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 it 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.
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