Mise En Scene wrote:For kicks, my season rankings from best to worst: 4, 1, 2 & 3 (tie), 5.
For what it's worth, I agree with that rundown. Again, "worst" is a very relative term.
The whole fall of McNulty thing also echoed the more severe and lethal fall from grace of Mike Kellerman on
Homicide, a storyline that I've always felt was one of the bravest and most compelling I've ever seen on dramatic television. The parallels extend even down to Bunk (who is clearly modeled after the same guy Meldrick Lewis was, read Simon's book if you want to see the templates of most of the original
Homicide squad) reluctantly covering for McNulty and Greggs (who is a clear stand in for Stivers) refusing to play along and eventually indirectly helping to push him off the force.
Throughout the run, it was clear that when McNulty was really engaged in his work, he was pretty worthless as a husband, father and general human being. His effectiveness at his job was in almost inverse proportion to his success at all other aspects of life. That was behind his decision to stop working as a detective and go back on the beat. While he was doing that relatively mundane job, he established a good relationship with Beatie and her kids, with his own boys and even his ex-wife. All of that started to slip away when he went back working on major cases.
This is a theme that is consistent over the course of both shows: that being a good detective almost requires you to be nothing else and that some people, no matter how good they are at the job, get chewed up and spit out by it. Kellerman started off as a gifted, rather happy go lucky guy moving up from arson and over the course of a couple of years, became a bitter, rotten jerk. Having appealing main characters, especially ones that serve as protagonists for the overall show, go through something like that, is really, really unusual for American TV.