I recently finished season 5 of HBO’s critically acclaimed series ‘The Wire’ and I have to say it’s one of the best shows I have ever seen. Considering the past HBO has a damn good eye for quality TV. In my book The Wire is tied for first with the Sopranos when it comes to premium channel series rankings. Up there with it would be aforementioned Sopranos, Band of Brothers (mini-series), Dexter (Showtime), Weeds (Showtime) and Deadwood.
The Wire premiered in June of 2002 and ended in March of 2008 but not before pounding out 60 episodes. Each of the 5 seasons focused on a different aspect of the troubled Maryland city of Baltimore which has seen it’s fair share of hard knocks. The themes for the five seasons were the drug trade, the port, the city bureaucracy, the school system, and the print news media. Each season follows a similar cast of cops, prosecutors, political figures, dealers, and fiends alike through the trials and tribulations of the massive drug trade and mountains of red tape that beleaguered Baltimore.
There appears to be a lot of political and social commentary mixed in with the series as a whole but the series creator, David Simon, has been specifically quoted in regards to Season 2 as saying that it is:
“a meditation on the death of work and the betrayal of the American working class.…[I]t is a deliberate argument that unencumbered capitalism is not a substitute for social policy; that on its own, without a social contract, raw capitalism is destined to serve the few at the expense of the many.”
It’s not all that difficult to determine that I probably wouldn’t see eye to eye with David Simon but in reading a few articles and having watched all of The Wire in only a few weeks time I have to say that despite his more liberal/left leanings and my more conservative/right leanings we would probably come out of a conversation with much closer viewpoints than one might assume.
I think a very interesting interview can be found here:
Q&A: David Simon (pt. 1) & Q&A: David Simon (pt. 2)
Bottom line is you should probably take the time to watch this series. You will most likely learn something from it simply because you will take the lessons people learn or the problems they have and filter them through the screen of your own life.
More on the show can be found at the Wikipedia article “The Wire (TV_Series)“.
Or at the official HBO website for The Wire.