After Lost ended I was quite sad - it was one of the only television shows I had seen that held me from beginning to end with very few hiccups. I searched around for another show that could replace it and kept coming up with one name: the Wire.
Now I used to watch Lost with my wife and my mother every week, and from what I had read, the Wire would not be a show my mother would have enjoyed, but the fact that it was constantly given high praise convinced me to go out and pick it up anyway. Laura and I just finished watching the last season last night and at the end of everything, I can say the show was incredible. Easily slides into my list of top shows ever.
When listening to a description of the show, it doesn’t sound like it should be the kind I would like. It involves police and drug dealers on the streets of Baltimore. First, I hate cop shows. I hate procedurals. They’re just not my type of show. I’m more of the Buffy/Supernatural kind of television watcher. Second, I’m not overly interested in the street-life style story. I never really cared much for things like Boys N the Hood or anything like that. They also just don’t interest me. So when I was told there was a story about police and drug dealers, my first instinct was to pass.
But then I saw who one of the actors was when I was looking through a few still shots.
I don't know his name, but I've loved him in every show I've seen him. That, plus finding the whole series for pretty cheap, convinced me to give it a try.
Boy am I glad I did.
The show starts you off in the middle of the action, uses a lot of lingo and patterns that, for the beginning, you're just trying to make sense of. "What the heck is a re-up?" "Why aren't the police having any success?" As the police learn the depth of the foes they are up against, they learn and start to make changes to their patterns. Which, of course, the drug dealers learn and start adapting themselves. As the show continues, things that worked flawlessly in season one become outdated by season three and it's a constant battle where each side is waiting for the other to slip up.
Soon in season one they're trying to track down the mysterious leader of this drug organization and find out what he's doing (if he even exists at all or is just a puppet). If the drugs are bringing in over a million dollars a week, where is this money going? The police have to follow everyone from the lowest drug dealers on the corners all the way to the top, follow them with wiretaps, eyeballs, and paper trails.
Each season expands the overall story while moving into a different aspect of the city as well. Schools, newspapers, dockworkers, politics - it's all tied together. And by the end of the story, you get a good idea of how interconnected this whole city really is.
If you haven't seen the show, you owe it to yourself to give it a try. The seasons are only 10-13 episodes long, each one an hour in length (and since it's HBO, they are each actually a full hour long rather than 45 minutes). Five out of five.
