and feared gangster in Baltimore at the hands of a small child is not even printed in the newspaper - there isn't room.
Often what's best said in "The Wire" is what's left unsaid. Season Three had a great commentary on the Iraq War - but not a word was ever said about Iraq. Little moments - the project towers falling, Slim Charles' soliloquy on what war is - "If it's a lie, you fight on that lie. But you gotta fight." - were symbolic. But no one had to scream out the subtext. The entire series showed the futility of the drug war, the corruption of politicians, and the crushing weight of institutions. But often what's best said by the show is what's left unsaid. We can expect no less from a show that once depicted a crime scene investigation using only variations on the word "fuck."
At its best, "The Wire" was equal parts social commentary (Seasons Two and Four) and dark satire (Stringer Bell instituting Robert's Rules among drug dealers, and the serial killer storyline in Season Five). A police drama and a political drama. Literary brilliance from a television show. It's a rare thing. We may never see anything quite like it again. And we haven't seen anything like it in the media for years.
The entire article from Simon is worth a read - a great commentary on the state of journalism today.
(Crossposted from Further Reading)