the wire (one of my favorite shows)

is beginning it's 4th season. i watched the opener yesterday. it did NOT disappoint. in general the writing is superb. the characters are so very real. the drug dealers, the kids they recruit, the killers, the dock workers, the cops, or they would say, the police, the politicians, the citizens.

ahhhhhhhhhh charm city

Hard Knocks This Season, Gritty HBO Drama `The Wire' Takes On Blighted City Schools

By ROGER CATLIN Courant TV Critic September 9 2006

As if it were a manifesto on urban ills instead of TV's richest drama, HBO's "The Wire" returns Sunday to take on no less than the crisis in city schools.There, crumbling buildings and defeated teachers conspire to provide dead ends for youngsters who see street-corner drug dealing as the only viable way out of poverty. Not that making such a strident point is the show's primary purpose, says creator David Simon. "The first job is to be entertaining," the former writer for the Baltimore Sun told reporters at a press tour this summer, "and I think it's enormously entertaining. The characters are vibrant, and I think you care about what happens.""The Wire" is a drama based loosely on a major crime unit's sophisticated wiretapping. In its three previous seasons, they tracked down a notorious drug syndicate in the city, and also touched on politics and tough times down at the docks."The first year was the law enforcement and the drug war; the second year was the working class and the idea of the death of work; the third season was the political element," says Simon. "And now, it's just quite natural to do schools. "We always sort of conceived the show this way," Simon says. "Rather than do the same thing over and add incremental characters to a continuing theme, we really wanted to reinvent the theme of the show every season."Eventually, he says a picture of the modern urban life will emerge. "We really wanted to depict an American city at the millennium, with all of its attendant problems, all of its promise, and really examine...why it is that we've built - and why it is that the richest, most powerful country in the world can't solve its fundamental problems when it comes to places like Baltimore. And there are a lot of places like Baltimore. It's not a unique place.".......

the wire