'The Sun' TV Critic Offers Harsh Review of HBO Series Set In His Newsroom

By: Joe Strupp David Zurawik of The Sun in Baltimore admits that reviewing the latest season of HBO's "The Wire" was unusual since much of the storyline is focused on a fictional version of his newsroom.

But that did not stop Zurawik from penning a harsh review Sunday of the popular series set in Baltimore and created by former Sun reporter David Simon.

"Whether I praise or pan Simon's made-for-TV version of the paper, the fact that I work for The Sun means I am likely to be mistrusted, if not damned," Zurawik contends. "So be it - I am not the first journalist to write about matters involving his or her own paper."

Zurawik does not let that detract from his criticism of the latest season, or at least parts of it, declaring "?the newsroom scenes are the Achilles' heel of Season 5 - with mainstream entertainment sacrificed to journalistic shop talk, while fact and fiction are mashed up in the confusing manner of docudrama."

He adds, "Time and again, momentum is lost as the story shifts to the newsroom. Part of the problem involves the way Simon populates the city room with several non-actors. Two of the first Sun staffers that viewers will see are played by former Sun columnist Michael Olesker and former feature reporter Laura Lippman. They look like two people stuck in cement before the camera mercifully leaves them behind. (Lippman is Simon's wife.) Ed Norris, the former Baltimore police commissioner who plays a homicide detective on the series, is not an actor either, of course. But he has a natural energy and raw anger that are in perfect sync with the dominant sensibility of the series. Other former Sun staffers with speaking parts include Scott Shane, now with The New York Times, and William F. Zorzi, who is a writer on the series. Zorzi's role is much larger than his onscreen talent."

Zurawik later states: "Almost everyone in the newsroom is a cardboard character - in part because Simon writes it like a morality play," and contends, "More problematic still is the way Simon links certain newsroom characters to real-life journalists through words and actions - and then depicts them exclusively in a negative fashion. Simon moves deeper into docudrama when he does that, and The Wire suffers as a result.

"Newspapers have changed exponentially since Simon left 12 years ago. When he was in the newsroom, cable TV was still considered new media - and most newspapers were at least five years away from the realization that they would soon live or die by the Internet," Zurawik continues. "The first seven episodes of The Wire have almost nothing to say about the biggest story in newspapers: the vast technological change sweeping through media today. And that is most surprising given how up-to-the-second - even prescient - the series has been about the use of the latest technology by criminals."

The entire story can be found at:
http://www.baltimoresun.com/entertainment/custom/altoday/bal-al.wire30dec30,0,380997,print.story