In a sort of open letter essay to the publishers of the Times and Post published by the Columbia Journalism Review, Simon pleaded for the newspapers to blatantly defy federal anti-trust laws and just blame it all on him when the FBI shows up on their doorsteps.

You must act. Together. On a specific date in the near future-let's say September 1 for the sheer immediacy of it-both news organizations must inform readers that their Web sites will be free to subscribers only, and that while subscription fees can be a fraction of the price of having wood pulp flung on doorsteps, it is nonetheless a requirement for acquiring the contents of the news organizations that spend millions to properly acquire, edit, and present that work.

No half-measures, either. No TimesSelect program that charges for a handful of items and offers the rest for free, no limited availability of certain teaser articles, no bartering with aggregators for a few more crumbs of revenue through microbilling or pennies-on-the-dollar fees. Either you believe that what The New York Times and The Washington Post bring to the table every day has value, or you don't.

You must both also individually inform the wire-service consortiums that unless they limit membership to publications, online or off, that provide content only through paid subscriptions, you intend to withdraw immediately from those consortiums. Then, for good measure, you might each make a voluntary donation-let's say $10 million-to a newspaper trade group to establish a legal fund to pursue violations of copyright, either by online aggregators or large-scale blogs, much in the way other industries based on intellectual property have fought to preserve their products.

And when the Justice Department lawyers arrive, briefcases in hand, to ask why America's two national newspapers did these things in concert-resulting in a sea change within newspapering as one regional newspaper after another followed suit in pursuit of fresh, lifesaving revenue-you can answer directly: We never talked. Not a word. We read some rant in the Columbia Journalism Review that made the paywall argument. Blame the messenger.

Yeah, we're sure that'll fly really well with the feds.

And of course, Simon couldn't resist taking another of his patented shots at the internet on his way out of the door.

In the newspaper industry, however, the fledgling efforts of new media to replicate the scope, competence, and consistency of a healthy daily paper have so far yielded little in the way of genuine competition. A blog here, a citizen journalist there, a news Web site getting under way in places where the newspaper is diminished-some of it is quite good, but none of it so far begins to achieve consistently what a vibrant newspaper, staffed with competent, paid beat reporters and editors, once offered. New-media entities are not yet able to truly cover-day after day-the society, culture, and politics of cities, states, and nations. And until new models emerge that are capable of paying reporters and editors to do such work-in effect becoming online newspapers with all the gravitas this implies-they are not going to get us anywhere close to professional journalism's potential.

Detroit lost to a better, new product; newspapers, to the vague suggestion of one.

In other words, the internet may look like a Toyota, but it's really a Hyundai. Or something.

Now, I agree with Simon that some sort of payment model for newspaper content needs to be developed, but as my colleague Ryan Tate pointed out so well back in May, Simon, who hasn't worked as a journalist since the mid-90s and is clearly staggeringly ignorant about many aspects of the internet, is, simply, a "dead-wrong dinosaur" in his assertions about the inability of the web to cover "the society, culture, and politics of cities, states, and nations." There are numerous websites doing incredible work covering society, culture and politics on a national level, and in his post, Ryan cited a few examples of individual citizens using blogs to shine light on issues in their local communities, something that continues to happen more and more all over the place. Hell, a group of plugged-in Alaskan citizens just about drove Sarah Palin to the brink of insanity with their pesky meddling, and as inexpensive, high-speed access to the internet continues to proliferate and the cost of the computer equipment necessary to create online content continues to drop, this sort of thing will become more and more commonplace.

As a collective source of news the internet is certainly not yet on par with newspapers that have been around for decades, but personally I've become much more comfortable getting my news from passionate individual observers than I am with getting my news from an institution forced to play politics with other institutions in order to maintain its oh-so-sacred "access" over the passage of time. If anyone should understand this feeling and sympathize with it, you'd think it'd be David Simon. After all, The Wire was a show about the corruption of American institutions, one of which was a newspaper! And frankly, let's be brutally honest here, the stuff taught in journalism schools isn't exactly, well, rocket science. Is it helpful and advantageous to have such an education if one chooses to embark on a career in media? Yes. But is it an absolute prerequisite? No. Because the lack of a journalism school education is nothing that can't be overcome with sheer determination and simple common sense. Period.

Look, I don't want newspapers to die. I love newspapers. They've been an integral part of my daily life since I was a kid. Ideally, in a perfect world, some happy medium can be reached, some middle ground can be found where newspapers and internet news sources are both able to survive and thrive. But in the course of the natural progression of things, sometimes things just die. Yes, it's sad, but it's just the way it is. Accept it.

The irony in all of this is that The Wire, the television show David Simon created/produced/wrote, owes a lot of its success to, wait for it—the internet! The Wire was, and continues to be, the darling of internet people. Web buzz played a huge part in the show's staying on the air for five seasons, not to mention how it's helped the show remain a part of the national conversation since going off the air. Hell, I personally rented and eventually bought the complete series on DVD earlier this year entirely because of the giant internet circlejerk over the damn thing. So, yeah, this is all so very, well, ironic.

Finally, I like David Simon a lot and he's someone that I and many others look up to, but really, it's time for him to just shut the fuck up.

Build the Wall [CJR]

The Wire creator, David Simon, was a cops reporter at the Baltimore Sun for 12 years, ending in 1995. He then made a lucrative second career in fiction and Hollywood before detouring into a sideline as a cranky, reactionary media pundit this past year.

Simon told the Senate Commerce Committee today bloggers don't go to city council meetings, or know what the hell is going on if they do — a clichéd, out of touch refrain common among newspapermen who can't be bothered to do any reporting on the assertion. The Wall Street Journal published an op-ed from a Newark Star-Ledger columnist to this effect:

Don't expect that Web site to hire somebody to sit through town-council meetings... a lot of bloggers will be found gasping for breath under piles of pure ennui. There is nothing more tedious than a public meeting.

New York Times media columnist David Carr often capitalizes on the idea that bloggers don't do government in his repeated columns about how newspapers must restrict their websites:

The capacity to produce accountability reporting... and robust coverage of public officials is not sustainable under current revenue models.

And here's Simon, right before winding up to his punch line about "relaxing certain anti-trust prohibitions:"

I found this argument odd, because as a newspaper reporter who spent a few years covering a town much like Baltimore — Oakland, California — I often found that bloggers were the only other writers in the room at certain city council committee meetings and at certain community events. They tended to be the sort of persistently-involved residents newspapermen often refer to as "gadflies" — deeply, obsessively concerned about issues large and infinitesimal in the communities where they lived.

And they weren't exactly a big secret. Here's a year-old San Francisco Chronicle article that Simon apparently missed about some of this motley crew; here's a report in Oakland's alt-weekly recounting one Oakland blogger's post on a politically-rigged block-grant meeting in West Oakland (nitty gritty enough for you, Simon?); Here's the Oakland Tribune quoting various bloggers on an intricate city council debate involving cabaret permits.

Collectively, these bloggers are doing just what Simon suggests: attending meetings, developing sources and holding government accountable every day.

And the best of the crop are doing so individually, on their own and, somehow, basically for free. Simon should spend as much time as he can on A Better Oakland (original posts down the center column), a thoroughly reported blog on the nitty-gritty of Oakland politics, complete with key video moments from government meetings, illuminating crime analysis, skillful fact-checking of political puffery, transit coverage, development coverage, thorough meeting recaps, spicy guest posts, and, yes, the occasional media criticism (along with support for the press against government stonewalling).

(Disclosure: The writer of A Better Oakland is among the bloggers I turned to as knowledgeable sources when covering Oakland, and I now count her as a friend. But you don't have to take my word about her; read the Chronicle and Express links above.)

You'll find communities of civic-minded bloggers in all sorts of places. The New York Times recently profiled the Brooklyn blog Gowanus Lounge, described elsewhere as a publication of "hard news scoops and opinionated rants" with "influence into City Hall and the executive suites of the city's biggest developers." The site was part of an ecosystem of any number of other local news blogs.

Even the mayor of the tiny city of Salisbury, Maryland claims to be "under siege" from bloggers.

With so much quality civic reporting already being done online for little or no pay, it stands to reason we could eventually get quality government reporting entirely from bloggers, both professional and amateur, rather than depending on a federally-coddled cabal of conspiring nonprofit newspapers, as Simon envisions.

And there are reasons to think the quality would actually be better, since so many of the writers are deeply invested residents, rather than the sort of superficially-engaged, careerist professional journalists portrayed so well by Simon in The Wire and all too common in American newsrooms.

Arianna Huffington may not be the ideal mogul to lead journalism into the future, but her own senate testimony offered an impressively rational and articulate vision of what's to come, at least next to Simon's:

For too long, traditional media have been afflicted with Attention Deficit Disorder — they are far too quick to drop a story — even a good one, in their eagerness to move on to the Next Big Thing. Online journalists, meanwhile, tend to have Obsessive Compulsive Disorder… they chomp down on a story and stay with it, refusing to move off it until they've gotten down to the marrow.



In the future, these two traits will come together and create a much healthier kind of journalism.



...We must never forget that our current media culture led to the widespread failure (with a few honorable exceptions) to serve the public interest by accurately covering two of the biggest stories of our time: the run-up to the war in Iraq and the financial meltdown.



That's why, as journalism transitions to a new and different place, the emphasis should not be on subsidizing what exists now but on how to rededicate ourselves to the highest calling of journalists — which is to ferret out the truth, wherever it leads. Even if it means losing our all-access-pass to the halls of power.

[Senate Testimony]

(Last image from the New Yorker.)

A tipster tells us that "Men's Health and Women's Health are merging advertising and marketing staffs today," a move they say will be accompanied by "big layoffs." If you have more info, email us. [UPDATE: Another tipster says "Looks like it was only one dude." If so, big whoop over not much, on our part. Please continue to emails us more info. UPDATE 2: "Rodale, publisher of brands such as Prevention and Men's Health, has cut another 20 sales-side employees," Mediaweek reports.]


The American Society of Newspaper Editors, which is, by the standards of newspapers, a pretty important organization, is canceling its annual convention, because they figured out that attendance would be low because all newspaper editors are currently bogged down writing layoff memos. Sad.

David Simon was a Baltimore Sun reporter on the police beat before he went and made The Wire and (hopefully) millions of dollars. And now he's so fed up with the god damn state of the city and the police department and the reporters there since he left that he had to go and start making calls again, himself, just recently, to get to the bottom of a crime story! And furthermore he sure as hell didn't see any "bloggers" or "citizen journalists" out there finding out the facts! Some people think David Simon is a jerk cause he's always mad and lashing out at ill-chosen targets, but I think David Simon is a great man, in his own angry way.


The LA Times: not paying its freelancers. Pay up, fuckers!

Ladies Home Journal is accused of violating the advertising/ edit wall in its recent issue featuring Ellen Degeneres. Well they took the cover photo from Cover Girl, the company for which Degeneres is a spokesmodel, and which bought ads right next to the cover story on Ellen, so yea. Still it's just incredibly hard to get outraged about crumbling journalism standards at Ladies Home Journal.

I told him I liked The Wire and he said, totally unbidden and without having any idea who I was, "Yesterday somebody sent me a thing from Gawker.com about how they stripped the set."

Whoa, hey, alright! He also said he hasn't watched some of the earlier seasons of The Wire yet, but it's on his agenda. This is the most exciting celebrity sighting here since the Williamsburg hair man.

*(May or may not be a fan.)

The show—which taught us, through the lens of a dying Baltimore, that our ability to squander is often times more powerful than our will to succeed—featured the Baltimore Sun heavily in its final season, displaying the industry and craft of newspapers in steep decline. As sad avatar for all we've lost in the real world, the mostly-destroyed fake-world set still lingers. (Though, not for long, the whole soundstage is getting torn down to make way for a supermarket.)

See the rest here, at abandondedplaces.

THE BEST

30 Rock Takes the Evening
With wins for writing, Tim Conway's guest starring role (Carrie Fisher should have won too), Alec Baldwin's and Tina Fey's performances, and Best Comedy, the under-watched NBC sitcom was well recognized for being the most delightful and hilarious show on television. Tina Fey got a nice long plug in about the very many ways in which the show can be watched (Hulu.com, iTunes, Verizon phones, actual TV sometimes) and hopefully, unlike last year, all of these wins will drive people toward it. Though, part of me doubts it because the show is just too weird and too clever for some folks. No condescension meant there, just... you know. Different strokes for different folks.

Ricky Gervais, Steve Carell, Jon Stewart, and Stephen Colbert Bring the Funny
The five reality show host um... hosts weren't really doing their job, so it was up to these four men to make us chortle. (Though Conan O'Brien, Amy Poehler, and Fey were also amusing). The prune joke was wonderful, and the Gervais/Carell stand-off was a hoot (if a bit too drawn out). Oh, and Steve Martin's Tommy Smuthers introduction was pretty wonderful too.

Tony Shaloub and Boston Legal Won Nothing
Yay! Finally!

Bryan Cranston's Big Upset
A longtime also-ran for Malcom in the Middle, Cranston scored big last night for his work on Breaking Bad, a small half hour long AMC drama about a dying high school science teacher who decides to start making meth in order to leave his family with some money. The award was supposed to go to Hugh Laurie or Jon Hamm, and the latter seemed surprised in a genuinely kind and excited way when Cranston's name was read. Breaking Bad has been a critical success, so here's hoping that people will actually tune in now that its star has been fabulously be-awarded.

Paul Giamatti's Acceptance Speech Oops
"I'd like to thank my wife. Not my actual wife! My fake wife. Laura. Laura Linney." Shot of his actual wife manager cringing. Where was his "actual wife"?

THE WORST

5 Reality Hosts Do Not Equal One Ellen or Conan
The five hosts—Tom Bergeron, Howie Mandel, Heidi Klum, Ryan Seacrest, and Jeff Probst (some sort of seminar lineup at the Learning Annex in Hades)—were so terrifically awful that you wanted the damn accountants to come back out and talk again. From the opening bit in which they had "nothing" planned to those awful "look! old TV show sets" bits to the Heidi Klum "this is drama" feinting thing, it was just so embarrassingly unfunny and wrong that you had to shake your head and wonder why they didn't just fill a dump truck up with money and drive it to Ellen DeGeneres' house. The whole thing was rescued only a little bit by Jimmy Kimmel's reality show competition vote off motif joke when it came time to name the winner of the Emmys' first ever reality show host award (for which all five hosts were nominated). Probst won. Meh.

"They Used Words —"
That dude who won for writing John Adams totally got cut off while trying to make a reasonable political point about old-timey politicians' knack for rhetoric that was full of substance and power. Ah well. At least they didn't cut off the hosts for making a fucking Seinfeld joke. (And, hey!, at least Laura Linney's pointed "community organizers" line got through.)

Josh Groban's TV Cabaret Hour
Josh Groban came out and wasted approximately 103 minutes of our time by singing the theme songs to many, many television shows. You can watch it here if you dare. It's really spectacularly weird and off-putting. Like Josh Groban himself!

The Wire Wins Nothing
Not even the lousy writing award which was, well, all the terrific and now-over HBO crime drama was nominated for.

The 'In Memoriam' Section Fails to Honor the Death of Entourage
I'd totally "Hi-Yo!" that one except that Jeremy Piven won yet again for doing the same yelling and swearing shtick he's been doing for four or five (who knows) seasons. Blahhh.

In An Effort to Stay Current, the Academy Gives Inexplicable Air Time to Lauren Conrad
Aside from her presenting duties, the Hills star got a whole chunk of time by herself to talk about the Emmy escort ladies dresses that she "designed." Somewhere Don Rickles made a joke about a bottle of chloroform and the backseat of a 1957 DeSoto sedan.

The Cast of Desperate Housewives
They just sincerely piss me off.

Mary Tyler Moore's Missing Sleeves
I know. It's terrible. But now I've said it. Um, dag.

So that's that. What did you like, what did you hate? Any winners you were thrilled about? Any that made you miserable (other than all of them)? Oh, and NB: They were the lowest-rated Emmys in history. Yikes! Of and if you're too busy to read all this, just click here for a really quick recap of all the awkward moments.

The Academy has the full, looong slate of nominees, naturally, but we've narrowed our interests down to 10 easy storylines for our own Emmy dramedy — conveniently outlined after the jump!

1. Mad Men joined Damages as the first basic-cable programs to earn a nomination for best dramatic series. Its 15 other nods led the pack among all nominated dramas, while 30 Rock led all shows with 17 noms.

2. For the last time (literally), the Academy has snubbed The Wire for a dramatic series nomination. Critics at the TCA press tour will be symbolically immolating themselves by lunchtime.

3. In other snubs, FX is wondering this morning who it has to blow to get Denis Leary, Eddie Izzard and Minnie Driver back on the list after nominations in 2007. Hint: It might be a bribe-friendly exec at AMC, which scored a kind-of-stunning two dramatic actor nods this year.

4. Silverman, Emmy Darling (Part 1): "I'm Fucking Matt Damon" was nominated for Outstanding Original Music And Lyrics. Silverman's competition is Flight of the Conchords and MADtv. As such, it bears saying aloud: " 'I'm Fucking Matt Damon' is going to win an Emmy."

5. Sarah Silverman, Emmy Darling (Part 2): Denied an actress nod for her own show, she earned a guest actress nomination for her turn as Marci Maven on Monk.

6. Amy Poehler's supporting-actress nod for Saturday Night Live is the first for an SNL actress since Gilda Radner and Jane Curtin were each nominated in 1978. Radner won.

7. There's apparently a formula for earning a few dozen Emmy noms: Just make a loooong historical epic like HBO's John Adams, which pulled in 23 mentions including outstanding miniseries — as Variety notes, the third consecutive year a period miniseries has drawn the year's biggest haul. Awards-bait film stars like Paul Giamatti and Laura Linney — both nominated as well — can't hurt either.

8. Come to think of it, film actresses on cable dominated dramatic categories in general, with four Oscar winners (including Susan Sarandon and Holly Hunter) and three Oscar nominees (Linney, Catherine Keener and Glenn Close) among the ten performers recognized. We presume Sally Field got Katherine Heigl's spot.

9. Speaking of whom, we're guessing ABC had higher hopes for Grey's Anatomy than two supporting-actress nominations and "Outstanding Prosthetic Makeup For A Series, Miniseries, Movie Or A Special."

10. If we must split up the reality and reality-competition categories, surely the Academy can find a way to further separate things like A&E's grueling Intervention from trifles like Extreme Makeover Home Edition and Kathy Griffin: My Life on the D-List. Really.

• The 60th Annual Emmy Award Nominations [Academy of TV Arts & Sciences]

• 10 Plots and Subplots to Watch After Today's Big Announcements [Defamer]

Gawker Media polls require Javascript; if you're viewing this in an RSS reader, click through to view in your Javascript-enabled web browser.

Fine — except Wright didn't write the scripts. Or did he? And did Simon and Wire collaborator Ed Burns fudge his screenwriting credit on five episodes? According to one report, excerpted after the jump, Wright could be hatching a plan for the forthcoming Generation Kill: 50% More Evan Wright Above The Line special-edition DVD:

Last summer, after HBO cut the series from eight episodes to seven, emails flew back and forth last summer from Baltimore, where Simon lives, to Baghdad, where Wright had returned to report for Rolling Stone. Wright was worried, correctly it turned out, that Simon was about to kill one of his scripts. Simon resolved the matter by giving joint credit to Wright and Burns. Again two months ago Wright had to request further credit in the wake of still more active input, and Simon agreed.

But Simon denies that Wright was responsible for half the scripts with his or Burns' name on them. "If he told you that, he's genuinely incorrect," Simon said this evening, from a screening for Marines in California, where Wright was also in attendance. He added: "Nobody wrote any of the scripts by themselves. There's stuff in Evan's script written by me and Ed. There's stuff written in total by me and Ed. There's stuff in our scripts written by Evan. That's what happens in every serialized show."

The two appear to have reached an amicable agreement, with Wright humbly acknowledging Simon's gracious Kill stewardship in exchange for the opportunity to work in this town again after a mandatory five-year probation. And seeing as that's just about as long as we have left in Iraq, a well-reported follow-up seems like an ideal re-teaming. Glad it worked out, guys.

• Who Really Wrote 'Generation Kill'? [WaxWord]

• 'Generation Kill' [LAT]

Scarcity. Viewers can access NBC for free from their TVs, NBC.com, Hulu.com, and, oddly enough, from their iPhones. Other than an ongoing trial in Wisconsin, HBO shows aren't available on the Web and viewers even have to pay to see them on their televisions. And isn't the difference between NBC's Crime Scene and HBO's The Wire worth paying extra for?

boomp3.com

Actor Idris Elba and his publicist would like to inform the general public that while he may have played the character, "Stringer Bell" on the critically acclaimed series, The Wire, his name is actually Idris Elba. Elba and his publicist in the future hope with the aid of this campaign to curtail the number of people shouting "Stringer Bell."

[Photo Credit: Getty Images]

• EW.com lists the 15 Most Brilliant Moments and manages to find some joy in the ending.
• New York Magazine has exhaustive, point-by-point commentary and a list of unanswered questions.
• The Baltimore Sun, which was heavily (too heavily, perhaps) focused on this season, was unhappy with this "once great" series' finale. Seems they maybe didn't like being depicted as Pulitzer hungry fabulists.
• The New York Times' Alessandra Stanley loved the ambiguity and uncertainty of the series. Oh, and she manages to bizarrely equate The Wire to that show Numb3rs.
• Slate counted down their Top 13 Moments.
• The Onion's AV Club has an interview with David Simon, who talks about his new miniseries Generation Kill, and waxes dramatically about The Wire's connections to Shakespeare, O'Neill, and Chekhov.

Season 1, song: "Step by Step" by Jesse Winchester

Season 2, song: "I Feel Alright" by Steve Earle

Season 3, song: "Fast Train" by Solomon Burke

Season 4, song: "Walk On Gilded Splinters" by Paul Weller

Season 5, song: "Way Down In The Hole" by Blind Boys of Alabama

The finale of The Wire airs on HBO, this Sunday at 8pm.

Related: Cults - Worship The Wire after this four-minute indoctrination!

More: Barack Obama: He's Just Like Us! (Us Weekly)

Chris Partlow, the drug lord's enforcer in HBO's The Wire, will cut you. No, really. Here's actor Gbenga Akinnagbe, who plays the part; photographer Nikola forgot to request the scary assassin look.

Gaius Charles is "Smash" Williams in Friday Night Lights, an actor recently profiled in New York magazine. Why is such a cosmopolitan magazine taking a lowly-rated show about college football, and a fictional running back, under its wing? New York's Adam Moss explains: Friday Night Lights is "sports for gays and women". And Neel Shah.

James Truman, former editor director of Louise MacBain's luxury magazine hobby collection, has the inner peace of a yoga devotee, and a man who will never again have to cater to the French-Canadian divorcee's whims. (Related: MacBain's Culture & Travel.is running a three-year-old account of a trip to Myanmar by obnoxious fallen Star editor, Joe Dolce.)

Emily Gould, another former Gawker writer now lost to management, is now consulting on blogs to Jewcy, the site for hip jews. Emily is way too hip for Jewish traditions. Piglet. Yum!

Another unkosher combination: Emily Gould and (head at regulation tilt) Julia Allison. Says Gould: "What can I say? I like her."

A piglet, desecrated by New York's Jesse Oxfeld. Or vice versa. Whatever.

Rachel Sklar of the Huffington Post, with her date, Raymond Roker of Urb magazine. They met at a Jewish retreat. The pork's better here.

Brits Eddie Izzard, Alan Cumming and Rachel Weisz watched fellow countryman, Daniel Day-Lewis, win the award for best actor. They're over the moon. Can't you tell? (Weisz, who won best supporting actress for her role in The Constant Gardener, was photographed later in the evening, at cabaret club The Box.)

To the right of Noelle Hancock from pagesix.com: Jessica Coen, overlady of New York magazine's blogs. The former Gawker writer looks like a sweet girl from the Midwest in this picture. Once, she was.

Hud Morgan of Men's Vogue learned how to wear scarves from his former boss at the New York Daily News, Lloyd Grove, seen here with New York's Carl Swanson (left).

Deborah Schoeneman, the former gossip columnist and Hamptons diarist, now writes TV scripts in Los Angeles. Does she miss New York? "In LA, writers actually make money; and they're happy." Smug bitch.

Waiting for Emily Gould.

It's gay Christmas. Public displays of affection between the gays are permitted only at The Cock and during the Oscars. New York's Carl Swanson and boyfriend cuddle around the telecast.

More rejoicing gays: New York's David Haskell and his boyfriend, Esteban Arboleda.

One straight couple, Noelle Hancock and New York Times reporter, Nick Confessore, didn't know the rules.

Curbed "lord" Lockhart Steele got name-checked in Page Six's party report. Jessica Coen, like aspiring starlets before her, is only with him for the reflected celebrity.

Photos by Nikola Tamindzic

First, Simon has turned his focus on his former employer, the Baltimore Sun; in newspaper terms, he's too close to the story, and the latest season's parable on the decline of the press, complete with irredeemable journalistic fabricator and empty-souled news executives, is leaden. Maybe the dockers and gangsters of earlier seasons were also less textured than the real Baltimore personalities on which they were based, but they didn't have an outlet for their complaints. Journalists do, and that has colored the reception to The Wire's latest storyline.

There's a deeper problem, which should establish why a feature, even a prequel, is such a bad idea. The saving grace of The Wire was the series' leisurely, meandering, convoluted plotline: Simon had no deadline for his political diatribes; his righteousness never overwhelmed the essential drama of crime and corruption in America's decaying industrial cities. But now the crusading former journalist has only a condensed final season, three episodes shorter than he'd hoped, in which to make all his remaining points, and demand recognition for a show which has never won a major award.

The result: embarrassingly improbable plot points, such as the fake serial killer conjured up by McNulty to shake down the mayor for police funding; absurd caricatures, particularly of journalists (see below); increasingly heavy-handed lectures on the bankruptcy of government, the press, heck, everybody; and a cascade of newspaper columns by Simon as part of the show's last-ditch marketing campaign, belaboring points which viewers should arrive at themselves. It's painful to admit: The Wire's creator has turned into one of those didactic lecturers who simply rattle out the script and raise the volume when they feel the audience slipping away from them, and the clock running out.

David Simon has struggled to compress his concluding remarks into the 10 episodes of the HBO show's fifth run. Imagine how painful it would be for him to fit his morality play into two hours of a feature movie. It would be better for him, and fans of earlier seasons, if he didn't.