As the Corpse Cools (Do Not Read This if You Have Seen The Wire Series Finale or Care about Knowing About It)

Something didn't feel right last night. There it was, the last few moments before midnight, the kitchen clean, the work week mapped out. Something in my brain said that I was supposed to hit the On Demand button. D and I were supposed to have a few beers and talk shit leading into an opening scene with Bunk or McNulty, Michael, Bodie, Stringer, Carcetti or Marlo. There would be the Monday afternoon call to my father about the night's episode. There would be hopes and dreams about the next case, the next season. But then I had to remind myself that there would be no next season. There would be no new episodes. The Wire is over.

Of course I've known this for almost a year now, but there nothing like the acceptance of it, the moment when it finally sinks in, the knowledge that what's out out in the universe is all that there ever will be. I must say that this could be the most bitter TV goodbye for me in as long as I can remember, maybe even back to my childhood. Sex in the City was inevitable. Oz had been plain bad for two seasons. I'm prepared for Jack Bauer, Jack Shepard and Vinnie Chase's bye-byes. But the Wire was personal. The Wire was real.

There are divisions within my soul between my roles as journalist, cultural commentator and crime writer. Different mindsets, different needs. When I flipped on the idiot box almost six years ago for episode ten of the show's first season, I thought I was watching just another cop show, just another crime drama that would make it easy for me to predict its ending. But as I watched the supposed good guys lose, the bad guys get away clean and my own brain nearly explode from the inertia of it all, I knew that I was dealing with something different. I watched Black faces turn to white ones in Season Two. I saw poor white boys hop into the dope game faster than any of the brothers I knew. The corruption at City Hall was so rampant that I found myself laughing. Police command were so bumbling that I almost wanted to cry. And the poor cats trying to do the right thing on both sides of the game either ended up dead or riding the boat. The game was rigged and I knew it. But so did they.

Though there are years and a million differences between us, David Simon had created a world where so many of the rules of my own creative universe applied. Everyone served a purpose. The Devil wore so many different garments. By Season Four the old bad guys had lost and there were new terrors on the rise, the fellowship of the Major Crimes unit broken into more pieces than than a bottle dropped from a skyscraper. But still the fight went on. Red names turned to black. Corners were kept. Casualties of war made a new home for themselves in vacant buildings. The schools can be as treacherous as the streets. The Justice League has its own section for burnouts. The Legion of Doom has a whole lot of bodies in its backyard.

But as the show came into Season Five I could feel fatigue in the work of those in the writer's room. After playing it clean and sober for a year McNulty relapse into debauchery became outright criminal. Sure he had come out of the Western to avenge Bodie's death, a death he had been inadvertently responsible for, but the whole serial bit seemed rushed and for a guy like Jimmy, who's always been if nothing else calculating, he and Lester not leaving themselves a cleaner way out was a tiny bit disappointing.

We never learned anything about Marlo's past or how he came to prominence. Chris has kids but unlike Wee-bey or even Cheese we never see them directly. Unlike the Barksdales, the Stanfield squad seemed to have landed on earth out of UFO, taken over West Baltimore and that was that. Omar breaks is code and transforms into a babbling maniac robbing stashhouses without a purpose to be blown away by a twelve year-old while buying cigarettes. Greggs turns rat in the name of a Daniels-esque girl scout decision to keep it clean. Carcetti goes back on his reform campaign in the name of making it to the state house. Prop Joe catches on in the noodle and the Co-op almost becomes a dictatorship. Some of it felt rushed (perhaps due to HBO only giving the show ten final episodes when they had written it for 12 or 13) but I could live with it. And as for Dave Simon's season-long sermon on the death of the newspaper, well...let's just say that if the series had a weak thread it was that one. There were a lot of other angles that could have been covered. There were two dimensions that should have been three.

When D and I checked the season finale a few days before everyone else on download, I was pleased to find that most of my predictions came true. As McNulty had been the catalyst for nearly every case the show dealt with, it could only end with him leaving the force. Lester, after enduring all the department could throw at him, had to get tired too. Bunk, as the company man in homicide, had to play the game by the rules and keep up what he did best. I knew Slim was going to pull that trigger on you know who and that the very red tape that McNulty had fought against for his entire career was the tape that saved him from a much more serious demise. I did think that Mike was going to get Marlo, but then again Omar never got Avon.

So what I'm left with as fan is the worse kind of love hangover, that drag around the house in a blanket and sweats "She don't love me no more" kind of a thing." I'm bracing myself for Generation Kill, Simon and series writer George Pelecanos' mini-series about the war in Iraq due in July. Word on the street is that their next full series will center around New Orleans musicians trying to pick up the pieces after Katrina. But as for multi-layered tales about how all of the many worlds in urban America overlap and connect, Simon and his squad are out of that business, which means that someone else has to step up behind them.

I'm trying really hard for that to be me. During lean years where more movies than not have sucked, it's been Simon's work that has kept me inspired as a dramatic writer. For the hot second when the pilot I wrote had actors attached I was hoping to spar with my creative mentors for a season or two, to see if I can borrow their following for a new story in a city not too far away. But I apparently wasn't ready to face my masters. I had so much more to learn.

I will run Seasons 1-5 into the ground for the rest of my life. This will probably mean that I'll end up buying them in multiple formats and for a million different people, including my own kids (who'll probably be watching far more violent fare in their own classrooms by then). I will make sure that my father can check any episode he wants until he breathes his last breath, as I know that this will make him happy.
And I will call up Wood and Byron and Benita and K and Millicent and everyone else who has made The Wire an experience for me from time to time, just to reminisce on an era long gone. Those days are over now. New ones are at hand. Cycle of life. And life is the only game in town. Out.