One word to describe last night’s season premiere of The Wire?

Crushing.

The fairy tale of Tommy Carcetti being elected mayor proves to be more of the same after a year in office, despite his best intentions.

The problem is, Carcetti, like most politicians, cares more about his political future than he does about actually curing the city’s ills. And Norman, bless his heart, calls him out on it. Sure, maybe Tommy can’t become governor if he accepts a giant handout from the state to fix the school system. But if the city’s completely going to pot under his watch, what does that matter anyway?

Col. Daniels is finding out the hard way that personal promises from the head guy himself means nothing when politics gets in the way. You just know he thought having State’s Attorney (in New York, that title would be District Attorney) Rupert Bond along with him would bolster his case for leaving the Major Crimes unit intact. How could he miss that Bond only cared about the Clay Davis case, which Major Crimes also had been working? As Daniels wryly pointed out, I guess one corrupt politician trumps 22 dead bodies.

The sad irony is that Lester is one of only two detectives who gets to stay with Major Crimes because he’s on the Davis case. After all, he’s the one who found the dead bodies. He cares far more about nailing the murderer(s) than he does about busting another corrupt politician. Yet what he gets to continue to work on is Davis.

It’s all politics.

The U.S. Attorney is willing to help solve the 22 murders only if his office can prosecute state Sen. R. Clayton “Clay” Davis, the corrupt politician. The only reason the city won’t accept that is that Bond refuses to give up the case; it’s his political future. And Carcetti, out of political partnership (partisanship), refuses to even broach it with Bond to give up the case. He’s not going to give the Republicans a bullet.

So once again, the city loses out while the politicians keep their eyes on their future careers.

The sad part is that it shouldn’t work, but it probably will. Carcetti has a chance of advancing his career. He’s a smart politician. Bond, if he can nail Davis, could become the state’s Attorney General, perhaps.

What if Assistant State’s Attorney Rhonda Pearlman ended up as State’s Attorney?

Not much. She’d probably find herself having to defend the indefensible.

Witness newly minted Sgt. Ellis Carver; a year ago, he would have been shouting at the SIC (sergeant in charge) right along with Officer Bobby Brown about the lack of pay for all that overtime they’re working. Now, he has to toe the party line. The cops are professionals; they have to act professional. They’ll get all their back pay owed them when the city has money to pay it. He knows there’s not a clue when that might be. But he’s management now. He has to say that; it’s his job. He has to tell them there’s no maintenance available for the cars now. He can’t even break up a fight between two officers over the condition of a patrol car — the morale of the cops cheering on the fight is, frankly, higher than it’s been in weeks.

We got a brief peek at the lives of two of the teens from last year — Michael and Duquan. Michael’s the dad now, providing for the house and playing Connect Four with Bug when he gets home from the corner at night. Michael, who for most of last season wanted absolutely nothing to do with the dealers on the street, now has his very own corner and crew. He’s almost as hard as Snoop.

While Dukie’s in charge of the corner in the morning, it’s clear that he doesn’t belong there. Michael realizes that and wants to get Dukie off the streets.

Duquan, after all, is the one taking care of Bug in the afternoon when he gets home from school. In his own twisted way, Michael is trying to keep as stable a household as he can for his little brother, considering there’s no adult in their lives anymore. He knows that Dukie doesn’t fit in on the street corner; he’s too quiet and nice. He recognizes that the crew doesn’t respect Dukie, and that’s no way to run a corner.

I was sad, though, that neither he nor Dukie even considered school as an option when Duquan asked him what he’d do with his mornings if he weren’t working the corner. Not surprised, but sad.

McNulty’s drinking and womanizing again. Shock!

Funniest line of the night belongs to Lester, when Lester, McNulty, Bunk and Kima are in the bar, discussing how they’ll have to knock over a liquor store because they can’t afford to pay their bar tab. Lester’ll do the crime, Bunk and Kima have his back. They need a getaway driver, they realize. The trio slowly looks over at McNulty, who’s just about falling down drunk, already.

“There’s a weak link in every plan,” Lester opines. (But the segment at the beginning of the episode that started with the McDonald’s meal and ended with the photocopier/polygraph scene when they trick the schlub petty criminal into spilling the beans on his buddy was good for more than a laugh, too.)

Herc’s working for lawyer to the scumbags of the world, Maurice Levy, and has a nice suit and an expense account. Marlo’s trying to sow discontent among Prop Joe’s lieutenants.

Speaking, how incredible was that scene where the drug dealers of Baltimore gather in the ballroom/conference room of a reasonably upscale downtown hotel to discuss how gentrification is pushing them out of the east side and how they’re going to open up new markets in the suburbs to make up for it.

Bubbles (Reginald?! Really?) is actually clean and sober, and desperately trying to stay that way. Was that his sister whose home he is (was?) staying in?

And what’s the deal with Marlo’s gang’s interest in the Russian from the port (season 2, Sergei Malatov)? A complete puzzle when Chris snags his photo from his file at the court clerk’s office (and you just hadda laugh when Rhonda Pearlman is the one who directs him to the clerk’s office).

We’ve been promised that any loose ends from the previous four years will be wrapped up (perhaps not neatly or nicely, but wrapped up all the same) this season. Is Marlo looking to have Serge whacked in prison or looking to have Serge take care of someone else who’s in prison, for him?

So that leaves us with the newspaper subplot. I saved it for last because, well, I probably have far too much to say about it.

My husband (not a newsman, bless his heart) asked me about halfway through last night’s episode, “Is this what it’s like?”

My answer: “Well, yes and no.”

Yes, because every reporter has a story about an editor who called him/her to the desk as City Editor Gus Haynes did to rookie Alma Gutierrez last night just to inform the reporter of an incorrect word choice. (She had people being evacuated, which as rewrite man Jay Spry pointed out, would mean that someone gave them an enema. Buildings are evacuated.) Yes, in front of other people. That’s part of the newsroom culture. No coddling here. You screw up, you take your lumps publicly.

And every reporter has had a colleague like Scott Templeton, who thinks he’s better than the assignments he’s given.

The metro meeting, where Haynes pokes at Executive Editor James C. Whitting III, who goes on about how he knows the dean of journalism at the University of Maryland because they used to work in Philadelphia together, back in the day, well, we’ve all been in meetings like these. News folks are malcontents. If we weren’t, we wouldn’t be in this business. We’re obnoxious and like to be right. The insults that are slung in a newsroom made everyone’s hide thicker. Because we can’t be any meaner to each other than our sources and readers sometimes are to us.

The conversation between Haynes and Council President Nerese Campbell — let’s just say I’ve had similar conversations with public officials in Florida, Arizona and New York, both as a reporter and as an editor.

The issue about cutbacks is a tough one in the news biz. The companies that own newspapers, for the most part, are publicly traded. They answer to Wall Street. Despite profit margins that would be more than respectable in any other industry, newspapers have had declining profits, and that’s the wrong direction for the money to be flowing. So every newspaper in the nation is cutting back on staff.

At the same time, shrinking newsroom staffs are consistently being asked to do ever more — for the Web, for radio, for television. We are, in fact, doing more with less. Sometimes that means things slip through the cracks — whether its the trial balloon on MTA fare hikes or a zoning change that means a land trade between the city and a known drug dealer. On the former, the fictionalized Baltimore Sun found itself following another newspaper on the story. On the latter, Haynes caught sight of the story at virtually the last second, with just enough time to get City Hall reporter Jeff Price back to the meeting to report it out.

Thing is, even at the best of times in newspapers, both of those scenarios could have happened.

The “no” part of my answer to my husband reflected that last night was slightly exaggerated. Has to be. The everyday of a newsroom can be kind of boring. Lots of carping and complaining and trying to figure out how to fill that hole on page 7A when half you’re staff’s on vacation or out sick. Not very compelling television.

But still far more realistic than any other newsroom portrayal I’ve ever seen on the screen — big or small. Even the movie The Paper, which got so many little details right (the fight over the ergonomic chair was brilliant), got the big picture wrong (no managing I’ve ever met would push ahead with putting a story on the front page that she knew to be false just, well, because).

Time will tell if Simon continues to get the big picture right, but I have little reason to doubt he will, as he spent many years as a police reporter in The Sun’s newsroom.

I know that many at The Sun are bristling over the paper’s portrayal, but The Sun is a standin for pretty much any newspaper in the U.S. So why The Sun? Simon goes for reality, and that’s the daily paper in Baltimore. If he filmed in Atlanta, he’d have gone for permission from The Journal-Constitution.

Times are tough right now in all of the news business. As the Internet snags an ever-growing portion of the newsreading pie, newspapers are trying to make that model work for them. The internet news aggregators can’t exist without the newspapers they aggregate from, however, and, eventually, this will settle out.

I graduated in the early 1990s, when there were practically no jobs to be had in journalism. Department stores were consolidating, advertising patterns were changing. There were salary freezes, hiring freezes, layoffs, buyouts, etc. Was it as bad as it is today? Maybe not. It’s hard for me to judge, as I was a newbie in the biz at the time and it seemed pretty freakin’ bad at the time.

This time is different, because all newspapers are trying to find their new way in this electronic world at the same time. That makes it more difficult.

I dunno. Call me Pollyanna, but I believe that news organizations will continue to exist. I can’t say newspaper, because the paper portion of it is in decline. But millions of people a month visit newspapers’ websites, looking for the same information that they once found they could only get in print. They’re still going to a lot of the same sources, just in a different way.

Now, have I simplified things a bit? To be sure. But, honestly, I could spend hours expounding upon all of this and still not really come to any sort of a resolution, even in my own mind.

And that, friends, is exactly the kind of story The Wire excells at telling.

Photos courtesy of HBO.