I came to The Wire by what Shakespeare’s Henry IV called “by-paths and indirect crook’d” ways. Well, maybe not as crook’d as all that. .. My first exposure to the show was the fourth of its five seasons. I had heard great things about the previous three and thought I should really check it out. I was impressed but also baffled. I was defeated by both text and context. I didn’t know anything about the principal characters or what they had already gone through. I found the language of the disadvantaged West Baltimore kids who were the show’s principal newcomers – this was the season that focused on education or the lack of it – almost impenetrable. After a few episodes I gave, guiltily, up.

However: not too long after that I was appointed the National Post’s TV critic, and one of the things I found looming on my horizon was The Wire’s fifth and final season. Obviously I needed to do some homework so I settled down to some frantic binge-watching, hoping to get it all done before The Wire was, well, rewired. I didn’t quite make it in time, so I had the strange experience of watching seasons 4 and 5 more or less in tandem. This led to some confusion on my part regarding the ultimate fate of Randy, the most vulnerable of the four boys on whom the fourth season concentrated. His abandonment by the authorities, and the despairing frustration of Carver, the cop who had tried to look after him and wasn’t allowed to adopt him, added up to the most draining experience I have ever had from watching a TV drama. It registered both as a personal tragedy and as a symbolic indictment of an entire system, both aspects symbolised in the image of Carver, pushing despairingly on the horn of his squad car: a brief and wordless sequence that was the most openly emotional sequence The Wire permitted itself in all of its five years.  I’m tempted to call it cathartic, but I can’t say that it left me feeling purged or healed. At the episode’s end I just sat there staring at the blank screen.

Bear in mind, too, that the same episode included the show’s most hilarious sequence, in which Omar, scourge both of Baltimore’s drug-dealers and of its legal and political establishment, sells a stash back to the guys from whom he stole it. The Wire offered us a world to get immersed in, at once consistent and multi-faceted. Along with The Sopranos and the unforgivably aborted Deadwood, it represented the apex of American television’s (or, more precisely, HBO television’s) Golden Age. Nothing else, with the possible exception of Breaking Bad, has approached them (and I’m not forgetting Mad Men). Was The Wire even better than The Sopranos? I’ve gone back and forth on this, as my reviews will attest. The Sopranos offered a more complex and compelling protagonist, The Wire is more tightly constructed and with a broader sociological sweep. And none of the agonising problems it depicts have gone away. Mercifully we don’t have to choose. Though I will say that now, with binge-watching a lifeline rather than an indulgence, The Wire is the one I want to watch again, all the way through. And this time in the right order.

The Collected Reviews of
The Wire

in chronological order