To use McNulty as an example, I think there were also plenty of beats during the run of the show that let viewers know how he ended up the way he did, chiefly the introduction of Colvin. The cyclical theme showed how a guy like Colvin rubbed off on McNulty, who in turn rubbed off on Kima, who was well on her way to following down McNulty's path during the middle of the show before finally pulling back and seeing the self-destruction ahead of her. Daniels' repeated attempts to reach back and stop Carver from making his own set of similar mistakes was another approach to the idea.
In the end, McNulty isn't that far off from a Daniel Plainview in terms of his drive. They often made a point of bringing up McNulty's "need to be the smartest cop in the room." That's what pushed him into repeatedly burning down everything around him, from those season one scenes putting the screws to Rawls even after Landsman went to bat for him and got him another shot in Homicide, to sitting there figuring out the tide charts to turn 22 county murders into 22 city murders, to that scene this season where he goes in trying to goad Phelan into signing off on a tap they don't need and don't actually
want, just because he thinks he can do it.
That need to prove themselves smartest is what drew McNulty and Lester together, and is the motivation that separated McNulty from Colvin, who burned
his bridges for what seemed like an honest desire to change things. And what separated McNulty and Freamon was that Lester knew - and warned McNulty and Kima early on - of the need to balance the consuming work drive with finding something outside the job to invest in when the job inevitably disappoints. McNulty couldn't do it, and it seems to me that the growing inability to tell anymore when he was doing something because
it was right and when he was doing it because he wanted to prove that
he was right turned into personal loathing, which just further fueled that self-destructive impulse.
I dunno, that's what I got out of it!
Also, I'm not so sure I agree with his idea that better newspapers make a better society. That seems a little too pat to me. It might help to shine a light on the corruption in the various institutions he's interested in, but would it end corruption entirely? I don't' think so. I think you would have to go a little deeper to get at that and even then you might come up empty-handed.
Nah, I don't think better newspapers would end corruption entirely, either. But I think the media came last in terms of what the show "took on!" because of the show's approach to "pulling back" in looking at its issues. Start with an issue (drugs) that people point to as a key and are more willing to address, begin to lay out the underlying, further-reaching issues that increase the scope of what's going on, then finally ask the question why we don't talk about
those underlying problems more.
His stance seems to be that not fully addressing the depth of the underlying problems is what leads to ineffectual attempts at solving them, and that the newspaper is meant to be a key resource that should help continually explore all these issues and set the table for the the dialogue and debate needed to figure out what actually needs to be done.
He's definitely got his own hang-ups and might not be the first choice among people whose work I really admire with whom I'd want to go grab a beer*, but I think you'd inevitably get the same kind of approach out of someone similarly driven who came from TV news and had complaints about the damage done by eroding the barriers between news and entertainment divisions and that sort of thing.
*My first choice would be Hulk Hogan, of course.