Good Mourning, Baltimore

Serial killers, mostly. In one of the show's most grandiose storylines yet, a homicidal maniac with a thirst for homeless men is loose in Baltimore during season five—only not really, because the killer is actually a fiction created by McNulty and fed-up fellow Det. Lester Freamon (Clarke Peters). It's all a brazen publicity stunt designed to shame the mayor into funneling a few more pennies into a police force so strapped for cash that it had to shutter its wiretap investigation into a soft-spoken but brutal drug kingpin named Marlo Stanfield (Jamie Hector). As fanciful as the phony-killer plotline may sound, it is executed with "The Wire's" customary verisimilitude, and Simon's point is never far from the surface. The story is "very much a critique [of] the fixation that Americans have with the pornography of violence, as opposed to the root causes of violence," Simon wrote in a December e-mail. "We have zero interest in why the vast majority of violence actually happens and what might be done to address the issue. But give us a killer doing twisted s––t or, better still, doing it to pretty white girls, and the media and its consumers lose all perspective." (Simon and his creative partner, Ed Burns, a former Baltimore cop and schoolteacher, have been declining all media interviews for months in deference to the ongoing Writers Guild of America strike; Simon agreed to answer follow-up questions about the new season for NEWSWEEK because the principal reporting for this story occurred prior to the strike.)

For all of Simon's passion on the subject of journalism—and maybe because of it—the fifth season of "The Wire" doesn't quite match the power of the fourth. Simon accepted a buyout from the Sun in 1995. Several more rounds of staff cuts have shrunk the paper's newsroom from about 450 reporters to fewer than 300, and Simon believes the reductions have crippled a proud institution. But fury has a way of flattening people into caricature, and some of the key personalities in Simon's fictional newsroom lack the lively mind and tangle of motivations that other characters on "The Wire," even the rotten ones, possess in spades. A callow young reporter with ethics issues, played by Tom McCarthy, is almost robotic in his deceit, and the top editor who coddles him is a naive blowhard in prissy suspenders. Simon vigorously disputes this criticism, though to give him his full say would require spilling major plot points. He does point out, correctly, that "the vast majority" of his newsroom "is made of ordinary souls, professional and trying to find their way through ... I believe people in [real] newsrooms will recognize the dynamics and characters and issues throughout. If I'm wrong, you won't be the only guy I hear from." The character of Haynes, in particular, is a healthy antidote. On set, Johnson, who has also directed several episodes, calls Haynes "the editor that every reporter dreams of having," and Simon's fondness for him is clear: he gets all the best lines. "You know what a healthy newsroom is?" Haynes says at one point. "It's a magical place where people argue about everything, all the time."

The media storyline is just one of a dozen or so that "The Wire" will wrap up over the next three months. Old faces will reappear, including an imprisoned, though no less influential, Avon Barksdale ("I'm what you might call an authority figure around here"), and season two's elusive crime lord known as the Greek. When the finale airs in March, the culture will not convulse the way it did after the sudden end of "The Sopranos," but fans of "The Wire," who adamantly believe they've got the better show, are likely to feel a deeper, more personal sense of loss. Simon promises he won't pour salt in the wound with a "Sopranos"-style snap to black. "I actually thought that was a great ending," he says. "But this is a different show. We'll pay out what we've set in motion."

Across town from Kavanagh's, at a farmers market in the parking lot of the racetrack in Pimlico, a second unit is finishing up the last scene for a character named Bubbles, a homeless heroin addict who has struggled, with little success, to get clean since the first episode of "The Wire." (Simon and Burns covered similar narrative terrain in 2000 with their Emmy-winning series for HBO, "The Corner.") Bubbles is a figure of weakness and decency on the show, and his crushing ups and downs have made him into a fan favorite. Between takes, Andre Royo, the actor who plays Bubbles, breaks out a script of the final episode with the front page covered in signatures from the cast and crew—a parting gift to himself. "When my manager first got the call about this part, I didn't want to go in for it," Royo says. "A junkie snitch named Bubbles? I was upset, actually. I was, like, 'Are white people still doing that?' But to come from that moment, where I was in my life then, to this moment five years later—it's very emotional. This was my biggest break. Bubbles will stay in my heart forever."

Royo, like nearly every other actor on "The Wire," had no high-profile credits before he joined the show—and hardly any since. Only the rakishly handsome Dominic West has been able to cross over into major movie work, playing supporting roles in a few "trashy films," as he calls them, such as "300" and "Mona Lisa Smile." Lance Reddick, a regular on "The Wire," can now be seen doing Cadillac ads and bit parts on "Numb3ers" and "CSI: Miami." After every season, Clarke Peters, who plays Freamon, gets back on a plane for London, where he lives and works as a stage actor. "Let me indict Hollywood as much as I can on this one," says Simon. "We have more working black actors in key roles than pretty much all the other shows on the air. And yet you still hear people claim they can't find good African-American actors. That's why race-neutral shows and movies turn out lily-white."

None of the actors on "The Wire" has ever been nominated for an Emmy. Overall, the show has earned just one nomination in four seasons. (Pelecanos and Simon, for writing. They lost.) What really steamed Simon, though, was a story two years ago in Emmy Magazine, the Academy's trade publication, about diversity in television. The story made no mention of "The Wire." "Nothing," says Simon. "Not in the whole issue." The silent treatment from Hollywood, though, has cultivated a theater-company camaraderie around the show, a nervy pride in what can be accomplished by unheralded artists in a supposed backwater like Baltimore. "You get a lot of cachet from being the underdog," says West. "And I rather enjoy that feeling—that you're a cult thing, a secret delight. That means a lot more than an Emmy." Simon is less diplomatic. "I don't give a f––– if we ever win one of their little trinkets. I don't care if they ever figure out we're here in Baltimore," he says. "Secretly, we all know we get more ink for being shut out. So at this point, we wanna be shut out. We wanna go down in flames together, holding hands all the way. It's fun. And it's a good way to go out—throwing them the finger from 3,000 miles away."

© 2008