The Best Show on TV

The Wire, perhaps the only police drama that truly deserves to be called “gritty,” begins its fourth season on HBO next Sunday. Let me be the first to begin the campaign for a fifth. A nuanced portrait of urban Baltimore, with its internecine battles among cops, politicos and drug dealers, The Wire demands a far greater level of commitment and attention from its audience than your standard escapist police procedural.

After screening all 13 episodes of the coming season, I'm left with the kind of melancholy that sets in when you finish a great novel. This is muckraking TV, in so many ways more powerful than anything a network news division can produce.

The Best Show on TV - 9/4/2006 - Broadcasting & Cable

We'll be watching. Oh man, will we ever. Even with competition from the likes of Deadwood and The Sopranos, The Wire is the best original series that has ever appeared on HBO, and right now I can't think of anything better that I've ever seen on television, period.