Connecting the Dots

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Simon believes the focus on minorities has kept the show's ratings down. "When people say it's not a 'water-cooler show,'" he says, "that's about the whitest thing they can say." The show is also dark, metaphorically, by the standards of nearly every previous TV cop show. "On commercial TV, there's no f______ way you can say, 'This is America, and we're not all right anymore,'" says Simon. "Not if every 12 minutes you have to say, 'Hey, we're sorry we brought you down, but check out the new iPods!'" And the show's dozens of stories are complex and challenging to follow even by HBO standards.

But it's worth the effort, not because The Wire is good for you but because it is fantastic entertainment. Like The Sopranos, it's laugh-out-loud funny, full of gallows humor and hustles. In the first scene of Season 5, detectives use a low-tech scam to work a confession from a perp: they load a photocopier with papers reading TRUE and FALSE and convince him it's a lie detector. "The bigger the lie," says a cop, "the more they believe."

For all Simon's progressive politics, The Wire betrays a kind of small-c conservative nostalgia for hard work and honor, for shoe-leather police work, for reporters who pound the pavement, even for criminals who try to follow some kind of code. The Wire offers a bird's-eye critique of society, but it doesn't look down on individuals. Its heroes are flawed, fated people who try even without hope, who teach kids with horrid home lives, who try to kick unshakable addictions, who do the hard labor of investigations even when their bosses punish them.

So even as Season 5 damns the media, it finds some love for Gus Haynes (Clark Johnson), a sarcastic Sun city editor with an unkillable work ethic and a fine-tuned b.s. detector who, despite those qualities--or because of them--knows he's a dinosaur. Maybe the greatest hero on The Wire is Lester Freamon (Clarke Peters), an old-school detective who explains to a young colleague how tediously scouring documents to connect a politician to drug money is better than collaring gang members on the street: "A case like this, here, where you show who gets paid behind all the tragedy and the fraud, where you show how the money routes itself, how we're all, all of us, vested, all of us complicit? Baby, I could die happy."

He could be talking about The Wire, which doesn't just show the tragedy but gets behind it, demonstrating how we're all complicit in a more-with-less culture, but also all cheated by it, all frustrated by its vicious cycles and all called on by small voices to rise above it anyway. This common humanity--call it stubbornness or call it conscience--is the final connecting wire of The Wire. It may be frayed, it may be poorly maintained, but it is all we have left. For four seasons and what is shaping up as one searing, elegiac season more, TV's best drama has followed that wire through every seam and sector of its urban tapestry. Baby, it can die happy.