Other people have written far better than I can about The Wire. It is honest, engaging, tragic, touching, funny, horrific; it is about real lives and real situations in a real place. It will take two or three episodes to get into it and for it to get going but once you get there it is like nothing else I have seen. The Sopranos is very good but the people it portrays, no matter how engaging, are parasites who have made a choice to be in the family business. The Wire is about ordinary people, in the main, who just haven't had any choices or what choices they have had have been really hard ones. It's about the cops who try to keep a lid on the crime in this place and the teachers who try to give the kids in their care some sort of escape through education but all are failed by the endemic corruption in the system. It shows America as a failed system with a growing, totally degraded urban underclass and a money-grabbing political class which disables politicians who want to do the right thing. It shows us what is wrong by allowing us to meet the victims and the perpetrators in this failed society and those who are trying to keep one group from killing each other and catch those with their fingers in the till! We also meet some chillingly ordinary-looking people, who are the men behind major drug and people trafficking, these are the true monsters.



The casting is phenomenal, the characters are believable and they look like real people; the scripts and storylines are likewise faultless. The only regret I have is that I have watched it now and can't ever again experience the feeling of seeing this incredible show for the first time!