Reviews

Ostensibly a cop series with a story to tell about the drug war in America's inner city (Baltimore, in this case), "The Wire" over five seasons was really an insanely ambitious, intimately detailed historical document about institutional failure on all levels - cops, criminals, courts, politics, schools and newspapers. Dense, novelistic, painful, funny, real and heartbreaking all at once. On top of that it had pitch-perfect dialogue, elegantly plotted crime stories and a tone that ranged from elegiac to raunchily funny. This love poem on the life and death of American cities was as good as TV ever gets.

"The Wire" is the best television series ever made. Period.

The series follows "The Gang", a group of five depraved underachievers: twins Dennis and Deandra "Sweet Dee" Reynolds, their friends Charlie Kelly and Mac, and Frank Reynolds, Dennis and Dee's adoptive father, who runs Paddy's Pub, a run-down bar in South Philadelphia. They are dishonest, egotistical, lazy, manipulative and vengeful. Episodes usually find them hatching elaborate schemes, conspiring against one another and others for personal gain, vengeance, or simply for the entertainment of watching each other's downfall. Their tactics often rely on inflicting emotional and sometimes physical and psychological pain on individuals both deserving and undeserving. They regularly use blackmail and manipulate one another and others outside of the group.

Much like in Seinfeld, the plots and schemes hatched by the Gang rarely result in lasting success; indeed, oftentimes, the plans backfire to adversely affect the group or at least, leave the Gang back at square one with little to no gain.

This show is hilarious. Watch it now.