The Wire: It's All Over

The final episode of The Wire has been broadcast and I feel the same emptiness that I felt when Six Feet Under, Deadwood, and The Sopranos ended their runs. However, I feel that The Wire’s conclusion was the most fully realized of the four. To be honest I didn’t like the future montage at the end of the last episode of Six Feet Under where you know exactly what happens to every character over the next 40 plus years-too much information, they should have left some of it u to your imagination. Deadwood is incomplete in my mind; they didn’t get a chance to finish the story-they needed another season to tie up the loose ends. I think the Sopranos ending was appropriate and a brave move by it’s creator David Chase, but as a fan I felt cheated I wanted more of a clue as to where these characters would end up in the fictional future. The Wire managed to tie most loose ends while leaving a couple of questions unanswered and added some parallel plot lines that suggested the legacy of its signature characters would continue in a generation of people working for the major institutions of the city. There were a couple of plot lines that I was skeptical about during this final season, but I feel that the writers concluded them adequately in the worst cases and brilliantly in the best cases. Not the best season of The Wire, but certainly one of the best seasons of TV nonetheless. I think one of the reasons that this series was well played out had to do with David Simon’s vision-he said from the start that he had a limited number of stories he wanted to tell about Baltimore, so there was no danger of spinning his wheels like we saw with The Sopranos, which became a victim of its success. The only danger was whether Simon would have enough time to tell his story of the city in decline and the failure of the city’s institutions.

There are a ton of Wire related interviews with David Simon and rehashings of the season, so I’ll link to a few.

A recently discovered site, The House Next Door, had a podcast panel of critics discussing who of the three Davids (David Chase/The Sopranos, David Milch-Deadwood, David Simon/The Wire) has the best creative dramatic vision, here.

Interview with David Simon with Salon TV critic Heather Havrilesky.

Alan Sepinwall has a great interview with Simon at his blog, What's Alan Watching.

Scott Tobias is also interviewed Simon for the Onion AV Club.