Sternbergh on ‘The Wire’ Finale: The Anti-‘Sopranos’

For everyone who felt cheated by the stubbornly ambivalent series finale of The Sopranos — which is to say, everyone — there can be no such complaints about The Wire. No sudden blackouts, no meta-textual commentary, no unearthed chestnut from Journey. (Though we have to admit that, earlier this season, we half-hoped The Wire would end with Omar driving to Jersey, hobbling into a diner, and gunning down Tony Soprano and his family.) Instead, The Wire finale was the anti-Sopranos: an almost absurdly exhaustive festival of closure. Bubs got clean. Carcetti got elected governor. Chris got life with no parole. Marlo escaped jail, but not the streets. Hell, Jimmy McNulty got a teary, beery Irish wake — and he's not even dead! He just took early retirement! Truth be told, the biggest question — will Omar live or die? — was answered weeks ago, when the knight errant caught a head shot while buying a pack of Newports. That leaves us with this: What kind of world does David Simon, the show's co-creator, believe that we live in?

For its first few seasons, The Wire appeared like a work of social protest, even muckraking — less Charles Dickens (Simon repeatedly mocked the phrase "Dickensian" this season) than Upton Sinclair. Here, the show said, is a system that's badly in need of repair. The various characters worked within it, or outside of it, but if they worked hard enough, they could spark a brief light in the gloom. The final season abandoned this reformist hope. Yes, personal salvation is possible, barely — Bubs the addict finally climbs the stairs into the warm light of his sister's kitchen — but as for the world? Forget it, it's beyond repair. The great urban plague is not corruption, but entropy: 'Twas ever thus, the show shrugs, as every character who expired, escaped, or was expelled (Omar, Bubs, Gus) is tidily replaced by a new Muppet Baby version (Michael, Dukie, Fletcher). Change, it turns out, isn't possible. The system isn't even broken. It's just unstoppable, and crushing.

As for Simon, who spent much of this last season railing at the fading role of newspapers, he proved in the end, for better or worse, to be like the figure he seems to venerate the most: the crusty city columnist, bellowing the truth. He showed a knack for the illuminating detail (like when a coroner notices that the corpse of Omar has the wrong I.D. tag and switches them, in a final, quiet tribute), and he couldn't resist a columnist's nod to the sweeping city, complete with a roving montage punctuated with the faces of Baltimore's everyday folk. It's exactly the kind of ending David Chase refused to indulge. But Simon, the newspaperman, likes stories, told right to the end. And if this one ended wrapped in a big bow, at least that's infinitely more satisfying than a blackout. —Adam Sternbergh

Vulture's complete coverage of the Wire finale:
‘The Wire’: One Last Long, Boozy Irish Wake for David Simon’s Accidental Masterpiece
Ten Questions Left Unanswered by the ‘Wire’ Finale
Actor Ptolemy Slocum on the Emotional Last Night of Shooting ‘The Wire’
‘The Wire’ Finale's Montage: A Shot-by-Shot Commentary
Debating the Legacy of ‘The Wire’

Source: Vulture -- Entertainment, Music, Culture, Theater, Movies, Art -- New York Magazine Blog | 10 Mar 2008 | 3:30 pm

‘The Wire’ Finale's Montage: A Shot-by-Shot Commentary

Every season of The Wire ends the same way: While a resonant song plays on the soundtrack, we're treated to a montage that lays out the fates of the characters we've grown to love and hate over the past few months. Season five's final montage was scored with the Blind Boys of Alabama's version of "Way Down in the Hole" from season one and was densely packed with images, scenes, jokes, heartbreaks, and surprises. Since the montage serves as David Simon and Ed Burns's final statement on their characters and themes, we thought it deserved a closer look. A much closer look.

See something we missed? Let us know in the comments!

By the hands on the left are the familiar names of Bodie and Lex. Poor Bodie died too long ago even to be mentioned in season five, but we imagine he’s up in heaven, spitting through his front teeth. As for Lex, Randy probably spits on his name every time he walks by that mural.

Looks like Lester ponied up for some Lasik surgery for Shardene, who doesn’t have to be a stripper in ugly glasses no more.

Here’s big dumb Herc at the bar, alternately saving and screwing his pals from the BPD. Of course he’s still good buddies with that bully Colicchio. Perhaps after this round they’ll hit the streets “the Western way.”

Designed especially to piss off journalists, this shot of Scott Templeton winning the Pulitzer made us laugh out loud. That he's accepting the award rather than Klebanow and Whiting suggests that, in the end, the paper entered his stories in Local Reporting rather than Public Service. Thank God for small favors.

The coffee at that place must be amazing. Somewhere in the world right now, the Greek is taking an ominous phone call.

Now that Carcetti’s in Annapolis, he can forget about Baltimore like everyone else. His wife will turn into a resentful Laura Bush clone, and he will have an affair with the Chelsea Clinton–esque woman on the left.

Gus is put out to pasture to contemplate the proper usage of “evacuate,” and Mike Fletcher gets a bump thanks to his profile of Bubbles. Gus will become the crustiest, crankiest editor to ever occupy the copy-editor slot.

Mayor Nerese Campbell should be admired for her ability to appoint do-nothings to lead the city of Baltimore with her. Find that van yet, Commissioner Valchek? We can still hear you cackling.

Oh, Dukie. We’re really, really sorry.

Perhaps the happiest ending of all comes for flawed but classy Ronnie Pearlman, who gets a judgeship! "My first case up, and I have to recuse myself," she says to newly-minted public defender Cedric Daniels.

Here, Wee-Bey and Chris discuss the prison’s upcoming production of South Pacific.

Nice hat, Rawls! Your new job as head of the Maryland State Police gives you every reason in the world to troll truck-stop bathrooms.

This truly heartwarming moment, in which Bubs finally gets let upstairs to eat with his sister, is intercut with…

…Baltimore's littlest killer, Kenard, getting arrested by Crutchfield for Omar's murder. The saddest part is when the cop pushes his head down as he gets in the squad car, even though Kenard's way too short to ever hit his head on anything. We bet he never got that reward money.

A reenactment of a favorite shot from all five seasons' opening credits — but one that, as far as we know, never actually appeared in an episode proper, until now. Unlike in the credits, we get a moment from the kids' point of view, too. That kid's got an arm on him; maybe the O's should sign him up.

The damp office where Daniels's detail was based in season one. This is how it looked just before Prez turned out the lights.

The public-housing low-rise apartments where much of season one was set. Looks like they finally got a new couch, though.

Baltimore's waterfront, complete with a Port Police car tooling through just as Beadie's did at the opening of season two.

What will McNulty do in his forced retirement? We don't see him buying a boat, unlike some ex-cops; after all, as he ruefully admitted in the series' first episode, diesel fumes make him seasick.

A suited man grabs a paper while a homeless guy digs through the trash. This is the kind of easy juxtaposition The Wire sometimes indulged in, to its detriment. Also, such is the show's devotion to a bygone era of journalism that, if you look more closely, you'll see the guy in the suit is actually grabbing a free real-estate weekly. In what world would that guy not just go to Craigslist?

Chess players: a reminder of D'Angelo Barksdale's chess lesson delivered to poor, ill-fated Wallace and Bodie way back in season one.

A foursome of images represent the show's devotion, over five long seasons, to cops sitting in cars or on rooftops staring at people for hours on end. Last week's scene of a tick-bitten cop stripping off his shirts in frustration was the peak moment of this particular theme.

The montage ends with a series of Baltimore citizens going about their day: parents with kids, junkies buying drugs, young men on bikes, city employees, whites, blacks, smiles, frowns. If you needed one last reminder that the true star of this show was not McNulty, or Omar, or even David Simon, but the city of Baltimore, then here you go. —Aileen Gallagher and Dan Kois

Vulture's complete coverage of the Wire finale:
‘The Wire’: One Last Long, Boozy Irish Wake for David Simon’s Accidental Masterpiece
Ten Questions Left Unanswered by the ‘Wire’ Finale
Actor Ptolemy Slocum on the Emotional Last Night of Shooting ‘The Wire’
Sternbergh on ‘The Wire’ Finale: The Anti-‘Sopranos’
Debating the Legacy of ‘The Wire’

Source: Vulture -- Entertainment, Music, Culture, Theater, Movies, Art -- New York Magazine Blog | 10 Mar 2008 | 3:00 pm

Actor Ptolemy Slocum on the Emotional Last Night of Shooting ‘The Wire’

Savvy New Yorkers may have recognized the actor playing the Business Card Killer on last night's season finale of The Wire. After years as a member of Neutrino, one of the Upright Citizen's Brigade Theater's most innovative improv teams, Ptolemy Slocum has made something of a cottage industry playing mental cases on HBO classics — first on The Sopranos, where he portrayed Junior's dog-kissing institutional buddy Keith, and now as the unstable answer to everyone's prayers on The Wire. Slocum's interrogation by McNulty and Bunk was the last scene ever shot on the set of The Wire. He sat down last week to talk with Vulture about keeping the surprises of the finale, the Bunk's final speech, and partying with Jimmy McNulty.

Did you know going in that this character would become so pivotal? Don't ruin anything for me! I am very diligent about this show.

So you haven't seen the finale yet?
No! I don't even know if I'm guilty or not. I can't even tell from the script that I have, because he's a twisted enough character that it could just be a psychological issue.

Were you a Wire fan before you got the role?
No. I'd never seen the show. And I'm actually very glad that I hadn't because now that I have watched it from episode one, season one, I can only imagine the anxiety that would have welled up in me knowing how amazing the show was. But I knew nothing about the character other than what was in the pages they gave me to audition. They did tell me at one point during my audition that my character could go on trial, but I think that got cut when the season was trimmed from thirteen to ten episodes.

What was it like that last night?
It was a remarkable experience. The day started late. There was a funeral that day for the daughter of a crew member, so there was this kind of somber beginning, and lunch wasn't taken until after nightfall, like ten at night. We got out of there as the sun was rising.

Did you have any other scenes that night?
No, so I was just watching the whole evening as everyone wrapped. They kind of organized the night so that as a scene would end, it was that person's final scene ever. Everything stops. Someone gives a speech about how this is their last experience. They applaud, and everything starts up again. Starting and stopping. Punctuating with these moments of pure emotion, and it just felt like getting hit with walls of water after each of these speeches happened.

Whose speeches did you see?
Daniels's speech was very sweet. He cried. Landsman never left his chair — the only person who did his whole speech sitting down. His was such a moving and quiet speech, very introverted and self-effacing. Kima had a lot of tears, a lot of emotion. After her speech was my scene.

What was that like?
If you can imagine a normal set with 50 people on it, double that, because people came in for this one moment. And then everything was intensified because they're all focusing on us much more than on an ordinary set. It was much more like theater than TV. It was the most stressful thing I've ever done. Afterwards, Bunk and McNulty gave their farewell speeches. Bunk started his off by standing there with his feet apart and saying, "All right, motherfuckers," and gave an extremely moving speech about the familial feeling of The Wire, and how much the cast and crew supported him and his family. He's from New Orleans, and some of the worst moments in his whole life happened while they were shooting the show.

And Dominic West?
Dominic was great. He was so kind to me throughout the shoot. And everyone loved him on that set. At the wrap party, Dominic came over and put me in this headlock. He looks off into the distance, and then he looks down at me and says, "Ptolemy" — in his Irish accent — and then he thinks for a long time, and then he says, "I'm sooooooo drunk."

Vulture's complete coverage of the Wire finale:
‘The Wire’: One Last Long, Boozy Irish Wake for David Simon’s Accidental Masterpiece
Ten Questions Left Unanswered by the ‘Wire’ Finale
‘The Wire’ Finale's Montage: A Shot-by-Shot Commentary
Sternbergh on ‘The Wire’ Finale: The Anti-‘Sopranos’
Debating the Legacy of ‘The Wire’

Source: Vulture -- Entertainment, Music, Culture, Theater, Movies, Art -- New York Magazine Blog | 10 Mar 2008 | 2:30 pm

Ten Questions Left Unanswered by the ‘Wire’ Finale

Last night's series finale of The Wire took great care to tie up a whole lot of loose ends and answer a whole bunch of nagging questions. Thanks to the events of the finale — and especially the montage at the end — we know that McNulty and Freamon lose their jobs, but McNulty is at least temporarily reconciled with Beadie; that Carcetti is elected governor and Nerese replaces him as mayor; that Valchek replaces Daniels as commissioner and Daniels winds up a public defender; that Slim Charles and Fat Face Rick seem to have taken over the Co-op's connection with the Greek; and that Scott Templeton wins a Pulitzer.

But one of the great pleasures of The Wire has always been the rich and novelistic details of plot and character, and over five seasons and 60 hours of TV, a lot of questions were raised. Some of them just weren't answered by this finale, as conscientious as it was. So we're going to ask. We've sent this list to David Simon, and we'll see if he writes back to drop us a few hints. Weigh in with your thoughts in the comments, and ask a few questions of your own.

10. What, exactly, is in Cedric Daniels's incriminating file?

9. It seems as though Sydnor didn't lose his job as a result of the scandal the way McNulty and Freamon did. How did he end up unscathed?

8. Are Chris and Wee-Bay still in the game from prison, or have they just bonded over being muscle for a charismatic drug lord?

7. How is it that Nicky Sobotka is back in Baltimore and out of Witness Protection? Shouldn't the Greeks be after him?

6. David Simon told an audience at USC a couple of days ago that Randy Wagstaff is actually Cheese Wagstaff's son. Was that a dropped story line, and would Randy have been affected at all by Cheese's death?

5. What would have happened to Rawls if he had been outed? Or was his sexuality always intended as simply a little piece of (out-of-nowhere) character flavor?

4. What happens to State's Attorney Bond? He saved his tail by joining in the serial-killer cover-up, but his choke job on the Clay Davis trial surely cost him capital. Does he go anywhere?

3. Why Valchek as commissioner and not Bobby Reed? Just because Mayor Nerese has the clout with the ministers to name a white commissioner?

2. What happened to wisecracking, coupon-clipping Officer Massey?

And finally, and most confounding …

1. What could Jimmy McNulty possibly do besides be a cop?

Vulture's complete coverage of the Wire finale:
‘The Wire’: One Last Long, Boozy Irish Wake for David Simon’s Accidental Masterpiece
Actor Ptolemy Slocum on the Emotional Last Night of Shooting ‘The Wire’
‘The Wire’ Finale's Montage: A Shot-by-Shot Commentary
Sternbergh on ‘The Wire’ Finale: The Anti-‘Sopranos’
Debating the Legacy of ‘The Wire’

Source: Vulture -- Entertainment, Music, Culture, Theater, Movies, Art -- New York Magazine Blog | 10 Mar 2008 | 2:00 pm

Obama: Debunking the Latte-Liberal Myth

“[Barack] Obama has won the small caucus states with the latte-sipping crowd,” an anonymous aide to Hillary Clinton told the Times of London over the weekend. “They don’t need a president, they need a feeling.” —Times Online

If there’s one piece of partisan analysis that has hardened into conventional wisdom about the 2008 Democratic campaign, it’s that Obama is an uptown guy compared to Clinton’s downtown gal. The argument has been made elegantly, as when Rutgers historian David Greenberg wrote in Slate that Obama’s “real precursors … are the educated, middle-class reformers of the Gilded Age known as the Mugwumps … liberal professionals and gentlemen of the late 19th century who tried to transform both the economic arrangements of the industrial age … and the machine-dominated political system … forebears of the Progressives … but also elitist.”And it’s been made crassly, as when machinists-union chief Tom Buffenbarger called Obama supporters “latte-drinking, Prius-driving, Birkenstock-wearing, trust-fund babies.” The meme is out there, and it’s sticking: To paraphrase Archie Bunker on Harry Belafonte, Barack Obama’s just a good-looking Adlai Stevenson dipped in caramel.

So here’s a question for Professor Greenberg and Mr. Buffenbarger and all the talking heads who sagely quote Ron Brownstein’s division of Democrats into “beer-track” Hillary supporters and “wine-track” Obama voters: Of all the self-styled “progressive” reformers, self-actualizing Prius drivers, Birkenstock-stomping lefty libs and bathrobe-wearing bloggers you know, how many are black? Surely there are many African-Americans who enjoy a tasty latte. But according to our back-of-the-envelope calculations, about 40 percent of Obama supporters happen to be non-wealthy blacks. And those voters seem to drop right out of this year’s breakdowns and equations.

Yes, Obama really is heir to a capital-P Progressive tradition that sees cleaning up politics and runaway capitalism as key to repairing societal breaches. Clinton, having failed to win a critical mass of Democratic voters either through the policy triangulations that worked for her husband or by campaigning as a semi-incumbent, really has fallen back on the virtues of machine politics. She now claims that she’ll fight and she’ll deliver the goods.

But simply to repeat that this divide exists is to miss the very specific way it is cleaving Democrats in 2008. White-collar liberalism puts forth a serious candidate nearly every presidential primary cycle: Stevenson, Eugene McCarthy, Morris Udall, Gary Hart, Bruce Babbitt, Paul Tsongas, Bill Bradley. Said contender is always an anti-politics politician
who typically comes across as ennoblingly idealistic to supporters, annoyingly holier-than-thou to opponents, and interestingly ironic or witty to the press. He then loses. And in going down to defeat, he gains hardly any black votes. Indeed, the Democratic regulars and Southerners who have been the party’s nominees since desegregation have, time and again, relied on overwhelming African-American support to beat back insurgencies, from Hubert Humphrey in 1968 to (most crucially) Walter Mondale in 1984 to Al Gore in 2000.

That’s why what Obama has been pulling off is historically unique. Obama versus Clinton is what you would get if you reran “Clean Gene” vs. RFK in 1968 — if you took African-Americans away from the Kennedy side of the ledger and added them to the McCarthy side. If reform liberalism, in other words, is what turned out to unite Democrats across racial lines, not interest-group liberalism.

That’s why when Bill Clinton says the states voting for Obama this time around “disproportionately favor upper-income voters who don't really need a president but feel like they need a change," he can’t seriously be talking about blacks. It’s not just that if the presidency matters to any one readily identifiable group of Americans, for better or worse it’s African-Americans, who are disproportionately lower-income, disproportionately affected by macroeconomic dislocations, and disproportionately reliant on the government to enforce laws against job and housing discrimination. It’s also that blacks have been among the most regular Democrats, putting party above “feelings” or “change,” for decades. Their break with the Establishment is a huge deal.

But the Clintons know they can rely on the media to miss African-Americans among working Americans. When Chris Matthews rhapsodizes about “working people,” he synonymizes that phrase with “ethnic people” and “regular guys,” meaning white Catholic males. When Joe Klein worries that Obama’s rhetoric won’t connect with “working-class voters,” he means white working-class voters. When Katie Couric visits with “blue-collar” voters, it’s with white restaurant owners and white Honda employees. Like sportswriters glorifying Brett Favre, the political press gets a chance to go authentic by rubbing elbows with honest-to-goodness hardhats during presidential campaigns. And lo and behold, all the faces under the helmets they interview turn out to be white.

Republicans have been claiming a monopoly on those “real” Americans for a few years now. Their primary weapon has been feminizing Democratic candidates: if you’re not a hyper-masculine war hawk, somehow you really don’t count. Thus the 2004 GOP convention gave us John Kerry is a handwringing peacenik, John Edwards as “the Breck Girl” and workers concerned about losing their jobs as “economic girlie-men,” and things have only gotten worse since.

Until the Obama-Clinton battle, however, this tactic of defining the opposition as worthless, as opposed to wrong, had been relatively rare within intra-Democratic party battles. In constantly re-writing various groups and states out of votes that “matter,” Clinton and her surrogates are fulfilling a Republican double fantasy: labeling white Obama supporters as effete snobs and rendering black voters invisible altogether. —Peter Keating

Source: Daily Intelligencer - New York Magazine | 10 Mar 2008 | 1:15 pm

Why the Sean Bell Trial Hasn't Exploded (Yet)

Andrea Peyser needs Al Sharpton's help. The Post columnist has been doing her sneering best to try to pump some racial tension into the trial of three cops accused of murdering Sean Bell. Lately, though, Peyser sounds more frustrated than incendiary: "This was supposed to be a case about racist cops shooting a black man for no good reason," she recently complained. Where is Reverend Sharpton to make an inflammatory stand when you need him?

Disney World, that's where!

Sharpton will be touring the Sunshine State (including Orlando) with his radio show trying to inject himself into the tangled controversy over the misbegotten Florida Democratic primary. For all one might say about the good reverend, he knows where the action is. And it isn't in the Sean Bell courtroom.

The trial surprisingly (and probably fortunately) hasn't produced the kind of polarizing drama that it seemed to promise. Partly that's because the racial lines aren't neatly drawn: All of the unarmed shooting victims were black, but only one of the NYPD defendants is white. But on a larger scale, it comes down to newsroom economics — the trial is competing for space with the riotous presidential election — and sad history: Tragic, fatal police overreactions are now familiar enough that Bell's death isn't as shocking as it might have been had Amadou Diallo, Ousmane Zongo, and others not died before him.

There is, however, still plenty of anger in neighborhoods outside the mainstream media's borders. That's why Sharpton's spring break is strategic on a second level. The Bell case has several more weeks to run. The reverend will be back in plenty of time for the verdict, handed down by a judge who happens to be white. The moment that tests whether New York has truly moved past the old antagonisms won't come until, or if, there's an acquittal. —Chris Smith

Earlier: Chris Smith: Tony Ricco's Racial Politics
Related: A Bad Night at Club Kalua [NYM]

Source: Daily Intelligencer - New York Magazine | 10 Mar 2008 | 1:02 pm

‘The Wire’: One Last Long, Boozy Irish Wake for David Simon’s Accidental Masterpiece

Episode title: "-30-"
Opening quote: "…the life of kings." —H.L. Mencken

Okay, let's start with the obvious question: Was Norman Wilson high this entire episode? Watching Tommy Carcetti's most trusted aide cackling his way through the nightmarish crisis that almost brings his boss down — "This is too fuckin' good," he giggles at one point — made us wonder if, at some point, Carcetti would stop viewing Wilson as his conscience and start viewing him as a ball and chain. We think maybe he did, because as the episode goes on, Wilson disappears from sight, and the heavy work is handled by chief of staff Mike Steintorf. One great disappointment of season five has been Tommy Carcetti — not just his transformation from eager do-gooder to jaded opportunist (a transformation that is made complete in this finale, when he approves a cover-up of McNulty's scheme), but the show's backgrounding of him. Where once Tommy Carcetti was a force in any room, now he recedes into his big leather chair while his chief of staff makes the earth move. We miss feisty old Tommy Carcetti; we'd liked to have seen that guy go mad with power, not be neutered by it.

In other news, David Simon is not exactly Agatha Christie.

Simon wrote this episode, which contains two of the most laughable smoking guns ever given their own eureka moments on a major television show: the business cards that lead McNulty to the copycat killer, and Scott Templeton's empty notebook, which opens poor Alma's eyes to his chicanery. David Simon may be married to a fantastic mystery writer — Baltimore's own Laura Lippman — but he isn't one himself; both these plot twists showed their creator's hand far too clearly.

Luckily, nearly everything else in the episode is outstanding. This 90-minute finale manages to wrap up five seasons' worth of story lines without sacrificing too much in the way of The Wire's signature realism. It offers charming echoes of seasons past, while still remaining true to the changes the show's put its characters through. It's the rare finale that went out of its way to satisfy its audience without pandering … well, not too much, anyway.

Perhaps it's pandering a little bit to give us Bubbles the front-page celebrity, but Andre Royo plays Bubs's trepidation at the idea — and quiet pride at its execution — so well we are willing to overlook it. Maybe it's pandering a little bit to show us Michael as the new Omar, wisecracking while he robs drug dealers. (At least they don't have him whistle.) And maybe it's pandering a little bit to bring back our favorite middle-school teacher, Mr. Prezbo, for a lushly bearded cameo, but any good feelings viewers get from his appearance are undercut by its context; Dukie lies to him, asking for money, and is well on his way to becoming the next Bubbles. Hell, he's even got bubbles on his T-shirt.

But all in all, the finale is a reminder of what we have always loved about the show: its ability to move a half-dozen stories along through the accretion of potent mini-scenes. Take as just one example Lester Freamon's discovery of the leak inside the grand-jury room; he delivers to Pearlman a tape of the leaker, prosecutor Gary DiPasquale, hitting up Maurice Levy for money. With Levy breathing down Pearlman's neck about the obvious illegal wiretap used in the Stanfield case, and the mayor's office telling Pearlman to make the case go away, Ronnie busts out the tape and plays it for Levy. Watching actor Michael Kostroff's face fall as Levy struggles to regain the high ground is delightful. A deal is struck: Marlo serves no time but must retire, while Chris goes away for life.

The consequences spin out from there: Levy fully embraces Herc as a source of inside information, even inviting him over for brisket. And Marlo, like Stringer Bell before him, declares himself a businessman, offering his connect with the Greek for sale. The price? A cool $10 million. The remnants of the Co-op pool their money ("We sellin' dope and coke in Baltimore," Cheese admonishes his pennywise fellow dealers. "Any y'all who ain't got that kind of money need be ashamed"), but their plans are a bit mucked up when Cheese pulls a gun on Fat Face Rick, telling him in no uncertain terms what he thinks about Rick's reminiscing about the good old days: "There ain't no back in the day. There ain't no nostalgia to this shit. There's just the street, and the game, and what happen here today." Then Slim Charles blows Cheese away and says, "That was for Joe." Hell yeah, Slim Charles. And Marlo, stuck at a stuffy party full of real-estate investors, realizes much earlier than Stringer Bell ever did that he's not cut out for this brand-new game. Soon he's back on a corner, bleeding, fighting, and alive and well.

Over at the Sun, Gus finally confronts Templeton about his fabrications and is rewarded with a demotion. Alma backs him up and is rewarded with a transfer to the Carroll County bureau. Templeton publishes a story about watching a guy in a van kidnap a homeless man, gets dressed down by a self-loathing McNulty, and is rewarded with a Pulitzer Prize.

Even though Templeton's story is bullshit, there's a copycat killer in Baltimore, and a furious Daniels and Rawls inform McNulty that solving the two resulting murders is his final case. "If you're half the detective you think you are," Rawls growls, "you'll put this down quick." McNulty does, laughably quick, nailing the Business Card Killer the next day. Carcetti names Cedric commissioner, but he's out within weeks, forced out by Nerese and the mystery file she got from Clay Davis. In his last official act, Cedric promotes Carver to lieutenant — the very rank Daniels held at the beginning of season one. Meanwhile, Sydnor's becoming the new McNulty; in another season-one echo, he complains to Judge Phelan about the abandonment of the Stanfield case. In one respect, though, he's smarter than Jimmy: "Keep my name out of it," he says.

In fact, echoes to the series' first episode are everywhere: In McNulty's "What the fuck did I do?" In the quick shot of Daniels and McNulty through an elevator security camera, a visual reminder of the first season's frequent use of such footage. And in Bunk and Kima's last scene, in which they investigate a murder under the same two statues of children where poor William Gant met his end in episode one, season one. "There you go," Bunk says, just as he did to Jimmy all those years ago. "Giving a fuck when it ain't your turn to give a fuck."

Perhaps there is one last little bit of pandering. David Simon does, after all, stage a full-blown Irish wake for Jimmy McNulty, even though he isn't dead — a chance for the show to gather its most beloved po-lice to talk up everyone's favorite hot-tempered, hard-headed cop. Let's let Landsman have the last word on Jimmy McNulty. Here's his eulogy:

He was the black sheep, a permanent pariah. He asked no quarter of the bosses and none was given. He learned no lessons; he acknowledged no mistakes; he was as stubborn a Mick as ever stumbled out of the Northeast parish just to take up a patrolman's shield. He brooked no authority. He did what he wanted to do and he said what he wanted to say, and in the end he gave me the clearances. He was natural police. And I don't say that about many people, even when they're here on the felt. I don't say that often unless it happens to be true. Nat'ral po-lice. But Christ, what an asshole.

And I'm not talking about the ordinary gaping orifice that all of us possess. I mean an all-encompassing, all-consuming, out-of-proportion-to-every-other-facet-of-his-humanity chasm — if I may quote Shakespeare — "from whose bourn no traveler has ever returned." He gave us thirteen years on the line. Not enough for a pension. But enough to know that he was, despite his negligible Irish ancestry, his defects of personality, and his inconstant sobriety and hygiene, a true murder police. Jimmy, I say this seriously. If I was laying there dead on some Baltimore street corner, I'd want it to be you standing over me catchin' the case. Because brother, when you were good, you were the best we had.

What else? There's a montage. It happens while McNulty stands next to his car on a stretch of I-95 in Baltimore, looking out over the city. Driving that same highway the other day, we found ourselves staring out to the left at the same view Jimmy McNulty takes in. Bawlmer will live with The Wire forever; no other American city has ever been so exhaustively and expertly anatomized by a single work of art. You can read the end of the montage — the faces of ordinary Baltimoreans, going on about their lives and loves and sins — as David Simon throwing up his hands and announcing, as Adam Sternbergh puts it on these very pages, "'Twas ever thus." Or you can read it as we do: that despite the crushing weight of institutional corruption, hope still exists for America's cities — not in political reform, but in the resilient ability of individuals to remain as unique and unexpected and stubborn as they, too, have ever been.

Years ago, David Simon professed himself not that interested in characters or story; The Wire existed, he claimed, primarily to advance a series of important social arguments. Just as The Wire surpassed its creator's own limited goals on the strength of its endlessly surprising characters, this finale reveals, so too do our cities overcome their limitations — on the strength of the people who live in them, work in them, laugh in them, fuck in them, love and kill and cry and try in them. No matter what, people will still give a fuck when it ain't their turn to give a fuck. After all, David Simon — harried out of the newspaper he loved, all those years ago — sure did.

Vulture's complete coverage of the Wire finale:
Ten Questions Left Unanswered by the ‘Wire’ Finale
Actor Ptolemy Slocum on the Emotional Last Night of Shooting ‘The Wire’
‘The Wire’ Finale's Montage: A Shot-by-Shot Commentary
Sternbergh on ‘The Wire’ Finale: The Anti-‘Sopranos’
Debating the Legacy of ‘The Wire’

Source: Vulture -- Entertainment, Music, Culture, Theater, Movies, Art -- New York Magazine Blog | 10 Mar 2008 | 1:00 pm

It’s (Unscientifically) True: New Yorkers Do Work Harder

On Friday morning, the federal government released data indicating that the average American workweek in February was 33.7 hours. Obviously, they didn’t ask many New Yorkers. Or did they? On Friday afternoon, we surveyed twenty locals about the length of their workweeks and found that not everyone works harder than the national average — just most people. Seven people worked fewer hours (a babysitter, a medical secretary, and a school psychologist among them), and thirteen worked harder, including a high-school teacher, a home health aide, and a newsstand operator. All of the respondents thought their fellow New Yorkers worked longer hours than the national average, even if they themselves did not. On the low end, a student-model worked fifteen hours a week. The newsstand operator clocked the most weekly hours, with 72. So what did these people have to say about their jobs? The average national workweek was 33.7 hours in February. Do you work more or less? More: 13; less: 7

Do New Yorkers work harder?
Yes: 19; no: 1
Why?
“The pay’s not enough.” “I have three children who are students. It’s an emergency for me to work.” “We like to look busy.” “Not harder, just not as efficiently. We have meetings about meetings!”

Do you wish you lived elsewhere in America?
Yes: 1; no: 19
Why?
“Oh God! Negative 50 percent no.” “No way. It’s toooooo slooooow.” “I’m moving to Seattle. There’s no income tax there.”

If you worked only 33.7 hours a week, what would do with the rest of your time? “Get another job.” “Get more sleep.” “I’m sure there’d be some guilt.” “Spend it with my family — I have three teenage boys at home.” “Get in trouble.”

—Reported by Josie Swindler and Lucy Tang