The Wire, Series 1 & 2, created by David Simon, 2004

In 1991, David Simon published Homicide: A Year On The Killing Streets, an uncompromising but sympathetic account of the year he'd spent shadowing the detectives of Baltimore's homicide unit. Optioned by veteran film director and Baltimore native Barry Levinson, Simon's book became the bible for an NBC TV show with a more affirmative, network-friendly title -- Homicide: Life On The Street -- and Simon, formerly a reporter for the Baltimore Sun, found a new career as TV writer and producer. Towards the end of the run of the TV show, Simon and former Baltimore cop Ed Burns published The Corner, which chronicled life on Baltimore's streets from the point of view of the drug dealers, addicts and ordinary citizens caught up in the trade in crack cocaine, and was later made into an acclaimed mini-series screened by US premium cable service Home Box Office. Simon's latest venture for HBO, The Wire, is a powerful hybrid of the gritty police procedural of Homicide: Life On The Street, and The Corner's hard-hitting social commentary, and like its predecessors is filmed on location in Baltimore with a large cast of mostly unknown actors. Instead of setting up and solving a story in each episode, it uses the span of an entire series to construct a detailed narrative that lays bare the consequences of a single police investigation from the point of view of both the police and the criminals. Widely acclaimed as the best-written, best-acted and most intricate TV cop show currently screened on either side of the Atlantic, it has been available only on the FX satellite channel in the UK, but both seasons 1 and 2 are now available as DVD box sets, perhaps the ideal way to enjoy their intricate and multilayered narratives.

The basic story of the first season's run of thirteen episodes is simple enough. Rogue homicide cop Jimmy McNulty (played by British actor Dominic West) is dismayed when D'Angelo Barksdale (Larry Gillard, Jr.), a member of a drug-dealing family led by the mysterious Avon Barksdale (Wood Harris), escapes a murder charge after a witness is bribed to change her testimony. McNulty is a driven, hard-drinking detective who suffers from a fatal arrogance that leads to bruising clashes with his superior officers -- the cliche of the loner cop from a thousand novels that's redeemed by fine writing and a terrific performance by West that precisely captures the contradictions of McNulty's rogue behaviour. As his partner, Bunk Moreland (Wendell Pierce) opines in the second series, ‘When Jimmy McNulty ain't policing, he's a picture postcard of a drunken self-destructive fuck-up. And when he is policing, he's pretty much the same muthafucker, but on a good case, that's as close as the man comes to being right.' Determined to see justice done, McNulty uses his friendship with a judge to start an investigation into the family's affairs, and incidentally makes an enemy of his superior, Major Rawls (John Doman), who makes sure that the investigative detail is a dumping ground for losers and misfits.

From this simple premise, The Wire spins an intricate, multilayered story that contrasts McNulty's struggle with the hierarchy of the police department with D'Angelo Barksdale's growing revulsion at the lethal machinations of his family, led by his cold-blooded uncle and his uncle's lieutenant, Stringer Bell (Idris Elba). Armed only with wire taps and typewriters, the detail slowly pulls together in the style of old-fashioned let's-put-on-the-show-right-here-in-the-barn musicals, and begins to unravel Avon Barksdale's drug-dealing empire by a combination of dogged police work and good, bad and purely dumb luck. A former homicide detective, Lester Freamon (Clarke Peters), stuck in the pawnshop unit for more than thirteen years as punishment for insubordination, gets back in the saddle and uncovers a paper trail that connects Avon Barksdale with city politicians and a state senator. Ronald Pryzbylewski (Jim True-Frost), a hothead who's only kept his job because of the influence of his father-in-law, uses skills learned from solving magazine puzzles to crack the code used by the drug slingers. And despite the reservations of his ambitious wife, the man assigned to lead the detail, Lieutenant Daniels (Lance Reddick), begins to believe that their work is truly worthwhile. While the detail mounts a round-the-clock surveillance of D'Angelo's drug-slinging team and attempts to fend of interference from superior officers who want a quick result, the turning point comes when Stringer Bell authorizes the kidnap and torturing to death of the boyfriend of Omar (Michael K. Williams), a flamboyant, gay stickup artist who specializes in ripping off drug dealers. Omar declares war on Avon Barksdale's crew and becomes a confidential police informant; the murder finally leads to the execution of one of D'Angelo's team of young dealers and D'Angelo's crisis of conscience.

In the second season, Avon Barksdale is attempting to run his empire from a prison cell while Stringer Bell tries to assert his own authority out on the street, and Jimmy McNulty has been exiled to Harbor Patrol. When he finds the body of a young woman floating in the water, he uses tide tables to determine that she died within the jurisdiction of the Baltimore City Police, and for vindictive reasons sticks the murder on his former colleagues in the homicide unit; when more dead young women turn up suffocated to death in a shipping container in the docks, McNulty manages to stick their deaths on the homicide unit too. Meanwhile, Major Valcheck's gift of a stained glass window to his local church is trumped by Frank Sobotka (played with bull-headed grit by Chris Bauer), head of the stevedore union at the docks. Their rivalry turns into a feud, and Valcheck, who happens to be the father-in-law of Pryzbylewski, begins an investigation into union funding that resurrects both the detail and the career of Lieutenant Daniels. Street surveillance, wire taps and detective work quickly reveal a connection between drug- and people-smugglers led by the mysterious Greek, the deaths of the young women in the shipping container, and Sobotka, who desperately needs funds to lobby for more business at Baltimore's docks; to Valcheck's fury the detail switches targets and brings in the FBI to help it make its case. Although the second season, like the first, ends with several plotlines unresolved, the good news is that the third season, which returns the struggle between the cops and Avon Barksdale's crew to the foreground, has already been screened in the States, and that a fourth season has just been commissioned.

In addition to their detailed and realistic portrayal of police work from street surveillance to tangles with red tape and political manoeuvring that would leave Machiavelli gasping with admiration, The Wire's stories are underpinned by incisive dissection of the crime-ridden underbelly of American society, from war-zones of inner city neighbourhoods, political and practical compromises that tint justice various shades of grey, to season 2's powerful elegy for the lost dreams of American working class life. David Simon described The Wire as a visual novel (he and Burns recruited George P. Pelecanos to their writing team for season 2, and Dennis Lehane and Richard Price for season 3), and like the best novels, it spins a detailed, multilayered and intricately nuance story in which even minor characters are carefully shaded in three-dimensions, taking its time to build a thorough picture of its world, and giving no easy answers to the difficult moral questions it addresses. That world is often bleak and dark, but it's shot through with vivid humour, salted with some of the best dialogue this side of the classic noirs of the 1940s, and illuminated by vivid storytelling, from D'Angelo's use of a chess game to explain the drug-dealing hierarchy, to Omar's performance as a courtroom witness, in which he demonstrates that the street has a code that's every bit as exacting as any in the law books. Perhaps you haven't yet seen the show; perhaps you've been put off by the hype and critical ecstasy surrounding it. Well, for once, believe the hype: The Wire is ever bit as good as everyone says -- even better than HBO's signature crime drama The Sopranos -- and if you miss it, you're missing some of the finest television ever screened.

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