Genres

After one episode of The Wire youll be hooked. After three, youll be astonished by the precision of its storytelling. After viewing all 13 episodes of the HBO series remarkable first season, youll be cheering a bona-fide American masterpiece. Series creator David Simon was a veteran crime reporter from The Baltimore Sun who cowrote the book that inspired TVs Homicide, and cowriter Ed Burns was a Baltimore cop, lending impeccable street-cred to an inner-city Baltimore saga (and companion piece to The Corner) that Simon aptly describes as a visual novel and a treatise on institutions and individuals as opposed to a conventional good-vs.-evil police procedural. Owing a creative debt to the novels of Richard Price (especially Clockers), the series opens as maverick Detective Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West, in a star-making role) is tapping into a vast network of drugs and death around southwest Baltimores deteriorating housing projects. With a mandate to get results ASAP, a haphazard team is assembled to join McNultys increasingly complex investigation, built upon countless hours of electronic surveillance.The shows split-perspective plotting is so richly layered, so breathtakingly authentic and based on finely drawn characters brought to life by a perfect ensemble cast, that it defies concise description. Simon, Burns, and their cowriters control every intricate aspect of the unfolding epic directors are top-drawer (including Clark Johnson, helmer of The Shields finest episodes), but they are servants to the story, resulting in a TV series like no other unpredictable, complicated, and demanding the viewers rapt attention, The Wire is an angry show (in Simons words) that refuses to comfort with easy answers to deep-rooted societal problems. Moral gray zones proliferate in a universe where ruthless killers have a logical code, and where the cops are just as ambiguous as their targets. That ambiguity extends to the ending as well season 1 leaves several issues unresolved, leaving you begging for the even more impressive developments that await in season 2.