The Wire, Season Five, Episode Two

I watched this episode On Demand in the middle of last week, and I have to say it was unsettling to listen to Saint Gus of the Newsroom talk about how life is always tough for Mother of Four, and then listen to characters lament that the only time Baltimore makes national news is when multiple bodies are discovered rotting in a rowhouse in the poor section of town, and then pick up the newspaper the next day and read about how, allegedly, a deranged, down-on-her-luck mother of four killed her daughters and left them to rot in a rowhouse in the poor section of town, which was soon covered on national news. DC the nation's capital is in the news every day, but DC the troubled, mid-sized mid-Atlantic city? Pretty much only with stuff like this.

Episode Summary: Bubbles is troubled. McNulty staggers up to the edge of the deep end, peers over, takes a swig of Jameson, and jumps off. With the investigation down, Marlo quickly resumes having everyone and their mother killed, up to and including that guy who the other guy said looked at him funny back in '93. He's also trying to cut out the middleman on the package and go straight to the Greek, which leads him to...Avon! Hey, Avon. He looks just like he should, the same but more weary, fronting as best he can. It's funny how the universe of Baltimore murderer / drug dealers sort of arranges itself on a purely relative scale--Marlo is such a dead-eyed sociopath that by comparison Avon seems somewhat reasonable, Prop Joe is Santa Claus, and Omar is an avenging angel. Or he would be, if he actually made his way on screen.

Saint Gus, meanwhile, has to deal with his very own Jayson Blair, who can't even squeeze a decent human-interest story out of opening day at Camden Yards. (Aside: It always seemed strange to me that the Jack Kelly fabrication scandal at USA Today received far less attention than the Blair affair, even though Kelly's fabrications were arguably much worse. Relative standing of the papers, I suppose.) Gus' boss, meanwhile, wants to run a prize-bait expose of the school system, one of those series that kicks off Sunday morning with a little box showing the chapters to come (Monday: "Everything is Bad." Tuesday: "Then it Gets Worse"), with each story jumping from page one to a full two-page spread that you feel vaguely guilty for not reading. Gus argues that, sure, the school system is terrible, but so are lots of other things, and shouldn't we tell the real story, the whole story? Or something like that. The Bad Editor says no, we need to dumb it down so people can understand.

Now, I have no doubt that conversations like this happen all the time, complete with facile use of the word "dickensian" and all the rest. But what David Simon Saint Gus seems to be arguing is that anything other than digging deep and exposing the entire underlying system, complete with all the connections and moving parts, is a moral failure and a lie. In other words, the only truly responsible journalistic treatment of Baltimore is...The Wire. Really? I think I disagree. The best treatment, maybe, but that's a helluva high bar. It takes, what, seven years and tens of millions of dollars? What happens in the meantime? If you can pick off a piece of the problem, expose it, and do something about it, what's the argument against that? Or are the children of Baltimore doomed until the revolution comes?