‘The Wire’ Wraps, and Our Obsession With Season Five Begins

Production wrapped on HBO’s The Wire’s final season this past weekend, and the Washington Post has a nice package on the event — an article, a video, and an online chat with actor Jamie Hector, who plays Marlo Stanfield. It’s a gentle appreciation of what the show has accomplished and an affectionate picture of the entire community of actors, writers, and technicians who made the show work. But forget all that: We’re dying here waiting for this final season to launch in January, so what tidbits can we glean about season five of The Wire from the Post’s coverage?

• We already knew that this final season would deal with the world of journalism, but we don’t think we knew that Tom McCarthy — writer-director of The Station Agent — plays a primary character, a conflicted Baltimore reporter. The piece notes that in the finale, McCarthy’s character engages in a fierce argument with Jimmy McNulty.

• McNulty, Kima, and Bunk all make it at least to the final episode without getting killed. And since the final scenes — or at least the final scenes shot — take place in the police station set, with everyone wearing suits, it seems unlikely that the show ends with some kind of apocalyptic shoot-out. We guess that doesn’t surprise us that much.

• We’re not so sure that’s true of Marlo Stanfield; in his online chat, Jamie Hector refers to The Wire as “going out with a bang,� which, given the above, we sort of take to mean Marlo meets an untimely end.

• Clark Johnson, who directed the pilot of The Wire, was hired to direct the finale.

• The Emmys will once again ignore The Wire, despite Andre Royo — who plays Bubbles — dressing as a newspaper peddler and handing out fake papers reading “HBO SERIES WRAPS PRODUCTION: Fifth season concludes in Baltimore; Emmy voters will be given one last shot to get it right.�

Down to ‘The Wire’: It’s a Wrap for Gritty TV Series [WP]