Premierewatch: 'The Wire' season five

The teaser promo for season five of The Wire just about perfectly encapsulates what we can expect this season, and it takes only 27 words to do it. It's a feat of concision that an old-school newspaperman would love.

I'll be spending considerably more than 27 words over the next 2 1/2 months in discussing the show, which for my money is the best series of my lifetime and deserves all the verbiage my critical brethren and I can heap on it.

(Spoilers for the premiere are hot off the presses.)

One of the uniting themes of The Wire, whether its focus has been on cops, dealers, the port or the schools, has been how the institutions that are supposed to help us lead better lives are failing us. The new season adds the media, as represented by the Baltimore Sun, whose corporate overlords (the same ones that own the site you're reading now) are gutting it in the pursuit of profits and asking everyone to do "more with less."

Creator David Simon, a former Sun reporter, may be grinding an ax here, but for the most part the rank-and-file employees come off all right in Sunday's premiere. Given Simon's background, it's no surprise that the newsroom scenes feel authentic -- yes, reporters and editors really do talk about the precise meaning of "evacuate," and when city editor Gus Haynes (new cast member Clark Johnson) talks about the newsroom as being a place where "people argue about everything all the time," that feels about right too.

In the premiere, though, the scenes at the paper are a little removed from the show's central cops-and-dealers story (that'll change as the season goes on), although Gus' catch of a shady real estate deal buried in the city council agenda does hit one of the show's political players, council member Naresse Campbell, where it hurts.

The problems at the Sun are similar to those at the police department, where morale is nonexistent and cynicism rampant as the city is squeezing every last dime. That means officers and detectives are toting around weeks' worth of unpaid overtime slips, cruisers aren't being fixed and, most important, the Major Crimes unit is going away.

That means no more surveillance on Marlo, whose business is still going strong and whose ambition remains unchecked, and a suspension -- which for all intents and purposes means a closing -- of the investigation into the 22 bodies Lester uncovered at the end of last season. He and Sydnor stay on the grand jury investigation of Clay Davis, McNulty and Kima go back to homicide and Dozerman gets shipped off elsewhere.

Of course this doesn't make any sense: When Daniels breaks the news to the unit, he tells the detectives that the money is going to patrol and crime suppression. "You think being on Marlo every day isn't suppression?" an incredulous Sydnor asks. "We lowered the body count just by sitting on people." He's right, of course, but that work doesn't lead to any stats, and stats are all that the increasingly shaky Commissioner Burrell and his deputy, Rawls, care about.

Meanwhile, Marlo's No. 2, Chris, is looking up the file on one of the Russians connected to Prop Joe's supply line, and one of his lieutenants warns Joe to keep an eye out.

A new day is not dawning, indeed.

Other thoughts from Sunday's premiere:

• Deadwood got tons of (deserved) praise for the tapestry of profanity it wove, but The Wire writers know their way around a "f***" just about as well. It's less surprising, maybe, to hear cops and dealers working blue, but The Wire is a fantastic show to listen to. I also kind of love the "Balmer" dialect the characters (some of them played by locals) employ, and it's consistently funny to hear the corner boys shouting out the new names for their product ("Greenhouse Gas" is the hot stuff now, following "Pandemic" and "WMD").
• Marlo may be ruthless and amoral, but dumb he is not: The guy is aware of his surroundings, and who's watching him, at all times. "Today I got the white boy with the black hair," he says of McNulty's surveillance.
• Great exchange between Carcetti's adviser Norman Wilson and the mayor regarding his refusal to take bailout money from the state because it would have hurt his chances to become governor: "No overtime, crime goes up, then you can't be anything -- just the weak-ass mayor of a broke-ass city." Carcetti: "Feel better?" Norman: "A little bit. You?"
• Just as it was at the end of last season, it's heart-breaking to see Michael and Dookie fully sucked into life on the corners. If there's any hope there, it's that both older boys (Jermaine Crawford, who plays Dookie, appears to have had a growth spurt since season four) have formed a protective shell around Michael's little brother, Bug, making sure he does his schoolwork and stays off the corner.
• Dismissed from the PD after the incident with the minister last season, Herc is living large as a legman for dirty defense lawyer Maury. Wonder if he knows how oily his boss really is, or if he cares.

Are you as happy to have The Wire back as I am? What did you think of the premiere, and where do you think things are going this season?

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