5 Reasons I Would Give Up My Cell Phone To Have Season Five of "The Wire" Debut Tomorrow

1. I have run out of things to say about my cell phone, despite its kinda-cool voice recognition. As anyone who has to listen to me out loud will soon find, I am never out of things to say about David Simon & Ed Burns' televised novel masterpiece.
2. The show's editors — manipulative jerks that they are — splice micro-snippets of scenes from upcoming episodes amongst slices from previous seasons into the credits, each played over a different rendition of a killer Tom Waits tune. That's right — more thought is put into the credits of each season than was put into entire conceptual arcs of certain shows.
3. One word: McNulty (or "Nutty," as another character references him). The hard-living, manic-swinging "good police" was, for all intents and purposes, benched for all but one key scene in Season 4, and made out to be a guy on the mend. As any fan will tell you (and as the show's creators have been quoted as saying), nobody in "The Wire" plays the good cop for very long, so he's due for a bender or five. And when McNulty goes on a bender, he goes for broke.
4. This season's over-arching theme (each season plants itself inside something, be it the drug trade, the docks, city hall or the schools) is the media [edit: and, apparently, homelessness, though only cited once]. Not just the oft-depicted microphone-shoving and sensationalism, but how financial cuts, declining circulation, a public indifference to corruption and diminished resources for actual "watch-dogging" affect what stories get told in America's cities and why they seem to keep cycling into endless spin and nothingness. David Simon's a former Baltimore Sun crime reporter, one with a keen eye for how newsrooms really function. All you Washington wonks have gotten your share of shows to pore over and coffee-talk; this here's my baby.
5. Okay, one more word: Omar. Sure, I'm personally invested now in seeing what fates will be dealt to Cutty, the "kids" from Season 4 and Bubs, among many others. But, really, who can't help but wonder what can happen to a gay stick-up man who follows a twisted Ghetto Robin Hood code of only jacking drug dealers? It's not a show afraid to kill off even much-beloved characters when the streets finally catch up with them, so we're left with a vulnerable, confused, proud man who has crossed every crime organization on the East and West sides ... it's going to be a long summer.