over at ew.com:

http://www.ew.com/ew/arti...0_,00.html

In David Simon's version of Dante's Inferno, Hell is played by Baltimore and all seven of the deadly sins are doing just fine, thanks. Midlevel drug dealers welcome fall by giving their corner boys money for new clothes — a little perk to keep them happy and moving those spider-bags and red-tops. The bigger crooks give to the politicians to make sure the influence keeps flowing. The only difference is the amount changing hands. And Lester Freamon, a detective Sherlock Holmes might hail as a peer, has an aha moment while looking at an abandoned row house — one of thousands in the city's decaying core — on a chilly winter afternoon. ''This is a tomb,'' he says.

Welcome to Hell...and to the world of The Wire, season 4, bowing on HBO in September.

Lester's right, by the way. There's a body in the row house he's looking at, and two dozen or so others. They are victims of a stealth gang war being waged by Avon Barksdale's successor, the handsome, dead-eyed Marlo Stanfield (Jamie Hector). But it wasn't Marlo who kept me riveted, or kept me plugging HBO's semidefective preview discs into my DVD player with increasing dread and fascination; that honor belonged to Marlo's hired hit team of Chris (Gbenga Akinnagbe) and Snoop (Felicia Pearson). The latter is perhaps the most terrifying female villain to ever appear in a television series. When you think of Chris and Snoop, think of John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo, only smart.

And with a nail gun.

The Wire is smart too, but never too smart for its own good. There's enough going on about the decay of the urban environment to scare the living crap out of you, but no one climbs up on a soapbox. Not even Tommy Carcetti (Aidan Gillen), the white man who would be mayor in a black city, does any preaching; he only runs, harder and faster, as he sees a chance of winning — slim, but real — appear late in the primary campaign.

Season 4 of The Wire is a dazzling three-ring circus of interwoven plot threads, and its take on America's drug war makes Miami Vice look like a Saturday-morning cartoon, but what I kept coming back to was Detective Freamon looking at that boarded-up row house and saying, ''This is a tomb.'' Simon and his gifted co-conspirators (they include novelists Richard Price, George Pelecanos, and Dennis Lehane) aren't shy about extending the metaphor to all of Baltimore...and then suggesting you connect the dots to your own urban jungle.

Roland ''Prez'' Pryzbylewski has quit Baltimore PD to become a middle-school math teacher, only to discover that in the age of No Child Left Behind, he's working another part of the same cemetery. He scrapes the gum off the bottoms of desks, takes attendance, passes around out-of-date textbooks (while new computers gather dust in unopened boxes due to a bureaucratic snafu), and preps students to pass state tests. He finds himself still ''juking the stats'' to please his superiors, only now in his grade book instead of his arrest reports. And cleaning up the blood when a disturbed child cuts another in class, disfiguring her badly. Prez gets at least some good news (because even in Hell, there's good news): The kid who was cut tested negative for HIV. So no worries there, mate.

When this run of 13 episodes begins, the original wire — a listening post designed to target and build cases against drug barons like Marlo — has been taken down, mostly by that constant need to juke the numbers. But in the school where Prez is actually making some progress, another kind of wire pops up: a unique class for corner boys and girls, the Marlos of the future, run by another Baltimore PD burnout who veteran Wire watchers will recognize: Maj. Howard ''Bunny'' Colvin, now retired. It's a classroom where there's some hope for change; it's also a room where adults can look — and listen in — on a world that is otherwise closed to them.

In a normal TV series, this is where AU (Automatic Uplift) would kick in. Not in Simon's Baltimore, where uplift is possible...but where viewers will also be shocked when one beloved character inadvertently feeds his friend a hot shot, killing him. Shocked, but not surprised. Because the world of The Wire is a tomb filled with the living dead. A few fight their way out, but not unless they can beat the streets, themselves, and the vast dead engine of the entrenched bureaucracy.

Even City Hall is a tomb, as Tommy Carcetti learns: ''You're sitting eating s--- all day long, day after day, year after year,'' a former mayor tells him. For a politician in David Simon's Baltimore, there's only one thing worse than losing, and I probably don't need to tell you what that is.

The Wire keeps getting better, and to my mind it has made the final jump from great TV to classic TV — put it right up there with The Prisoner and the first three seasons of The Sopranos. It's the sort of dramatic cycle people will still be writing and thinking about 25 years from now, and given the current state of the world and the nation, that's a good thing. ''There,'' our grandchildren will say. ''It wasn't all Simon Cowell.''

No. There was also Chris and Snoop. Their terrible nail gun. And the empty houses that have become tombs, standing as silent symbols for what has become of some of our inner cities. The Wire is a staggering achievement.


its also number 1 in the top 5 reason to live this week. a nail gun..DAMN!

I have to start watching this I'm years late on so many shows...

The Wire
Nip/Tuck
House

I'm staying away from Rescue me until I can see some old episodes. I need a whole other life just to watch all the tv I wanna watch


But back to the Wire - aren't they supposed to have an episode or special that catches people up on the whole series? I looked for it & can't find it

leeroysoupnutz said:

This is easily the best show on television the past three years.
Saw the opener last night and this looks like another addictive season for me.
I thought the Sopranos was the best until this show aired and I haven't missed a single episode since it started.

Rome is now a close second to me and I can't wait for season 2 of that.

HBO rocks.
[Edited 9/11/06 7:33am]

CalhounSq said:

The entire last season was being shown on HBO every Sunday night for the past month and a half leading up to last night's season opener.

Where have you been?




[Edited 9/11/06 7:36am]

Think I'm gonna be addicted to this series

White American (red states) will not watch this show. Too real, Interacial sex, Blacks in important positions. No matter how good it is.

At least we get a final season to wrap things up.

leeroysoupnutz said:

I love this show- I think you are right though.. sadly I live in a red state.. do not know anyone that watches this show. I have watched from the beginning.

leeroysoupnutz said:

What do you mean "a final season"?

dseann said:

FEAR NOT.....

Its 4th season just begun, 'The Wire' gets OK for 5th
Latest rave reviews delight HBO brass
By David Zurawik
sun television critic
Originally published September 13, 2006
In a surprise move that will guarantee 125 jobs and pump at least $17.5 million into the local economy next year, HBO will announce today that it is renewing its Peabody Award-winning drama, The Wire, for a fifth season.

The Baltimore-based series about urban America began its fourth season Sunday night, greeted by a crush of critical acclaim, including an "appreciation" on The New York Times' editorial page calling the series "the closest that moving pictures have come so far to the depth and nuance of the novel."





"We are delighted - though not surprised - at the initial critical response to the new season of The Wire," Carolyn Strauss, president of HBO Entertainment, said in a statement. "David Simon and his remarkable creative team have a riveting and thought-provoking series that's unlike anything else on TV."

In a statement, HBO confirmed reports in Sunday's Sun that the fifth season would look at the role of mass media in contributing to cities' dysfunction.

"For four seasons, we have depicted that part of urban America which has been left behind by the economy and by the greater society, and chronicled entrenched problems that have gone without solution for generations now," Simon, the 46-year-old creator of the series, says in the statement.

According to Simon, the fifth season will focus on the economy in answering the questions: "Why? What is it that we see and sense about these problems? To what are we giving attention, and what is it that we consistently ignore? How do we actually see ourselves?"

At the end of Season 3, in December 2004, it seemed as if HBO was about to cancel the series. But, not ready to abandon his vision, Simon wrote story arcs and scripts for another season that were so compelling that HBO gave him another year.

The expectation by Simon himself was that HBO would see how ratings went this season before committing to a fifth season. In an interview in Sunday's Sun, Simon vowed to write a fifth and final season as a novel if HBO did not renew the series.

The ratings Sunday for the Season 4 premiere - 1.53 million - were only slightly better than those of Season 3, when cancellation seemed imminent - an average of 1.49 million. But looking at The Wire's critical acclaim and at technology that allows the series to be marketed in new ways, HBO sees a series worth renewing.

A final audience measurement for Sunday's screening won't be available for weeks - the time it will take for an independent ratings service to canvass cable systems across the country for the number of viewers who saw the episode On Demand. In addition, Nielsen Media Research this week will be measuring the number of viewers for nine additional replays of The Wire's premiere on various HBO channels.

"All of these - plus people recording the show on DVRs for later viewing - are ways that we hope more people will be accessing The Wire," said David Baldwin, executive vice president for program planning at HBO. "We've made a concerted effort to put it on in as many places as we possibly can."

By way of comparison, other Sunday-night viewing included 20.7 million people watching NFL football on NBC, while 13.0 million tuned in for Part 1 of ABC's controversial docudrama The Path to 9/11.

david.zurawik@baltsun.com

Fury said:

I didn't see that article and thought you were talking about this season being the last. Almost made me cry.....whew.....
I for one abandoned my game to see the opener and I am a lifelong Giants fan.

My conselation was that I didn't see them lose to the Colts, but that's what the Wire does to me. I think after getting the results from on demand viewing there is a good chance of a sixth season.

This shit is hot, hot, hot...