“You only do two days": that’s the day you start lying and the day you start telling the truth.
Last year, I was watching season 5 of The Wire, whose plot is built on a lie. It’s about how Detective Jimmy McNulty and journalist Scott Templeton’s paths diverge after one admits to fabricating a homeless serial killer while the other doubles down on the lie. The separation happens at a moment of truth.
McNulty, fed up with the lack of attention towards drug-related violence, creates a fictional murderer to get more police action and political attention on real cases. Templeton, an ambitious journalist willing to cut corners, advances the made-up killer through the local paper. Both spend most of the season getting deeper into their lies and getting what they want, too. McNulty gets a specialized unit to solve his fake case, and Templeton is given front-page real estate and recognition for his coverage. By episode 10, McNulty is confronted by his superiors and Templeton by his peers. McNulty owns up to it. Templeton stands on (false) business.
Navigating a moment of truth by being honest is essential to becoming a truth-teller. We should respect what people do in this moment because it’s the only thing separating liars from truth-tellers.
Honesty is at the heart of human relationships; it’s a foundational element of love. When we lie, we jeopardize the potential for genuine connection.
The stakes are high: honesty not only shapes our character but influences our relationships, creating walls when absent and bridges when present. With this, we recognize that choosing truth can risk discomfort but lays the groundwork for healthy, productive connections.
A moment of truth is the specific point in time when someone decides to tell the truth or lie, regardless of being called out or under duress. It’s context agnostic; it’s a moment of truth whether you’ve been making up murders for 7 episodes or were just asked whether you called your grandmother 7 seconds ago.
In this world, there are only two decisions: go left and tell less than the truth, or go right and tell enough truth. Observing people’s choices at a moment of truth is the only way to differentiate a liar from a truth-teller. Not their gender, body language, vocal patterns, or even a polygraph.
Liars continuously go left, and truth-tellers continuously go right.
We often take for granted the idea that everyone should tell the truth. Just as we might reward a fish for swimming—something they do by nature—it’s easy to forget that not everyone possesses the ability or inclination to tell the truth. As such, not all moments of truth are the same; some are critical turning points in someone’s journey toward becoming a truth-teller.
People’s actions in a moment of truth determine their integrity. It’s the best metric for measuring honesty. Don’t assume you’re familiar with their game, just observe whether they told the truth.
Moments of truth reveal future truth-tellers. Every truth-teller in the history of the game started by making it through a moment of truth. It’s not a mystical phenomenon. At some point, they just told the truth and committed to keep doing so.
And once you deal in moments of truth, instead of assumptions about someone or their circumstances, you can move from judgment to empathy.
Before, you’re only worried about the harm they caused with their lie. You think about how they purposely deceived you. But now you know better. You still weigh that harm and assess how it’s made you feel, but you simultaneously think about them going left. And you remember from that one article that they could’ve gone right too. Why didn’t they? You ask them. They’re surprised, no one’s ever asked them that before. They give you an answer. You learn something about that person you didn’t know before. Something strange happens. You maintain those feelings about the harm and the deception, but now, at the same time, you may hold very different feelings about the reason why they caused that harm.
Measuring these scenarios in moments of truth unlocks empathy, compassion, and understanding.
If we’re talking truth, every body McNulty juked to look like a murder, and every false quote Templeton sent to press pales in meaning and comparison to their response when they got tested. The heaviest truths on the integrity scale are high-stakes and recent.
Consequences create the test. We can imagine telling the truth when the stakes are low, like actually telling our friend we haven’t even started getting ready instead of ‘I’m 15 min away’. That’s all well and fine. But we can see it’s not as revealing as admitting to that friend that you said something nasty about them behind their back.
Now, a long history of dishonesty isn’t erased by one seemingly redemptive choice. Truth-telling is consistent. And the deception McNulty and Templeton engaged in up to that point? Obviously, reprehensible. You got to pay for that: ‘you owe’. But a real test ain’t trivial. Telling the truth when there are larger consequences is harder than when there are small ones. Even if someone has lied before, choosing to finally tell the truth under serious duress shows the potential for growth and redemption.
The test is only half of the battle. You also need to see when these tests and their responses happened. Someone’s latest response is a temperature check on their commitment to honesty. You can see what they’re on, right now. Beyond the present, someone’s last moment of truth determines their legacy. Both McNulty and Templeton spent the entire season lying and conniving, but the choice they made in their moment of truth weighs heaviest in defining their legacies.
The Wire portrays Templeton as the liar who found success unjustly and McNulty as the misguided hero who wronged for the right reasons.
The only way you become a truth-teller is by starting to go right. At some point, going right. It’s not instantaneous, but that journey always looks that way.
In The Wire, they put McNulty on administrative leave (better than the jail time he could’ve got) and Templeton wins a Pulitzer Prize (the highest recognition in journalism) while his colleagues at the paper get demoted for trying to hold him accountable.
Can we get further by lying? Maybe, but The Wire teaches a deeper lesson—art imitating life in its rawest form.
At the series’ conclusion, Templeton wins his award. Yet, it’s a hollow victory–he’s celebrated by strangers, receiving accolades without earning true respect. The audience knows he doesn’t deserve it and reasons the award givers would think the same if they knew the truth. His ‘success’ isolates him, his lack of integrity leaves him with nothing but superficial recognition.
McNulty’s ending happens not with formal accolades, but in a bar with his people. His ‘wake’ is symbolic—he’s alive, humorously eulogized as if he were dead, laid out on the ‘felt’ (read: pool table). Despite his moral failings, “of which there are many,” they honor him with the highest badge of respect among police: ‘he was real police.’ This means more than just doing the job; it speaks to the soul of what they value most—solving murders, pursuing truth, and being relentless, even when his methods went astray.
The message here is nuanced: we can see two truths in the same person. On one hand, they may be guilty of lies and deceptions; on the other, we recognize their authenticity in moments of real integrity. McNulty, despite the damage he caused, earns the respect of those who matter to him, not for being perfect, but for being real in crucial moments. This is where The Wire leaves us: in moments of truth, we see a person’s full complexity. Lies can define a person, but so can the truths they stand for when it matters most.
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