If a great series ends and nobody watches, is it really over? For HBO's The Wire, sad to say, the answer is yes. After five critically acclaimed, scaldingly brilliant seasons, David Simon's Baltimore-set classic airs its final episode Sunday (9 ET/PT), no doubt to far fewer viewers than it deserves. Never a huge audience draw, peaking at about 4 million viewers, The Wire has seen its numbers dip below 1 million this season — sometimes so far below that they barely registered on the ratings scale.
On the bright side, those who tune in for the extended 90-minute finale are likely to be satisfied with a conclusion in which justice is served to the extent possible without violating the series' commitment to realism. And while any newcomer probably would be perplexed by the plot, even a first-time viewer could not fail to be impressed by Dominic West, Wendell Pierce, Andre Royo, Lance Reddick, Sonja Sohn, Clarke Peters and Deirdre Lovejoy, Emmy contenders all. Just be sorry you missed the now-departed Michael K. Williams and hope the voters didn't.
From start to finish, The Wire has been one of the best series ever produced for American television, one in which the commitment to honesty and authenticity has never wavered. Despite that quality, its subject matter — nothing less than the failure of the world's most powerful nation to solve the fundamental problems of its urban centres — was never likely to pull in a mass, casual audience.
Still, when a show this good does this poorly, it is worth pausing to consider what happened.
One thing the falling numbers can tell you is that The Wire simply went on too long, outrunning its audience's interest. It's wonderful to have the luxury and ability to structure your series like a novel, and then stretch it out over a six-year span. But if Simon wanted viewers to get to the end of the story, he clearly needed to get there faster himself. He might also have considered skipping this year's detour into the troubles of Baltimore's The Sun, the series' weakest and worst-acted subplot. It didn't detract much from the season as a whole, thanks to the strength of the other stories and actors, but it didn't help much either.
Of course, most of the original viewers had already left before the season started, probably out of exhaustion. Despite what you may have heard or feared, The Wire was not hard to follow, but it did require close, weekly attention. Many viewers were just unwilling to make that kind of commitment, particularly to a show that, by the very nature of its focus on wrenching social issues, could only promise an ambivalent ending at best.
Yet while the show may bear part of the blame for a ratings decline, they would not have collapsed if HBO had not collapsed as well. As any other network would have known, The Wire was never going to be a stand-alone success; it needed the nurturing and protection only a lead-in hit could provide. And that is something an indulgent but not helpful HBO, long past the ratings glory days of The Sopranos and Sex and the City, has been unable to offer.
Still, for The Wire, failure may just be a temporary condition. This is a series that will live on through repeats, on DVDs and in whatever form the future holds. And it's one that is sure to grow in reputation with each new viewer's discovery. Which means we can answer one more question, this one from The Wire's James McNulty, who asks near Sunday's end, "It was worth it, wasn't it?"
Damn right it was.
