So Meta

Up through Episode 56, "The Dickensian Aspect".

Couldn't agree more, V, with your/everyone else's recent take on McNulty. Sometimes I still like to think this is some acrobatic feat of character development, where Jimmy's trapeze of likability will swing dangerously low, scraping the 3 rings, only to see him pop back up and quadruple-backflip his way back off of my shit list. Lord knows this show has pulled off greater feats than that.

Sadly, though, watching him rail at the machine, watching him make arguments against people when he, we, and everyone knows that it's the collective and faceless institution holding him down, watching that makes me scratch my head and think: could David Simon actually be consciously parodying himself? Could he be self-aware enough and ironic enough to recognize that Jimmy's misplaced anger at the police command is just like his own rantings and ravings at his editors past? Could he be aware that this season shows Simon to be equally unwilling to acknowledge that it's the system that forced people into compromise, not some politician or police commissioner or Marimow/Whiting newspaper editor?

That's what's so odd to me about this season, and many have written about it, right up to this weekend's Washington City Paper article on same: how did all the insight and wisdom about individuals and how they're compromised by the system fall out of the show's world this season? How did a person as astute and uncompromising as Simon fail to look at his own profession through the magical lens he used for every other one? I almost puked when Whiting comes over after the homeless story first hits, douchebag junior editor at his side, and in unbelievably predictable fashion, drops "Grrreat story, Scott". Post-industrial gods? Shakespeare? Dickens? Bullshit. That shit is elementary school good vs. evil, a place and a device this wonderful show has studiously and miraculously avoided for 4 seasons.

So why? I guess all I can come up with, trying not to settle for the "Simon's just too angry" plotline, is instead almost more incredulous - Simon's just too lazy. In each of the first four seasons, he used a reporter's best skills - go out, talk to people, learn about something you knew nothing about, turn it into something people want to digest - to tell a deeply woven story. The guy, by all accounts, did major field research at the ports, the schools, city hall and on the streets, and using up-to-the-minute details, recrafted it into a eerily (but not annoyingly) realistic piece of fiction. But to tell the story of reporters, it seems he relied less on reportage - finding out what a newsroom feels like in 2008, what role the internet is playing, learning about who's succeeding despite that, etc - and instead crafted a story based on his own history, his own experience, and most disappointingly, his own black-and-white Jimmy McNulty world view of the people supposedly destroying his beloved (former) profession, all the while neglecting to apply either the lessons or the world view of the first four seasons to that thing he holds closest. It feels stale because it's stuff that's been rattling in one guy's head for 20 years. Dare I say, he's pulling a Templeton job on us.

Still, lest I digress to far, let's all take a breath. It's the best show ever. Omar, Bubbles, Michael, Cutty, Freamon, Rawls, Landsman, Norman, Joe, Frank Sobotka, Dukie, the list goes on, etc etc. Pelecanos, Price, Lehane, Burns, etc etc. And David Simon sure as hell is always welcome at my house for dinner - or even better, my girlfriend's house where they make the most delicious of foods.

Swing low, sweet trapeze, and dare me to dream once again. T-minus 4 episodes to go.