Good Mourning, Baltimore

We ' re building something here. And all the pieces matter.
—Det. Lester Freamon

About 3,000 miles away from Hollywood, in a crusty dive called Kavanagh's on the corner of East Lexington and Guilford Avenue in downtown Baltimore, one of the most highly praised dramas on television is coming to an end. The bar is set up for a policeman's wake—a framed photograph, rosary beads, a bottle of Jameson—and soon, in this smothering August heat, the place will be filled with large men pretending to be drunk. It is the last scene on the last day of filming on the last season of "The Wire," the HBO series that started out in 2002 as a drama about a single West Baltimore detective unit but has evolved, with furious ambition, into the story of an entire city in decline. The show is legendary here—many of the characters are based on people plucked from the city's recent past—and the cast and crew are often treated like folk heroes.

On the sidewalk outside Kavanagh's, the creator of "The Wire," former Baltimore Sun crime reporter David Simon, a salty, pugnacious guy with a bald head, thick chest and the kind of pale pink skin that catches fire in any kind of sun, chats with a black teenager with a gold grill in his teeth and dreadlocks spilling out from underneath a lopsided Baltimore Ravens cap. He came by to give Simon a T shirt that he'd made. "Did you see this?" Simon asks a visiting journalist. "This is what they're selling in West Baltimore now." The shirt features a photo of one of the show's most fabled characters, a female assassin named Snoop, played by former Baltimore gang member Felicia Pearson, who spent six years in prison on a juvenile murder conviction. Very few people watch "The Wire"—about 4 million per episode, about half what the mighty "Sopranos" drew—and this pleases Simon enormously because it appeals to his underdog instincts, and his conviction that bare-knuckled authenticity isn't for everyone. And besides, he's got the fans he really wants. "I'd rather have the allegiance of these people than all the viewers in the world," he says. "Mainstream America has 100 shows to love. The other America has this one. I'm proud of that. That's why this"—he holds up the shirt—"makes me so happy. Because you know what this is? This is subversive."

If you've never seen an episode of "The Wire," which began its final season on Jan. 6, by now you're probably sick of hearing about what a fool you are for missing it. The show has become an object of worship among critics and culture snobs (Barack Obama told TV Guide that it's his favorite show) and they—OK, we—can be flat-out annoying in our zeal for it, as if there are only two types of people: enlightened fans of "The Wire," and everyone else. Worse, with all our talk about the show's Dickensian cast of nearly 30 principal characters, its novelistic, episode-opening epigrams, its street-level patois and labyrinthine detail about city bureaucracy, we tend to make "The Wire" sound like homework. In fact, the show is riveting, infuriating and funny as hell. (In one scene last year, a schoolteacher locks his keys in his car and one of his 13-year-old students, already an accomplished car thief, helpfully jimmies the door open for him.) Baltimore's ruling class has complicated feelings about "The Wire"—there's more to their city, they complain, than crime and blight—but its embrace by Baltimore's underclass hints at its uncomfortable truth. "There is a sense around here that someone finally said, 'Your lives are worthy of the same degree of drama and meaning as beautiful housewives'," says Simon. "That's a simple thing, but it becomes profound. It becomes a bit of connective tissue between these two Americas that are going their separate ways."

Simon and his writing staff, made up largely of urban-crime novelists such as George Pelecanos ("The Night Gardener") and Dennis Lehane ("Mystic River"), as well as old pals from the Sun, like Bill Zorzi, who spent 20 years covering courts, cops and city politics, are not optimistic people. "The Wire" is filled with revelations, but its authors aren't holding their breath waiting for a new day. "I think 'The Wire' is going into the archive as an artifact of where we were as a country when we fell on our a–– and became a second-rate society," says Simon from his trailer near the set, parked just across a courtyard from city hall. As he talks, the mayor's office looms over his shoulder through the window behind him. Each new season of "The Wire" has focused on a different organ in Baltimore's flat-lining civic physiology, with the aim of articulating "why an American city can no longer solve its problems," says Simon. Season one explored the justice system through the prism of a prolonged wiretap case against a powerful drug dealer named Avon Barksdale. Season two shifted focus to the city's waterfront, profiling its eroding community of blue-collar dockworkers. Season three examined city politics in the heat of a mayoral election, while the show's standout fourth season followed a group of boys through Baltimore's overmatched school system. "David has a social conscience, but he's never ax-grinding," says Dominic West, a British actor who plays combustible Det. Jimmy McNulty. "Very rarely in life are there out-and-out villains. People do things for reasons. And you see those reasons on this show."

In this fifth and final season, "The Wire's" probing eye focuses on the media, a subject that Simon knows intimately from his years as a newspaperman. The Baltimore Sun's leadership gave HBO permission to film in its newsroom, and in a scene during the first episode, a pair of actual Sun veterans—including Simon's wife, Laura Lippman, who no longer works at the paper—watch from the window as a fire blazes a mile or two away. After a minute, the paper's city editor, Augustus (Gus) Haynes (a superbly gruff Clark Johnson), comes over and suggests that maybe they should find out what's going on. "What kind of people stand around watching a fire? That's some shameful s––t right here," Haynes says. The scene is vintage "Wire," delivering a bitter-pill message with a healthy dose of gallows humor. "The next and last argument we wanted to have," says Simon, explaining the season's media focus, "is about why nothing ever gets fixed. While the American empire slipped off its pedestal, what the f––– were we paying attention to?"