Critics Love Wire's Media Turn

Final season 'paints realistic portrait of newsroom'
By Matt Cantor,  Newser Staff
Posted Jan 6, 2008 4:32 PM CST
Critics Love Wire 's Media Turn
In this photo released by HBO, (from left) actors Clark Johnson, Brandon Young, Michelle Paress, and Tom McCarthy in a scene from the upcoming season of "The Wire". For its fifth and final season, which begins Jan. 6, "The Wire" ventures into the newsroom of The Sun, Baltimore's newspaper of record,...   (Associated Press)

Entering its last season, HBO's urban drama The Wire "succeeds strikingly at getting what's wrong just right," Tom Shales writes in the Washington Post. “Written and acted to the highest standards of the best TV drama,” the show has dealt with drugs, job loss, and school troubles, and now explores the trials of a major newspaper.

Other critics are left agog, too. Series creator David Simon “paints the most realistic portrait of a newsroom ever seen on television,” writes Charlie McCollum of Mercury News. But David Zurawik of the Baltimore Sun, the paper depicted in The Wire's final season, was less enthralled. "The police story line has never been stronger,” he concedes, but he calls newsroom scenes the show's "Achilles' heel." (More The Wire stories.)

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