Wire, The - Season 4 Details

[Highly rated reviewer]

Every bit as good as you've heard

When The Guardian's Charlie Brooker goes on and on about The Wire as being the best American TV show of the last twenty years, he can get a bit repetitive. You'd also be entitled to wonder why, if The Wire is such an amazing piece of work, it only gets a UK airing on the obscure FX Channel rather than one of the big mainstream stations. But your reservations would be totally unjustified. The Wire is every bit as good as you've been told and better. Sure, it'll take you three episodes before you have a clue what is going on, but the investment pays dividends.

I can't remember a drama serial from either side of the Atlantic with such depth and emotional range and that delivers trenchant social comment along with a narrative tempo that suffers not one jot from a huge cast of characters and a complex plotline. Unsentimental, brave and moving - I guarantee you will not regret it, but start with season one and work your way through otherwise you really won't have a clue what's going on! Roll on season five!

The best quality thing on TV

A fantastic series that is compellingly gritty from start to finish.

This is my favourite series of The Wire, partly because the school dimension is so brilliantly portrayed. As with every aspect of the fabric of Baltimore explored in the The Wire, the veracity is startling, even to a British audience who has no experience of these street corners or profoundly damaged kids. The slang is unrelenting, forcing you to observe every action carefully. Under such scrutiny the series proves just how uncompromising it is as everything from the way Bodie spits seems to transcend what it is possible to capture in a Teleplay. At least once an episode I end up wondering how they managed to create this.

In particular characters such as Carcetti and 'Prez' have developed in a manner which is quite unexpected, just as the quartet of middle school students become moulded by Baltimore rather than a Warner Bros-style cliched script.

More than anything, there is a kind of aesthetic value that just does not belong to a TV show- I have found myself comparing it with a sprawling Dickens novel- with a web a characters that are neither good nor bad, but rather some shade of grey. And then I think of E.M. Forsters 'Only Connect' sentiment from Howard's End. Certainly the more of The Wire you watch, the more thrilling it becomes when new links are formed or old folds renewed.

So we become the surveillance in this series, as the Major Crimes Unit is made redunant amidst political turmoil. This allows the audience to appreciate the candid realism of the programme as more than an original quirk in a cop show- it is what makes it an artistic masterpiece.