The Wire’s final season wasn’t the mess you remember, fake serial killers and all

What is the one thing better than an exquisite meal?” asks Kelsey Grammer’s Frasier Crane, rhetorically, in an old episode of Frasier. “An exquisite meal with one tiny flaw we can pick at all night.” Seldom have truer words ever been said. Whether we’re talking hors d’oeuvres or television series, there’s nothing a good snob enjoys doing more than quarrelling over one small facet of an otherwise perfect experience.

When it comes to TV, of course, there are few – if any – meals as exquisite as The Wire. The police drama, which celebrates its 20th anniversary this week, is often described as the greatest TV series of all time (sometimes ceding that honour to The Sopranos). It was a searing, labyrinthine portrait of Baltimore, a port city bled dry by the “war on drugs”. It was a cop show that was more interested in root causes and budget cuts than murder weapons or tense interrogations. Its brilliance was undeniable.

Despite this hallowed status, there nearly exists a near-consensus opinion among the show’s fans that The Wire’s fifth and final season is a letdown. Of course, a bad season of The Wire still towers above pretty much every other drama out there. After the highs of season four – an enduring contender for the best single season of TV ever – the slightest dip in conviction would surely have felt like a major lapse. But with a decade and a half of hindsight, it’s time we embrace The Wire’s last season as not just a worthy and necessary addition to its ranks, but perhaps its most important season of all.

The conceit of The Wire meant that each season changed significantly from the last, introducing whole new settings and sets of characters. The first focused almost entirely on the drug trade. Season two continued this, while also turning its attention to crime around the city’s docks. Season three took on politics, season four the inner-city school system, and season five the press. In other hands, this chopping and changing could be a gimmick; here, it seemed to stem from the show’s own journalistic curiosity, a desire to cram as much context and intricacy into its depiction of contemporary Baltimore as possible. (David Simon, who created the series, had spent years working as a journalist in the city.)

While some of The Wire’s fans have shunned the newspaper plotlines, the bulk of the criticism of season five is reserved for the season’s other major storyline, in which Homicide detective Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West) manages to convince the city of the existence of a fictional serial killer targeting Baltimore’s homeless population. After tampering with crime scenes and falsifying evidence, McNulty is eventually able to channel media hysteria into resources for a manhunt, which he then discreetly redirects into the underfunded investigation into local crime lord Marlo Stanfield (Jamie Hector).

The main criticism levelled against this plotline is that it all sounds rather far-fetched. The Wire was a show that many viewers championed for its authenticity and grit. “Fake serial killer ploy” sounds almost closer to a logline for a Brooklyn Nine-Nine episode than for the show that gave us Avon Barksdale. But The Wire had indulged a similar flight of fancy before – in season three’s “Hamsterdam” plotline, which saw Major “Bunny” Colvin (Robert Wisdom) unilaterally decriminalise the drug trade in one small sector of the city.

Perhaps McNulty’s “homeless killer” proved particularly jarring with fans because it challenged their own conceptions about McNulty, and about the police itself. Other than a stint in season four, when West’s off-screen obligations pushed him to the sidelines, McNulty is the closest thing The Wire had to a lead character. Throughout most of the series, he fits the mould of the stock issue “renegade detective”. He’s got all the specs: a disregard for authority, an alcohol problem, troubled interpersonal relationships, and, despite this, an irrepressible brilliance when it comes to solving crimes. But when he goes rogue and starts fabricating a killer, the entire trope is subverted; it’s no longer possible to balance the scales.

Naturally, The Wire is constantly searching for the bigger picture. McNulty’s actions are borne out of a frustration with systemic bureaucratic and ethical rot throughout the Baltimore police force and government. But it’s also made clear that he’s only driven by his own rampant ego. His fall from grace subverts the kind of narrative that “morally grey” cop shows usually push, that even The Wire had pushed on occasion. Time and time again, we see otherwise hard-nosed and clear-eyed police dramas perpetuate the myth of the maverick detective. Watch enough of them, and you can’t help but conclude that canny and dogmatic detective work (the quality of being “good po-lice”, in The Wire’s lingo) eventually wins out over the police department’s larger systemic failings. In The Wire, as in real life, it cannot. By the end of season five, it’s clear that McNulty is not the solution, but part of the problem.

Even if we set aside McNulty’s story, The Wire season five still absolutely sparkles in its depiction of the press, which is filtered almost entirely through the newsroom of The Baltimore Sun newspaper. The Sun is where series creator David Simon cut his teeth, working on the City desk for 12 years. It’s no surprise, then, that it rings as true as any of The Wire’s many settings. World-weary editor Gus Haynes (played by Clark Johnson, who directed both the series pilot and finale, and brilliantly played a cop on the Baltimore-set Simon adaptation Homicide: Life on the Street) is one of the standout characters of the entire series.

One of the standout qualities The Wire has – over pretty much any other drama to grace the medium – is complexity. The sheer breadth of its socio-political scope starts out huge, and billows with each new season. Throwing The Sun into the mix adds more than just a change of scenery. It offers a window into how the city of Baltimore sees itself, how it converses with itself. Amid the bureaucracy and higher-ups’ desperation for a Pulitzer, there are moments of real dedication, real human connection. The season’s most uplifting moment – one of the few sentimental beats in the entire series – comes when young newswriter Alma Gutierrez (Michelle Paress) publishes a human-interest feature about Bubbles (Andre Royo) and his recovery from heroin addiction. In this moment, The Wire almost seems to assert its own mission statement. These are people worth focusing on. These are stories worth telling.

In the end, The Wire’s fifth season is about repeating patterns, inescapable cycles. The Baltimore Sun is subject to exactly the same kind of structural malaise as the unions, the mayor’s office, the police department or the schools. But there’s no big climax, no moment of catharsis. Concluding on this note – not of victory or failure, but of an unflappable status quo – is a bold gamble for a drama like this. The Wire’s canonised peers such as The Sopranos and Breaking Bad swung for the fences at the end, opting for big, symbolic endings and showstopping set pieces. The Wire stayed true to its convictions, refusing to sanitise, refusing to sensationalise. It’s the stuff of good journalism; for television, it’s remarkable. To this day, there’s been nothing like it.