I have to get this post off my chest. That way, after tonight's finale, I can write effusive and fawning things about the fact that The Wire is The Most Important Television Show Ever with a clear conscience.

The genius of The Wire is that it pushes us to look beyond the comfortable concepts of hero and villain that populate most TV fiction. David Simon and his team of writers ask us to see virtue and flaw in every character, and they demand that we understand the institutional arrangements that define the choices each is making. The "blame" for social problems is shared, not artificially embodied by a super-villain without whom the rest of the characters could live happy, fulfilling lives. And the "solutions" are hard to come by, not brought to us by a knight on a white horse.

But this season's media critique has been a disappointing exception.

The American newspaper faces many fundamental challenges. The internet brought an end to its distribution monopoly, which brought an end to the third of their revenue that came from classifieds (Craigslist), allowed all of the extras like crosswords and cartoons that juiced demand to be stripped from the core news product, and brought a practically unlimited number of news competitors (blogs, etc.). At the same time, media consolidation and privatization from above is bringing more pressure to return a profit, and changing culture below is driving people away from long-form text and encouraging a new conversational style.

On top of that, the people who are running most newsrooms are almost uniquely unqualified to change them. Having spent their career climbing the ladder of a complex bureaucracy, they are likely to be middle-aged and therefore less tech-savvy than the average teenager. And most importantly, they're likely to be deeply invested in the model of news that has allowed them to rise to the top.

With all of this going on, a newspaper seemed a perfect target for a complex and unromantic storyline in The Wire. Just like the dock workers in Season Two, they are having to deal with problems brought on by radical technological changes with no easy solutions. And no one in the system--media consumer, corporate leadership, editor or reporter--is without some share of the blame.

We don't see this in Simon's Baltimore Sun.

Simon presents two easy villains: a profit and award-obsessed Managing Editor enabling an ethically-challenged and ambitious young reporter. The Managing Editor is firing off all the good reporters as the ambitious reporter spends the season replacing the hard work of elbow-grease reporting with fables that create great headlines to sell papers and fodder for the Pulitzer committee.

He also presents easily the most sympathetic hero of the show's run: the "just the facts ma'am" City Editor who is trying desperately to keep hold of his cherished concept of the civically responsible local paper. He growls about the cutbacks that are gutting the newsroom of its best reporters, investigates the lying young upstart, and rolls his eyes as his superficial bosses chase bottom lines and lucrative awards - all the while digging up stories of public corruption, humbly giving credit to his reporters, and agonizing over the moral challenges that surround him.

We don't see the agony of the management, as we do with the Police Department or the Mayor's office, as it's faced with impossible choices. We don't sympathize with the challenge of the young reporter, as we do the corner boys or the young cops, to carve out a place in the world for himself. And we don't see the City Editor, like the show's ultimate anti-hero Jimmy McNulty, self-marginalize himself through his own self-righteouness and unwilingness to come to terms with the world's flaws.

Instead, we get a civic republican nostalgiafest. We get a Hero fighting Villains in a show that is supposed to be about the fact that neither really exist.

The "why" for this deep flaw is painfully obvious. David Simon spent 12 years as the kind of gritty, idealistic city reporter he glorifies. He left and turned to writing fiction for the very reasons he outlines in this season. The depth of his grudge against The Sun, outlined by Mark Bowden in a long piece for The Atlantic, left him unable to fit the media into his normally more nuanced world view.

Simon, we discover, is human. Like the rest of us he tells himself stories about his own life that simplify the world into a place where he is a hero, and those who frustrate, disagree, or oppose him are villains. He overlooks his own more complex or imperfect motivations and struggles to see the good, and the depths, of others.

In that way, the media storyline's failure paradoxically reinforces what is so important about the show when it succeeds. When we look around at the world it is often easiest to see stereotypes. These can be positive or negative, they're simply the mental short-hands we use to get by. And when we look at something we fear, like the American city, those stereotypes only solidify and darken.

Simon and his team take those stereotypes--The Junky, The Politician, The Cop, The Gangster-- and explode them. They force us to see the humanity, good and bad, in each character. And most importantly, they refuse to offer simple solutions or easily categorized Heroes and Villains.

That Simon falls short when he attempts to take on something closer to home should remind us how difficult this basic project is. Even the writer who has done so much to humanize with the stories he tells others, cannot overcome some of the elements of dehumanization in the stories he tells himself.

In the end, this off note will seem minor in context of the show's five season run. But it helps to clarify what makes The Wire, on the whole, such a monumental achievement.