The Wire Seasson 5 x265 [Alex]

HBO announced on September 12, 2006 that it commissioned a fifth and final season consisting of 13 episodes,[1][2] which was later reduced to ten.[3] On April 30, 2007, production for Season 5 officially began. Filming wrapped early in the morning of September 1, 2007 and the first episode aired on January 6, 2008.[4]

In an interview with Slate on December 1, 2006, David Simon said that Season 5 would be about the media and media consumption.[2] A major focus would be journalism, which would be dramatized through a newspaper modeled after The Baltimore Sun.[5] The theme, according to Simon, would deal with "what stories get told and what don't and why it is that things stay the same."[2] Issues such as the quest for profit, the decrease in the number of reporters, and the end of aspiration for news quality would all be addressed, alongside the theme of homelessness. In the same interview, Simon indicated that no other theme seemed substantial enough to warrant a sixth season, except possibly the large influx of Latinos into Baltimore. He noted, however, that since no writer on the show spoke Spanish or had any intimate knowledge of the city's Latino population, the field work would be too cumbersome.[2]

At the Night at the Wire event on June 9, 2007, Simon stated that Detective Sydnor is the only character who remains morally clean by the end of the show, but not perfectly since "after all, this is The Wire." He also hinted that Mayor Carcetti might make a run for governor.

The series continued the show's examination of the devaluing of human life and institutional dysfunction.[6] The increased scope of the season to include the media allowed this theme to be explored through an examination of "the people who are supposed to be monitoring all this and sounding the alarm — the journalists."[6] In particular Simon has spoken about the devaluing of the reporter in terms of downsizing a newspaper staff and the management expecting to do "more with less" when he asserts that in reality, you can only do "less with less."[6]

The series realism has been reported as being maintained particularly through the accurate dialogue and use of contemporary slang.[6] Series creator David Simon further expanded on the thematic content of season five in an interview with Fancast/Inside TV.[7] Critic David Zurawik saw the unifying theme of the season as "public and private lies," particularly those perpetuated by the media and told by Jimmy McNulty in protest against cutbacks in the police department.[8] TV Guide writer Matt Roush also saw the central theme as lies and characterized it as "deeply and darkly ironic."[9]