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

Clark Johnson (headphones) and David Simon (right) on the final day of shooting on The Wire.Screenshot courtesy of washingtonpost.com.

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]

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