The fifth and final season of the television series The Wire commenced airing in the United States on January 6, 2008, and concluded on March 9, 2008; it was the show's shortest season with 10 episodes. The series introduced a fictionalized version of the Baltimore Sun newsroom, while continuing to follow the Baltimore police department and city hall, and the Stanfield crime syndicate.

The fifth season aired on Sundays at 9:00 pm ET in the United States. The season was released on DVD as a four-disc boxed set under the title of The Wire: The Complete Fifth Season on August 12, 2008 by HBO Video.

HBO announced on September 12, 2006, that a fifth and final season consisting of 13 episodes—but later reduced to ten—had been commissioned. Production for Season 5 officially began on April 30, 2007. Filming wrapped early in the morning of September 1, 2007 and the first episode aired on January 6, 2008.

In an interview with Slate on December 1, 2006, David Simon said that Season 5 would be about the media and media consumption. A major focus would be journalism, which would be dramatized through a newspaper modeled after The Baltimore Sun. The theme, according to Simon, would deal with "what stories get told and what don't and why it is that things stay the same."

Issues such as the quest for profit, the decrease in the number of reporters, and the end of aspiration for news quality would all be addressed, alongside the theme of homelessness. In the same interview, Simon indicated that no other theme seemed substantial enough to warrant a sixth season, except possibly the large influx of Latinos into Baltimore. He noted, however, that since no writer on the show spoke Spanish or had any intimate knowledge of the city's Latino population, the field work would be too cumbersome.

At the Night at the Wire event on June 9, 2007, Simon stated that Detective Sydnor is the only character who remains morally clean by the end of the show, but not perfectly since "after all, this is The Wire." He also hinted that Mayor Carcetti might make a run for governor.

The series continued the show's examination of the devaluing of human life and institutional dysfunction. The increased scope of the season to include the media allowed this theme to be explored through an examination of "the people who are supposed to be monitoring all this and sounding the alarm — the journalists." In particular Simon has spoken about the devaluing of the reporter in terms of downsizing a newspaper staff and the management expecting to do "more with less" when he asserts that in reality, you can only do "less with less."

The series realism has been reported as being maintained particularly through the accurate dialogue and use of contemporary slang. Series creator David Simon further expanded on the thematic content of season five in an interview with Fancast/Inside TV. Critic David Zurawik saw the unifying theme of the season as "public and private lies," particularly those perpetuated by the media and told by Jimmy McNulty in protest against cutbacks in the police department. TV Guide writer Matt Roush also saw the central theme as lies and characterized it as "deeply and darkly ironic."