The Show That Canceled Itself

It doesn't take long, in the fifth and final season of HBO's "The Wire," before David Simon, the show's prodigiously talented creator, finds an opportunity to go meta, putting in the mouths of some of his Baltimore characters his own reasons for telling the story of the city the way he has during the past five years.

We find ourselves sitting around the table at a pitch meeting of a real newspaper, the Baltimore Sun, the latest fluorescent-lighted and cubicle-filled city institution to suffer Mr. Simon's scrutiny. The paper's executive editor, James Whiting (Sam Freed), a smug, portly man in suspenders, wants his reporters to produce a Pulitzer-worthy series about the city's failing schools, one that will depict, he says, "the Dickensian lives of city children."

The metro editor, Augustus Haynes (Clark Johnson), speaks up to voice his opposition. Haynes looks and sounds immediately familiar, a classic from the Simon lexicon — the independent man who lives by his own moral code. "[If] you want to look at who these kids really are, you have to look at the parenting or lack of it in the city, the drug culture, the economics of these neighborhoods," he says. "It's like you're up on the corner of a roof and you're showing some people how a couple shingles came loose. Meanwhile, a hurricane wrecked the rest of the damn house."

This is the argument made by "The Wire," season after enthralling season, the last of which begins Sunday. Whether it's teachers forced to lift test scores or cops inflating their crime stats, institutions focus on the falling shingles and miss the hurricane. Bureaucracies self-perpetuate. They never examine or try to fix their own systemic problems. Even the world of street crime as depicted on the series has its own illogical "game," in which street corners are held through violence. Try to reconfigure that game, as Stringer Bell (Idris Elba), the gangster-cum-real estate developer, did in the third season, and you might just get got.

Now in the fifth season, we enter a newsroom, but the problems are just the same. The owners of The Baltimore Sun — played by the real-life owners, the Tribune Company — are in the process of downsizing the paper. They are busy figuring out how to meet the bottom line at the expense of quality journalism. Not only are the bosses dictating that stories have narrower, more sensational angles, but seasoned veterans with important sources are being offered buy-outs (as Mr. Simon was, when he left the Sun after 20 years) and crucial beats are being eliminated. From the first episode, the struggle between the principled metro editor, Haynes, and the journalism-crushing institution around him looks just like the conflict as we've seen it play out in previous seasons at the Baltimore Police Department. You could probably transpose the words "stories" with "murders" in some of the dialogue and you wouldn't lose much.

But having the sprawling panorama of "The Wire" land in the world of journalism offers more than just another opportunity for Mr. Simon to present his fatalistic vision of, as he put it in a recent New Yorker profile, the "decline of the American empire." If schools (in the last season) allowed the show to critique the poor state of education, and lingering in the police department is a constant reminder of how ineptly the drug war is fought, the domain covered by newspapers is no less than narrative itself — how a story is told.

So this, the final season, is more than just an argument against the downsizing of the news business; it also makes a case for a certain type of journalism, one that does provide context, that does examine systems, that does look at an issue such as schools not in isolation but as part of a fully integrated social structure. This season represents Mr. Simon's argument for "The Wire." It's a show, after all, in which a scene depicting an addict shooting heroin can be followed by one of a state senator handing over a briefcase full of cash.

If I've neglected to mention that these new episodes continue the series' commitment to complex characters and unpredictable plot, it's not because I'm taking it for granted. Without revealing too much, the fifth season integrates all the story lines that have built up during the past five years, provides every one of its tragically flawed characters a chance at redemption or a descent back to type, and completes the kind of fully drawn narrative arcs that are unprecedented on television.

It's Mr. Simon who forces one to contend with the bigger political message of his show — mostly because his notion that institutions, cities, and, ultimately, America have failed the individual is relentlessly telegraphed through every season. I'm not the first to give "The Wire" the compliment of calling it Tolstoyan — clearly Mr. Simon prefers this to "Dickensian" — but the parallel with "War and Peace" is worth a look. Isaiah Berlin was essentially right to see Tolstoy as a fox who wanted to be a hedgehog. It's the characters and the various worlds they take us to that make the novel what it is, not his overarching theory of history. The same is true of "The Wire." The struggle against "raw, unencumbered capitalism," as Mr. Simon has put it, does provide conflict, but in the end it's the tiny details, the sense that we've come to know a city up and down from its lowliest corner boy to its mayor, that makes the show sing.

After viewing only a few episodes of this final season, it seems right that "The Wire" should end now. Mr. Simon's hedgehog tendencies could make the examination of yet another institution feel redundant. How many times can we hear a character holler "Nobody cares!," as we do in the third episode of the final season. But there is still much to enjoy in this ending. As the old-school reporter (surely a Simon stand-in), having just accepted a buyout, exits the newsroom, he says to himself in resignation, "Might as well get to work on the great American novel." Mr. Simon has accomplished no less than this with "The Wire." And, like any sprawling social-realist novel, the closing chapters are always the most satisfying.

We get to see what happens to our favorite characters.