When we judge “The Wire,” we’re grading on a curve.
A complaint shouldn’t deter anyone from the best, most ambitious work on television.
That said, when “The Wire” returns Sunday at 7 p.m. on HBO, it will take a few weeks to re-establish the momentum of previous sublime seasons.
Few television efforts in history have come close to capturing the poignant realism David Simon has nailed in “The Wire.” Critics used to compliment good television by saying it was cinematic, but in the case of “The Wire,” it’s really more like a good read.
Using Baltimore as his muse, Simon’s novel-like series offers a universe of indelible characters from across a society, living tragic, comic, occasionally noble and often ruthless lives. At the same time, the series subtly delivers a grim underlying commentary on the rotting inner city. The desperation and violence of daily life, the best intentions and worst failings at every level, and the layers of deceit at work in the political, law enforcement, labor and education systems are all on view.
So when we say that the opening hour of the fifth and final season feels less than stellar, toned down and slowed down to appease those just tuning in, we mean the subtlety is missing.
The gripe isn’t insurmountable. It’s just that “The Wire” has never felt like television, and the opening hour of the final season feels an awful lot like something “CSI” would do.
Simon connects the dots for viewers in ways he never felt necessary before. The opener takes the viewer by the hand and tells us things, alerting us to signposts along the way, cueing our reactions. Some lines jump out as summary statements (“We’re all complicit,” or, “The game is rigged” or, “You can go a long way in this country killin’ black folks”), as if to underscore themes we previously absorbed on our own.
In the seven hours HBO provided to critics, the focus is the failure of the media, particularly newspapers, to do more than serve as lame bystanders to the crumbling city and all of its madness. Because of bottom-line priorities, nervous owners, short staffing and ego-driven reporters more interested in seeing their bylines than in gathering facts, the newspaper is shown to be as derelict as the cops, the dock workers, city hall or the school board.
The concerns are universal, of course, but in “The Wire,” the newspaper is the Baltimore Sun, where creator Simon worked for years. (He took two leaves, first in 1988 to write the book “Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets,” which became the basis for the acclaimed NBC series “Homicide: Life on the Streets,” and second in 1993 to write “The Corner: A Year in the Life of an Inner-City Neighborhood,” which became the eye-opening, Emmy-winning HBO miniseries “The Corner.”) A number of Sun staffers, past and present, have cameos, and others work as writers on Simon’s crew.
Simon left the business before the demands of blogging and Web posting became part of journalists’ job descriptions. Even without those updates, the newsroom banter about layoffs and buyouts is uncomfortably realistic. But for those outside the business, those scenes may fail to move the story along as artfully as seasons set in the classroom, in the projects, among political campaign staffers or the cops on a wiretapping case.
Dominic West returns prominently as Jimmy McNulty, a cop so disillusioned with the system that he’s on a self-destructive tear in the process of trying to outsmart the rules.
Fellow cops Lester (Clarke Peters), Bunk (Wendell Pierce) and Kima (Sonja Sohn) are back and world-weary. On the street, Bubbles (Andre Royo) carries on in perhaps the series’ most achingly sad portrayal. Councilman Tommy Carcetti (Aiden Gillen) is forced to cut city services to the bone. Gangsters Marlo Stanfield (Jamie Hector), Omar Little (Michael Kenneth Williams), Proposition Joe (Robert F. Chew) and the rest of the anti-heroes return in full force.
The best casting addition is Clark Johnson (Detective Meldrick Lewis on “Homicide”) as the ethical Sun editor who observes the journalistic lapses all around him.
Burnout is everywhere. Everyone is trying to do “more with less,” as the impossible newspaper aphorism of the moment has it. And the end begins.
Joanne Ostrow: 303-954-1830 or jostrow@denverpost.com
