The Wire - Best TV Series Ever?

This is a piece that I've dreaded writing since the moment that I first watched The Wire. There's nothing that I can say about its sheer brilliantness that hasn't already been said 500 times.

First of all, this will contain spoilers so if you haven't seen it stop reading NOW, go on to amazon and buy the complete box set. You will like it and even if you don't, you have to see it. If you have seen it, read on...

At first I didn't connect with it, I even posted on here that this may not be the series for me. But I stuck with it as many people advised me to. By the fifth episode I was completely hooked and I remained hooked throughout the rest of the series. It keeps you going until the very last moment.

It's incredibly well written, you can tell this straight away. There's an enormous number of characters but all of them feel realistic, all of them are perfectly plotted out. We learn things about them very slowly, some things we don't get told until much much later on. This doesn't matter.

The Wire isn't driven by character or plot, both are perfectly balanced. Sometimes the story hinges on one character yet at other times a main character can be simply bumped off, no epic deaths, it just happens. The best example of this comes towards the end of the final season when Omar, a character that has been pivotal to the story on a number of occasions, is shot by a child while shopping. There are literally hundreds of people after him and have been since the very beginning, yet it's a small and simple thing that is his ultimate downfall.

While watching through The Wire I found that some kind of reset button was pressed at the beginning of each series, I lost interest for periods of time before picking it up again. Yet by the end of every series I was hooked, sometimes watching three episodes in a row. The start of a series does see the pace slowed down a bit. This may have been because I was watching series back-to-back and not one a year over five years.

People ask me what The Wire is about, the obvious answer is obviously cops and robbers. However when you look carefully, it's not about that at all. It's about how Baltimore as a city fails to recognize and deal with its own problems and how the system fails those that it should protect. The Wire is really a novel for TV, about how shit life is and how no one can really do anything about it. Every episode is a different chapter and every series is a different volume of the same story, a story that has no beginning and no end and probably never will do.

A brilliant series that is often hailed as 'the best TV series ever' and I can understand why, it's certainly up there with the greats and I would recommend it to anyone and encourage everyone to watch it in its entirety. The ending isn't particularly rewarding but it puts its message across clearly and in a very entertaining way.