The sun finally sets on 'The Wire'
TELEVISION REVIEW
In the end, 'The Wire' spins out a future that is believable if not exactly cathartic.
For me, "The Wire" ended a week ago when Snoop (Felicia Pearson) died. She was shot by Michael (Tristan Wilds), the young drug dealer who teetered on the edge of redemption all season, and her death, like her life, embodied both the show and the city it rhapsodically mourned.
An androgynous waif with legit, which is to say virtually unintelligible, Baltimore street vocals and real-life criminal cred (Pearson did time for manslaughter), Snoop committed murder the way other young women text-message their friends -- regularly and with an air of distracted enjoyment alarmingly close to boredom. She was neither immoral nor amoral, but post-moral. A morality vacuum, obliterating the illusion of choice the moment after it was made.
"How ma hair look, Mike?" she asked just before taking a bullet in the head, and you could hear the shrug in her voice. (Javier Bardem, eat your heart out.) Snoop did what she did -- killed lots of people -- because that's what you do, you know, when you're Snoop. It's not any more complicated than that. Or at least not according to "The Wire." The universe moves in slow, painfully familiar patterns that creep in that ever-widening gyre toward degeneration. Only a few small instances of transformation briefly postpone the decline.
This is where the finale of one of the few truly groundbreaking shows left us: in Baltimore, a city relying on perpetual cosmetic reinvention while the foundations buckle and the cellars fill with corpses. Created by former Baltimore Sun reporter David Simon, "The Wire" is, was, no more a traditional portrait of Charm City -- Phillips' crab cakes! The National Aquarium! The "Diner" guys! -- than it was a traditional cop show. Instead, it relentlessly (and at times, obsessively) focused on the shivering guts of the place. The cops, the criminals, the kids, the teachers, the bureaucrats, all the flawed threads of modern urban life were stripped and stretched and twisted together.
Each season brought a new caste under scrutiny. In the final season, it was the journalists of the Sun, squirming under the yoke of corporate ownership and blind self-congratulatory leadership. "The Wire's" harsh critique of pride, fear, corruption and incompetence slipped through the newsroom and found Scott Templeton (Tom McCarthy), a doughy-faced reporter fabricating quotes and stories as fast as his Pulitzer-hungry editor in chief would publish them. Warnings by fellow journos, including righteous city editor Gus Haynes (Clark Johnson) went, needless to say, unheeded, while those of us in the field spent the whole season waiting, longing, demanding that he get caught.
