At this point I should probably get round to telling you what The Wire is. The Wire starts out ostensibly as a cop show, but quickly becomes as concerned with the drug dealers targeted by the police as with the police themselves and then slowly widens the focus over the course of five seasons to encompass dock workers, politicians, schoolchildren, teachers, drug addicts, stick up men, reporters, the homeless and probably others I’ve forgotten to mention. Following HBO tradition every character in the series is written with remarkable depth and comes off as completely believable, and boy are there a lot of characters in this show. Every season of The Wire adds extra groups of characters to the proceedings, and with the exception of the dock workers introduced in the second season they all keep going right up till the final episode (assuming they survive that long of course). One of the many factors which makes this such a remarkable series is that it manages to maintain so many characters for so long without any of them deteriorating into the cliché to which they would be so easily surrendered in so many other shows.

Despite the initial focus of The Wire don’t be fooled into believing this is just about crime. The Wire takes place in modern day Baltimore, Maryland (or Bodymore, Muddaland as some prominent graffiti puts it) and over the course of five magnificent seasons the series attempts to paint a portrait of the city through the eyes of it’s inhabitants, by it’s conclusion The Wire has delivered a study of the dark side of Baltimore and American society that’s as unflinching and as gripping as anything ever produced for television. The conclusions drawn by the show are not necessarily comforting, with all the characters having remarkably little effect on their environment and any character who tries to change things in a significant way for either better or worse being severely punished for it, but they certainly aren’t nihilistic either, those rare happy moments are all the sweeter for their persistently dark setting. The Wire doesn’t preach to it’s audience, it just presents life as it is, alarmingly willing to kill off main characters and to leave loose ends hanging for the sake of realism but always maintaining a level of drama that prevents the series from feeling like a documentary.

This isn’t to say that The Wire is faultless, every season follows a single investigation and requires you to have seen the previous seasons to know what anyone’s talking about, therefore it has a jump-on factor of precisely bugger all. You need to have seen this from episode one of season one and you need to have not missed a single episode to have any chance of following it. Thankfully all five seasons are now out on DVD and as such missing an episode is no longer a worry. There’s also the problem of language, the characters speak English of course but they speak it with such thick Baltimore accents it at times becomes all but incomprehensible (several people I’ve leant box sets to ended up watching the first episodes with the subtitles on), eventually you get used to it but at times early on it can be like watching a Deadwood spin-off series focussed entirely on Calamity Jane. There’s also the fact that this is one hell of a slow burner, taking about seven episodes to set itself up and really get going. And of course this is HBO so if tend to be offended by explicit violence, drug use, swearing, sex and so on it’s probably not for you.

So what is it that makes The Wire so much better than any other TV show ever made? At the end of the day it isn’t any single factor but rather the overall weight of the achievements of this series that make it so very special. Giving us a staggering number of three dimensional and well rounded characters, The Wire gives us a bleak, violent, almost dystopic vision of the modern world, but it also tells the stories of people willing to risk and lose it all for the sake of saving that world. It doesn’t have us believe these people are heroes, rather they are often pushed to their actions by despair or frustration and are well aware of the likely bad outcomes for themselves, and yet they do it anyway. The series also shows us ruthless, terrifying people profiting from crime and often escaping justice at the hands of the law. It also shows us people who are victims of both the official and criminal systems, who seem destined only to lose in life, but who very, very occasionally triumph against everything, including themselves. The Wire shows us American society’s dark side, the side so rarely covered realistically or at all in television, and yet it does so without descending into complete darkness, perhaps this is it’s greatest achievement of all “ To give it’s audience such a horrifyingly brutal vision of their own world and yet never stop being compelling and endlessly entertaining.

Watch it, watch it now. Put simply, this is the greatest television show ever made and it deserves your attention.