And today, UK users of Guardian Unlimited will be able to stream the first ever episode for free for one week. Here's why you should watch.



I believe The Wire to be the greatest ever television drama. Photograph: FX

Today, and for the next seven days, GU is streaming the first ever episode of The Wire for free here (only available to UK users). Meanwhile, the FX channel is about to repeat all four seasons. The show's small but loyal fan-base is finally set to increase dramatically.

Here are nine reasons why I believe The Wire to be the greatest ever television drama. Please feel free to post up your own nomination for reason number 10.

1. No other television drama comes close to the scope of its ambition. As co-creator and executive producer David Simon says: "Our model when we started doing The Wire wasn't other television shows. The standard we were looking at was Balzac's Paris or Dickens's London, or Tolstoy's Moscow." Over four seasons, the show has never flinched from that ambition and managed to realise it consummately. Salon.com got it spot on when they described the show as, "a Homeric epic of modern America".

2. The Wire's consistency is nothing short of staggering. The Shield lost the plot in season four. Deadwood ran aground midway through series three. Even The Sopranos experienced dips in two and six. The Wire has not faltered for a moment in four vaguely themed seasons that have tackled the pointlessness of the war on drugs, the bureaucracy and corruption that infest both the police force and drug-dealing gangs, class war against the labour unions, and the city's dysfunctional public schools system.

3. The casting is spot-on. Dispensing with big-name stars and celebrity guesting, the show opts for unknown actors and is all the better for it. For added realism, a good many of the street characters have real-life criminal records as long as your arm - including Felicia Pearson (Snoop), who was dealing drugs at 12 and was imprisoned at 14.

4. You would need a swinging brick in place of a heart not to care deeply about the fate of the characters. You don't just side with flawed cops like Jimmy McNulty, Bunk Moreland and Thomas Hauk. Equally, if not more so, you root for street urchins like Bodie Broadus and Chris Partlow, along with bad-ass entrepreneur Stringer Bell.

5. It's the greatest ever cop show that isn't actually a cop show. We spend as much time with the junkies, the pimps, the murderers and the frightened street kids as we do with the law. The Wire is a dense, novelistic drama about those on both sides on the law caught up in the whirlpool of an entropic, near-suicidal society where dark reality is fast outpacing hope.

6. The writing is immense and never misses a beat. Creators David Simon and Ed Burns are supremely qualified to depict life in one of America's poorest and most violent cities, being a former crime reporter and former homicide/narcotics cop respectively. They are ably abetted by some of America's finest crime writers including Richard Price, George Pelecanos and Dennis Lehane.

7. Like all great drama, it succeeds in making its location something like a central character. Not to be confused with the fruitcakey world of John Waters movies or the sentimental place depicted in the work of Barry Levinson, The Wire's Baltimore is a city in its death throes, fighting to hang on to its very soul. Never pretty, never less than compelling.

8. It features Bubbles, the most sympathetic character ever to appear in a TV drama. Expertly played by the mighty Andre Royo, Bubbles breaks your heart every time he appears on screen, always about to clean-up, clawing his way through Baltimore's meanest streets, precariously holding onto his last scrap of dignity. I weep just thinking of him wheeling around his portable supermarket - a trolley piled with cheap toilet rolls and knock-off white T-shirts. More than any other character, Bubbles encapsulates the humanity at the heart of the show.

9. The Wire is a guaranteed way to win friends and influence people. Evangelistically recommend it to complete strangers and it's a cast-iron guarantee they'll become your lifelong disciples. Just don't go lending out your DVD box sets. Anyone who borrows it will want to hang on to it as much as you'll be longing for its return.