We’re a little obsessed here with the conclusion of HBO’s “The Wire” and all the information that the conclusion yields through interviews (mostly with vocal and hyper-articulate creator David Simon). We’ve been a few steps behind Vulture, (damn, doctor’s appointment, job and no writing co-hort teamates!), but we’ve been keeping our hawk-eye out there. While we’re closing our case file on the final season, here’s the notables fans and obsessives should take note of.
Who’s To Blame – Only 10 Episodes?
Many who find valid fault with Season Five tend to pin it on the truncated number of episodes (10 this season) compared to past seasons (generally in the ballpark of 12-14) and feel the season was rushed. Be that as it may, Simon exonerated the shorter run, firmly believing and explaining that they told the story in as exactly as many episodes as they needed, and had his writers needed more time, they would have recieved it.
“I was given 10 and a half [episodes -the finale being basically 1 1/2 eps]. I realized I needed more than 10, they asked if I wanted 11, and I said, “No, I need 10 and a half.” If I said I needed 12 halfway through the season, from [HBO’s] Carolyn (Strauss) at that point, I could have gotten it. I asked for an extra episode, a 13th, for season four, because we had to add some elements of the political spin-off that didn’t get made…and they gave it to me.
How Do You Really Feel About The Media?
If you’ve been at all reading any late-game David Simon interviews you know the gist of this season’s media critique was: everything they missed.
The stories the Sun didn’t cover/follow through on illustrated the problem with the media — that they were missing the boat in favor of sensationalism and prize-winng. More importantly all the stories the Baltimore Sun missed (on the show), we’re actively played out on the show.
“We [the audience] know that they mayor is cooking the stats so he can become governor. We know that he’s taking apart the Marlo task force. We know that he’s backing No Child Left Behind, and hyping a dubious gain in the 3rd grade test scores though the schools remain an unmitigated disaster. We know that these politically charged prosecutions of Clay Davis are being undercut behind the scenes by a variety of conflicting interests, that there’s turf wars that result in complete lapses of any anti-corruption effort.”
Other Examples:
Gutierrez: “Three people murdered in a house and it gets twelve inches below the fold. Explain that to me.”
Johnson: “There’s no explaining it. Advertising’s down. We’ve got a smaller news hole and we’re not managing it well. We messed up. I’m sorry.”
Fletcher:” Wrong zip code. They’re dead where it doesn’t count. If they were white…you would have had 30 inches off the front.”
From Season 5 – Episode 51: “More With Less”: When Regional Affairs Editor Beth Corbett reports they have 15 inches on University of Maryland not making its desegregation goals, Executive Editor James C. Whiting III who has joined them, squashes the story based on a personal connection to U.M. Dean of Journalism Gene Robbins, who insists things have changed for the better. Haynes, obviously irritated by the blatant dismissal of a good story, attempts to protest Whiting’s bias by mock-mispronouncing Robbins’s name and mentioning off-handedly that he is white.”
“It’s a newspaper that is so eviscerated, so worn, so devoid of veterans, so consumed by the wrong things, and so denied the ability to replenish itself that it singularly misses every single story in the season,” Simon told the New Jersey Star Ledger’s Alan Sepinwall in an extremely lengthy interview (that we and many others quoted all day).
The ironic part? Look at today’s entertainment news coverage (say for example, the front of Reuters, AP or Yahoo) and all the coverage of “The Wire” – arguably one of the top five television dramas ever – is below the fold and off the front pages. Sad, but fitting.
Thanks to Sophanova for inadvertently inspiring and contributing to some of this post.
