Television Review: More with Less (The Wire, S5X01, 2008)

More with Less (S05E01)

Airdate: January 6th 2008

Written by: David Simon
Directed by: Joe Chapelle

Running Time: 58 minutes

One of the most enduring American myths, enthusiastically propagated by Hollywood since the golden age of cinema, is that of the intrepid muckraking reporter—lone wolf journalist unearthing systemic corruption, holding the powerful to account, and single-handedly righting societal wrongs when institutions collapse. This narrative, reaching its zenith of cultural influence in the post-Watergate era, now belongs firmly to the dustbin of history. Contemporary generations, reared within the fractured, tribalistic ecosystem of social media, have developed a deeply ingrained cynicism and mistrust toward mainstream media institutions. This pervasive disillusionment profoundly reshapes how we engage with David Simon’s final season of The Wire, in which he audaciously positions Baltimore’s news media as yet another dysfunctional cog in the city’s broken machinery. From today’s vantage point—where "fake news" is a ubiquitous political cudgel and trust in media has plummeted to historic lows—the season’s critique feels less like a revelation and more like a grimly familiar autopsy of a corpse we’ve long since stopped mourning. Consequently, More with Less, the season opener, lacks the visceral, era-defining impact of earlier seasons. Yet Simon’s unparalleled talent as a chronicler of institutional decay remains evident; the episode is less revolutionary than elegiac, trading the seismic urgency of Seasons 1–3 for a quieter, more resigned effectiveness that nonetheless cuts deep.

Season 4 concluded in a vortex of despair leaving little room for hope. Viewers anticipating even a sliver of redemption or respite as Season 5 dawned were met with brutal immediacy: Baltimore, and its inhabitants, are irrevocably worse off. The title "More with Less" is the cruel mantra of austerity, reflecting both the city’s fiscal straits and HBO’s own cost-cutting. Much to Simon’s vocal displeasure, the network greenlit only ten episodes instead of the originally planned thirteen, forcing narrative compression that subtly undermines the season’s sprawl. This corporate parsimony mirrors the very budgetary constraints crippling Baltimore, creating an uncomfortable meta-layer where art imitates life imitating corporate avarice.

The root of Baltimore’s fiscal crisis lies squarely in Mayor Tommy Carcetti’s nakedly ambitious gamble. Seeking to bolster his statewide electoral prospects against a Republican governor, Carcetti refused state education funding—a decision driven by partisan posturing rather than civic duty. The gamble catastrophically backfired, leaving the city with a gaping $54 million hole in its school budget. Forced to slash spending citywide, Carcetti targets every department, including the police force whose crime-reduction statistics were the lynchpin of his mayoral campaign. The cuts are savage: officers are denied overtime pay, forced to use malfunctioning equipment, and stripped of basic resources, breeding utter demoralisation. Most devastatingly, the Major Case Unit (MCU)—which spent past year painstakingly building a case against Marlo Stanfield’s West Baltimore drug empire—is abruptly disbanded. Colonel Cedric Daniels pleads with Carcetti for its survival, but the mayor, eyes fixed on Annapolis, dismisses his concerns. Detectives are scattered: Lester Freamon and Leander Sydnor are reassigned to a politically expedient corruption probe targeting State Senator Clay Davis alongside the ambitious State’s Attorney Rupert Bond, while Jimmy McNulty, the nominal protagonist, is unceremoniously dumped back into Homicide—a regression to his starting point in Season 1. The MCU’s dissolution is the deliberate dismantling of the one unit capable of challenging Stanfield’s reign, a stark symbol of how political ambition actively sabotages public safety.

Simultaneously, The Baltimore Sun—Simon’s former workplace—faces its own existential austerity. Corporate overlords, driven by profit motives rather than journalistic integrity, demand staff reductions, including buyouts for veteran reporters. City desk editor Augustus "Gus" Haynes (Clark Johnson), a moral anchor in the newsroom, battles to preserve investigative rigour against this tide of corporatisation. His efforts manifest through two contrasting protégés: Alma Gutierrez (Michelle Parres, wife of Lawrence Gilliard Jr., actor who played D'Angelo Barksdale earlier in the series), whose tenacious reporting uncovers a sordid real estate deal favouring convicted strip-club owner "Fat Face" Rick Hendrix—who also funnels illicit support to City Council President Nerese Campbell—and Scott Templeton (Tom McCarthy), a ruthlessly ambitious reporter fixated on using the Sun as a stepping stone to The Washington Post or The New York Times. Templeton’s simmering resentment over Gutierrez receiving credit for the Hendrix story exposes the toxic individualism corroding newsrooms, where scoops are currency for personal advancement rather than public service.

Yet herein lies the episode’s central weakness: the newspaper storyline feels curiously inert compared to the high-stakes political machinations, the visceral desperation of street-level crime, or even the procedural grind of police work. Simon, having worked at the Sun, seems constrained by proximity, crafting journalist characters who lack the rich complexity of his cops, dealers, or politicians. Gus Haynes, though nobly portrayed by Johnson (a Homicide: Life on the Street veteran and Wire director), verges on saintly idealism—a beacon of integrity in a compromised world, yet frustratingly one-dimensional. His colleagues, including Managing Editor Thomas Klebanow (David Costabile), blur into interchangeable ciphers of bureaucratic inertia. Only Gutierrez and Templeton escape this flatness. Gutierrez embodies ethical journalism’s quiet perseverance, while Templeton chillingly personifies its moral decay—a young man for whom truth is secondary to career capital. Their dynamic hints at the season’s core tension but remains underdeveloped in this opener, leaving the newsroom subplot feeling like a promising sketch rather than a fully realised narrative pillar.

Simon’s mastery, however, remains undeniable when handling established characters. Marlo Stanfield, now unchallenged in West Baltimore, begins eyeing Proposition Joe’s Eastside territory—a subtle shift signalling his insatiable hunger for dominance. Bubbles, heartbreakingly, struggles to maintain sobriety post-rehab, his fragile hope a stark contrast to the city’s brutality. Herc, ironically liberated by his dismissal from the police force, thrives as a private investigator for defence lawyer Maurice Levy, his moral compromises now lucratively monetised. But it is McNulty who delivers the season’s most devastating portrait. Hauled back to Homicide as Landsman sneers, the "prodigal son," he is a ghost of his former self. The domestic tranquillity with Beadie Russell has frayed; his relapse into alcoholism and womanising isn’t a stumble but a surrender. The MCU’s dissolution extinguished his last flicker of purpose, reducing him to the hollow, self-destructive cop he was in Season 1—a regression that feels less like narrative symmetry and more like existential defeat.

Some of the season’s shortcomings—narrative compression, underdeveloped subplots—can be attributed to HBO’s budgetary constraints. Yet More with Less also hints at a more troubling possibility: Simon’s creative exhaustion. Nowhere is this clearer than the cold open, where Bunk Moreland and colleagues trick a suspect, DeShawn Fredericks, into confessing via a photocopier masquerading as a lie detector. This scene is lifted verbatim from Simon’s 1988 non-fiction book Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets and the Homicide: Life on the Street episode Smoke Gets in Your Eyes. It’s not homage; it’s self-plagiarism, a jarring recycling of old material that suggests Simon was mining his own archives out of necessity rather than inspiration. The scene’s power, however, derives not from its novelty but from Detective Eddie Norris’s offhand remark as the ruse succeeds: "Americans are pretty stupid people by and large. We pretty much believe whatever we’re told."

This line, one of the most devastating in The Wire’s canon, transcends the immediate context to indict the very foundation of democratic society. Norris’s cynicism isn’t just about gullible suspects; it’s about a populace primed for manipulation by institutions—from government to media—that repeatedly betray public trust. In 2008, when The Wire aired, this observation felt like a warning shot across the bow of a still-cohesive media landscape. Today, it reads as a post-mortem. Our current era of algorithmic echo chambers, weaponised disinformation, and tribalistic media consumption didn’t emerge in a vacuum. It is the logical endpoint of decades where newsrooms prioritised profit over truth, where "objectivity" masked corporate bias, and where journalists like Scott Templeton learned that outrage sells better than accountability. Simon’s portrayal of the Sun’s decline—its veteran reporters purged, its ethical core hollowed out by cost-cutting—wasn’t merely a Baltimore story. It was a blueprint for the national media’s collapse.

More with Less ultimately resonates not as a triumphant finale but as a requiem. Its power lies not in offering solutions but in diagnosing a sickness we now recognise all too well: the erosion of trust in the institutions meant to safeguard truth. Norris’s lament—"We believe whatever we’re told"—now feels less like a character’s observation and more like the operating principle of our age. The myth of the heroic journalist died because the public, burned too many times by media that lied, spun, or simply stopped caring, chose to believe nothing at all. In that context, More with Less is the prologue to our current crisis of truth. And that, perhaps, is the most devastating twist of all.

RATING: 6/10 (++)

Blog in Croatian https://draxblog.com
Blog in English https://draxreview.wordpress.com/
InLeo blog https://inleo.io/@drax.leo

InLeo: https://inleo.io/signup?referral=drax.leo
Leodex: https://leodex.io/?ref=drax
Hiveonboard: https://hiveonboard.com?ref=drax
Rising Star game: https://www.risingstargame.com?referrer=drax
1Inch: https://1inch.exchange/#/r/0x83823d8CCB74F828148258BB4457642124b1328e

BTC donations: 1EWxiMiP6iiG9rger3NuUSd6HByaxQWafG
ETH donations: 0xB305F144323b99e6f8b1d66f5D7DE78B498C32A7
BCH donations: qpvxw0jax79lhmvlgcldkzpqanf03r9cjv8y6gtmk9