"The Wire": The best TV show no one's watching

Tense and gritty as the ghetto it portrays, "The Wire" is the red-headed stepchild of HBO. Praised by the critics but ignored by most everyone else, it's been snubbed by the Emmys and has garnered only a fraction of the ratings of more famous siblings like "The Sopranos." The last episode of Season 3 aired in 2004 — an age, in television terms — and the show lingered in limbo for months while HBO decided whether to renew.

Then again, given the demands the show places on viewers, the network's hesitation is easy to understand.

"The Wire" is perhaps the least formulaic police procedural of all time, more Victorian novel than "CSI." It follows, roughly speaking, a police unit on the trail of a drug gang, but that's like saying "Bleak House" deals with a very long lawsuit. Together with writing partners such as former Baltimore cop Ed Burns and crime novelists George Pelecanos, Richard Price and Dennis Lehane, writer/producer David Simon draws on his experiences as a police reporter to create a world of striking richness and complexity. The show's depiction of inner-city despair is more realistic, both practically and morally, than anything else on TV. (So realistic, in fact, that a drug ring in Queens reportedly used the show as a handbook on how to avoid arrest.)

In "The Wire's" universe, there are no good guys or bad guys, no ends neatly tied up. None of the characters are likable in a conventional sense, and there's no telling when one of your favorites might take a dirt nap. The plotting is labyrinthine, the pace almost slow. Every conversation is important, and there are no flashbacks or voice-overs to help sort out the connections. Considering the show's huge cast of characters, their thick "Ballmer" accents and drug-dealer slang, it's as if Simon and company were daring us not to keep up.

The problem with a description like this one is that it makes the show sound like broadcast spinach: Watch it because it's good for you. But make no mistake, "The Wire" is hugely entertaining. Give it your full attention, and the effort pays off with sharp, subtle writing, gallows humor and the kind of quirky details that make Simon's Baltimore come alive. It's safe to say no other cop show critiques the war on drugs, the Iraq conflict, even capitalism itself, while also featuring a shotgun-toting gay stick-up man who whistles "The Farmer in the Dell" on his way to a hit.

In this era of celebrity-driven media culture, "The Wire" is also remarkable as an ensemble effort. There's not a well-known name in the cast, just some of the most interesting (and interesting-looking) character actors around.

Simon's characters tell their story, play their part in the narrative and then melt away; no one's a hero, and there's a fresh anti-hero wherever the camera turns. Especially notable are the roles it offers for black actors, many of whom have turned seemingly secondary characters into complex and enduring creations. (See Omar, the stick-up artist referenced above: One darkly comic scene in Season 4 shows the thug in his blue satin bathrobe, striding grimly to the store to buy Honey Nut Cheerios as passersby flee in fear. The cheese stands alone, indeed.)

"The Wire" isn't just impressive TV, it's impressive art, and it shows just how far the medium has come — and where, one hopes, it's going. If someone liked a television show back in the day, they'd say, a little embarrassed, "It's as good as a movie!" These days, you'd be hard-pressed to find anything at the multiplex as thoughtful as what's on HBO. Their writers can take advantage of 100-plus hours of run-time to craft sprawling, season-spanning plot arcs, impressively subtle character development and multiple narrative threads. As an art form, the long-format TV drama comes a lot closer to literature than to film.

In the case of "The Wire," the best analogy might be the serialized 19th-century novel, the kind of thing that kept Dickens fans lined up at newsstands in anticipation of the next installment. Like Dickens' London, the Baltimore depicted in "The Wire" lives and breathes, as rich, textured and immediate as the world outside our door.

Now, if we can just get some more people to watch it.

Mary Park is a writer living in Seattle: marypark@speakeasy.net