The Wire: Season Five (2008)

Creator: David Simon

Lets get this out of the way first, if I had to rank each season of The Wire I would pick season four as the best and season five as the worst. But even the worst season of this show is better than almost anything on television right now. That just goes to show how great this series is, and why it's justified when people say that this show is the best ever. This final season had a few goals. The first was to bring in the institution of journalism in the world of The Wire, a profession that creator David Simon knows a whole lot about since he was a Baltimore Sun reporter before he started the show. The media is an appropriate focus for the shows final season because the media is the middleman between the people and the governmental institutions and what keeps the people from knowing about the failures of those institutions. Simon shows us why the media is as guilty as all those other institutions when it comes to the question of why nothing ever changes. The media is just another cog in the machine, being oiled by the same forces of surface-level achievement and personal success.

The second thing the season did was to give us another Hamsterdam-like solution and then shoot it down. This time we see that even when we have good people in office, getting resources to where they belong can be difficult, and so we observe what kind of drastic things need to happen in order for those resources to come. We see McNulty invent a ridiculous fake serial killer in Baltimore, but it's quite tragic how serious he needs to make it and how he needs to sacrifice his whole career in order to get the resources to fix the real problems. That reflects a theme that The Wire has advanced over and over again: The individual gets devoured by the institution. Doesn't matter if the individual does the right thing or the wrong thing, they will get devoured. It all also ties into the lies that fund all of these institutions. The newspaper gets a chance to win Pulitzer's because of a reporters exaggerations and lies the same way the police department exaggerates stats to fake success and maintain funding. The third and final thing this season does was to meticulously craft and conclude the stories of all these characters in a way that ends in mostly the same way it all started. That's the conclusion that Simon wants and that's what he shows. Despite all the strong idealistic individuals, everything is cyclical, and everything stays the same. The game is the game, and the game will always stay the game.

Grade: A