The Wire, Season 4

I discovered The Wire back in March, when I borrowed the Season 1 DVD from Meghan. I'd heard a little about it, and I'd been a big fan of David Simon's 1990s show Homicide: Life on the Street. But there hasn't been much buzz about The Wire here in the UK (it has only recently appeared on TV here, on a not-always-available cable channel). Apparently, and incomprehensibly to me, there hasn't been much buzz about it in the US either. Turns out it got mediocre ratings and was largely and consistently ignored by the Emmy awards people.

The series features beautifully written and acted characters, but the real star is the city of Baltimore. Each season focuses on a different aspect of the workings of the city. In Season 1, we go to the towers and the low-rises, the housing projects where Baltimore's most powerful drug lord, Avon Barksdale, reigns. We also meet the special detail of police officers assigned to investigate Barksdale's organization. Season 2 moves over to Baltimore's docks, where a stevedore union leader finds himself in over his head doing business with gangsters smuggling contraband in shipping containers. The storyline from Season 1 also continues to play out in the background.

In Season 3, Barksdale's crew faces a challenge from an up-and-comer, and we are introduced to Baltimore's political scene as a councilman begins a bid for the mayor's office. Barksdale's second-in-command enlists the help of corrupt political connections as he tries to go legitimate, and a veteran police officer triggers a political crisis when he tries an unorthodox approach to containing the flourishing drug trade on his beat.

In Terminator 2, when Robert Patrick's character shatters into a million pieces, the pieces find each other and slowly converge back into Robert Patrick. Each season of The Wire is kind of like that. It begins with bits and pieces of story all over the place, and over the course of the 12 or 13 episodes, the pieces come together into a full picture where everything makes sense. Throughout the series, characters on both sides of the law, and in all parts of society depicted, are written as three-dimensional people shaped by the city that created them. We have the cops and the criminals and the politicians, but even peripheral characters, who in any other show might have been caricatures, are fleshed out with such care that you become emotionally attached to them. Ridiculously talented and mostly unknown actors (and some non-actors, including former politicians and gangsters) bring these people to vivid life. There are no stereotypes here. Your first impressions will deceive you, and characters you thought you had figured out will surprise you.

Season 4 might be the best yet. Here, we venture into the school system, guided by four students at Tilghman Middle School on Baltimore's tough west side. Randy is a cheerful entrepreneurial spirit who sells candy bars to his classmates and strives to stay in the good graces of his latest foster mother. Duquan (Dukie) is the smart, nerdy kid who would have a lot going for him if his family didn't constantly sell his clothes and school supplies for drug money. Namond is the relatively rich kid. The son of a major player in the Barksdale empire, he struggles under the thumb of his domineering mother, who insists that he carry on the family business and maintain the lifestyle to which she is accustomed. Michael is a brooding figure, bravely protecting his little brother from their addict mother (and the men she brings home) and always ready to stand tall if his friends are in a bind.

We watch as these kids and their compatriots negotiate the ins and outs of their everyday lives: their dysfunctional or unstable homes, the school that can barely cope with their educational needs (let alone their other problems), the lure of a relatively easy and lucrative career slinging drugs on the corners, the adults with good and bad intentions. Much of what we see is disturbing: Namond's mother ridiculing him for not living up to the example of his father (who is serving a life sentence for multiple homicides); a group of kids animatedly explaining the dos and don'ts of drug slinging to a sociologist; a jaded child on his way to a foster care facility reassuring the well-meaning cop who tried to find him a home. Without exception, the performances are astonishing, and even more so since many of the actors should be too young to understand the subject matter so well.

Often intersecting with the boys' stories, other ongoing plot threads continue, and education is the theme throughout: A new mayor is schooled in the political and fiscal shambles that is Baltimore. A former cop learns as much as he teaches in his first year as a math teacher, and another assists in an academic study about violent teenagers. The Homicide unit puzzles over how a new drug gang seems to have risen to power without mass killings.

Talking about The Wire, David Simon has said that he is not interested in portraying good and evil (the show is more Greek tragedy than morality play). And he has been criticized for offering a "moral equivalence" between the outright criminals and the law-abiding citizens. But that criticism misses the point. He is simply telling a story, a reality as he sees it, and everything that happens happens in service of the story. In The Sopranos, another clear candidate for Best Show in the History of Television, it felt like the writers were always trying to make sure we understood that Tony & co., no matter how entertaining they were, or how enviable some aspects of their lives might be, were bad people. One of the more blatant examples that I can remember is the finale of Season 2, where happy scenes of Meadow's graduation party are interspersed with scenes of the social degradation caused by her family's business. The Wire wags no such finger in our faces. It gives us the characters and the stories and trusts us to form our own opinions.

Which brings us to the oft-cited reason for the show's lack of popularity: that it's hard work, or that it asks a lot of the viewer. I don't quite get that one. Is that because it makes us think? Because it doesn't give us easy lessons or gratuitous happy endings? Because it's not low-brow enough? If that's hard work, then I'll happily roll up my sleeves and get stuck in for another dozen episodes.

The fifth and final season of The Wire begins tonight in the UK on the FX channel.