Uncovering "The Wire" season 5

So you've heard all these great things about HBO's "The Wire," but you've also heard that you need three weeks on the couch, studying in Zapruder detail the DVDs for the show's first four seasons. That's nonsense. Skip to the bottom of this review and read my handy primer, "The Wire 101." Then read the main story. Then flip on your HBO On Demand — because you're already an episode behind.

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Toward the end of the new season of HBO’s “The Wire” — and sadly this is one of the last times you will see the words new season next to “The Wire” — we watch the grizzled city editor of the Baltimore Sun, Gus Haynes, in his nightly ritual, deciding what metro story should get the biggest play in next morning’s edition.

Moving from cube to cube, he hovers briefly over shoulders, glancing at the computer screens of his charges. Suddenly, in one of those flights of dialogue you get only on this show, Gus declares, “I’m interested in what feels true.”

It has been said that when novelists strive for realism, the worlds they create are often more authentic than the real ones. That’s what David Simon, the creator of “The Wire,” has done for half a decade with the blessing of HBO.

He and his team of novelist-screenwriters created an East Side and a West Side, with their drug fiefdoms fueled by the renewable resource of children. He created an undermanned and overworked police force that, hampered by a comical bureaucracy, would have struggled to combat either the city’s drug pandemic or murder rate, let alone both.

He created failing unions, schools and city government that both fed off the urban core’s problems and were consumed by them, like a dealer who doesn’t have the sense not to use.

Yes, the city was called Baltimore, but in interviews Simon always said that it could have been Cleveland or Kansas City or any other troubled American urban area besides the one he knew and loved.

Crucially Simon also populated each of these tableaus with characters — dozens of them — flawed, profane people, but people whose lives had a purpose, whether it was to hold down a corner for a dealer or get elected or save a child or catch a predator.

(For those of you who are trying to get up to speed on this show, start by getting to know some of the show’s best-loved characters. See the story above.)

Now, for the final 10 episodes, Simon has recklessly pulled all these strands together in what either could have been his most audacious and ambitious yarn or just a big mess of string. From the seven episodes I’ve seen, it looks to be the former. As the last of my DVD screeners ended, and I found the story wrapped around me, constrictorlike, I had to agree with old Gus: It feels true. Very true.

And then I had to remind myself: It’s not true.

Which is good, because in the final season of “The Wire,” Simon paints pretty much a nightmare scenario for my profession, newspaper journalism — much as he did with public schools and labor unions in seasons past. The Baltimore Sun of “The Wire” is a toothless lion in winter, crippled by corporate cost-cutting and defanged by idiots who sweep in and reorder the paper’s priorities like a decorator moving around settees.

“I used to work at a newspaper in Baltimore, until out-of-town ownership and the petty venalities of transplanted, self-aggrandizing editors sucked all joy from the place,” Simon wrote in the introduction to a 2004 book called The Wire: Truth Be Told.

Simon has never made a secret of his contempt for corporate journalism (Times Mirror acquired the Sun in 1986, and Tribune Co. gobbled that up in 2000). And even though being driven out of the newsroom and into the writers’ room was, to put it mildly, a good move for Simon, the rage has not been quenched.

Already early reviewers are knocking Simon for using his fictional Sun to settle old scores, for writing a heavy-handed morality play of real journalists versus fake ones, Menckens versus Munchkins.

Indeed there has never been a character on “The Wire” as unambiguously good as Gus Haynes (played by “Wire” director Clark Johnson), an old-school editor who can work sources and can work over reporters, on everything from the reliability of information to the nits of grammar. (In a very funny scene, one reporter learns the proper usage of the verb “to evacuate.”)

Gus is a man willing to speak truth to power, including upper management. He’s interested “in what feels true” because he is the purest embodiment of truth David Simon has yet breathed into life.

On the other hand, of all the kingpins and corrupt pols and incompetents who have paraded through “The Wire’s” first 50 episodes, I can’t recall one as wholly unlikable as the Sun’s upper-crust, out-of-town editor in chief. He commandeers the paper’s best reporters on a quest to write a great master narrative about the city’s Dickensian poor — an underclass that Simon goes to great pains to suggest this editor has never seen other than outside the passenger window of a car.

Caught between these two forces is a striving reporter named Templeton (Tom McCarthy). He’d like to get off this sinking ship and onto terra firma, which he thinks is the New York Times. So he sets about to write a killer narrative about poor people in Baltimore, one the higher-ups will be proud of, whether the facts are there to support it or not.

Already the TV critic of the real Sun has weighed in, writing that “the newsroom scenes are the Achilles’ heel of Season 5” because the dialogue is too inside-baseball.

That’s news to my relatives, who are usually deaf to my shop talk but were as absorbed as I was watching the screeners. (The only inside baseball I will defend is the prominent use of a Kansas City Star T-shirt in one episode. I have no idea if it was a shout-out to me, but that’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.)

The reviewer also said Simon had been away from newspapers too long and gave “a simplistic critique of media.” Agreed, Simon has conjured up a horrorscape of well-bred journeymen scribes polishing their bows while Baltimore burns.

But even if it is more truthy than truthful, Simon has jabbed at the Achilles’ heel of American democracy, one that Neil Postman put out there in 1985 in his classic Amusing Ourselves to Death — namely, how can you effect change when people are so affected by imagery?

If a politician tells you he cares, does it matter how he actually votes in the Senate? If education reform can’t be explained in a 90-second news story, will it ever happen? I’m amazed how many people have defended Dan Rather’s shoddy reporting to me by saying, “We know Bush avoided National Guard duty.” Thus does a hoax “feel true.”

Anyway, the Sun is just part of the larger skein that Simon and company have woven for Season 5 of “The Wire.” Detective Jimmy McNulty, the show’s central figure, will ensnare the newspaper, his own police department, the mayor and colleagues in a scheme that, even if I wanted to describe it here, would seem so implausible that you’d think Simon had swung for the fences and missed. He hasn’t. It’s the truth. You can believe me because you read it in a newspaper.

‘The Wire’ 101
Only now are many people realizing what the faithful have known all along — “The Wire” is worth every minute of the huge effort it demands. Miss an episode, or even part of one, and you miss something. If you’re thinking of diving in now, be forewarned that not every scene will make sense, so it might help to have a fan watching with you who can give 20-minute answers to questions like, “What’s with the Russian dude?” That said, you can enjoy this fifth and final season if you know something about a few key characters. (Also, know that if “The Wire” were a movie, it would earn a strong “R” rating for violence., adult situations and almost nonstop profanity.)

Jimmy McNulty, above right
(Dominic West)
Baltimore cop who is to the city’s drug trade as Ahab was to Moby-Dick. Gifted with excellent instincts for crime-solving and cursed with toxic people skills, McNulty has ticked off every superior and a string of ex-lovers with his obsessive pursuit of evidence that will rein in the street gangs and end their bloody turf battles. He is “The Wire’s” tragic hero, and this season he will raise the stakes considerably in pursuit of Marlo Stanfield.

Bunk Moreland, above left
(Wendell Pierce)
Jimmy McNulty’s cigar-chomping cubemate and dapper drinking buddy, “The Bunk” is my favorite character on “The Wire.” He is the show’s Greek chorus, dispensing pearls of unprintable wisdom to one and all. This season McNulty’s crazy scheme to get Marlo Stanfield will drive a wedge between himself and Bunk.

Lester Freamon
(Clarke Peters)
In the beginning, Lester was a minor character. But over the years he became the keeper of “the wire,” the surveillance tap that is started up and shut down by forces that he cannot control. Frustrated by stings that were cut short just as the evidence was piling up, Lester seems ready to do anything to bring down the drug dealers.

Marlo Stanfield
(Jamie Hector)
Cold-blooded and opportunistic, Marlo Stanfield is the corporate raider of urban gangstas. He came out of nowhere in “The Wire’s” fourth season to seize control of Baltimore’s drug trade. In season five Season 5 he will attempt to consolidate his power and exact revenge on Omar, but will make crucial errors that could cost him dearly.

Omar Little
(Michael Kenneth Williams)
The wiliest hood in Baltimore, Omar has an unparalleled ability to spring out of nowhere and take what’s not his, dispense street justice and vanish as quickly as he came. He appears to have taken his spoils and headed into retirement, but Marlo is determined to smoke him out. Sexuality is no doubt one reason, though unlike his hapless counterpart on “The Sopranos,” Omar makes no apologies for being gay — or anything else.

Rhonda Pearlman
(Deirdre Lovejoy)
Yes, there are women on “The Wire.” Assistant state’s attorney Pearlman is sensible, determined and tough — except when she’s around Daniels, with whom she has been romantically linked following her flings with McNulty. She’s one of the show’s explainers, so pay attention whenever she speaks.

Cedric Daniels
(Lance Reddick)
When we first met Lt. Daniels, he was married to a political climber and going places, but McNulty’s wiretap in the show’s first season ensnared everyone who came near it, including Daniels. Yet he knew Jimmy was a brilliant cop and onto something, and ever since, he’s been torn between career ambition and making a difference in a crime-riddled city.

Tommy Carcetti
(Aidan Gillen)
Though not as key a figure as in past seasons, this onetime councilman has matured into a savvy mayor of Baltimore. As season five Season 5 begins, he clearly has eyes on the state house Statehouse — if he can keep the killings and public-school situation from damaging him in the polls. Every now and then we get glimpses of another Carcetti, the failed idealist who traded vision for power, and may do so again before “The Wire” is done.