The final season of The Wire about to begin, every critic wants to file something about it. There isn't much that is new in Lauren Mechling's piece, other than noting the show was conceived as an 60-hour film (instead of a collection of 60 one hour shows set in the same milieu).
Come New Year's, wine guru Robert Parker, rapper Mims and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tony Kushner all expect to be in the same place: curled up on their couches at home, watching the premiere of the final season of "The Wire." Says Mr. Kushner: "It's my favorite TV show -- and I watch TV a lot."
The HBO series, which begins it fifth season Jan. 6 (and will be available on the network's On Demand channel starting Monday), tends to inspire this kind of manic devotion. What the show lacks in numbers -- last season averaged 1.6 million viewers per episode premiere, HBO says, compared with 8.9 million for "The Sopranos" at its height or, say, 30.7 million viewers for an "American Idol" season finale -- it makes up for in cachet. A favorite among the hip-hop world and the intelligentsia, "The Wire" doesn't have casual fans -- those who watch, watch obsessively.
In the post-"Sopranos" world, "The Wire" is more central to HBO's strategy than in years past. The network's looking to the series to retain subscribers at a time when many in the industry say it's on shaky ground. In many ways "The Wire" is HBO's closest cousin to "The Sopranos" -- they're both gritty dramas and they're loved by critics. (Slate's Jacob Weisberg has called "The Wire" "the best TV ever broadcast in America.") It doesn't hurt that the season will be premiering in early January, against other lineups weakened by the writers' strike -- much of what's being scheduled is reality television and reruns.
Named for the wiretap that a special police unit uses to listen in on members of a Baltimore drug ring, the show's title doubles as a metaphor for viewers' experience of listening in on worlds they're not usually privy to. When the show first aired in 2002, it focused on a police investigation. In the four subsequent seasons, the program's scope has spiraled out to include the stevedores' union, local politics, the school system and the media -- in short, it's a portrait of a struggling American city.
It's also storytelling at its most stunning. Heartbreaking, wry and novelistically complex, "The Wire" has run roughshod over practically every television convention. While the police drama typically honors formula (See Bad Guy run! See Good Guy catch him!), "The Wire" is content to let questions go unanswered, investigations get bungled, and characters escape being pigeonholed. The would-be hero Officer Jimmy McNulty may be "good police," but he's short-tempered and reckless when it comes to whiskey and women. Drug soldier Roland "Wee-Bey" Brice is one of the city's toughest gangsters -- and the loving owner of a roomful of tropical fish. Series creator David Simon spent 13 years as a crime reporter for the Baltimore Sun and draws on his own anecdotes and grievances. His decision to tell "The Wire" as a 60-hour movie rather than 60 one-hour episodes gives him room to expand characters and threads that develop texture more than plot.
[From Inside 'The Wire' - WSJ.com]
(Digg-enabled full access to entire article here which includes some details about the final season, set in a fictionalized version of the Baltimore Sun.)
