The Wire

For years, I've heard from my friends comment how amazing a show The Wire was. Over the holiday break, I finally grabbed the bull by the horns and watched all four seasons of the show.

It was absolutely amazing. There is a certain truthiness to the show is astounding. The character development for growing cast is incredibly three-dimensional. The protagonists are flawed and sometime battered, the drug dealers aren't inept like most Hollywood films, many are smart and ambitious. Stringer, one of the drug overlords had a copy of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations in his apartment.

All in good time too, the fifth and final season will start on January 6.

Interestingly, Mark Bowden, most known for his book: Black Hawk Down, recently wrote a piece on David Simon in the Atlantic Monthly. In it the profile, Mark posits that David's anger and grudges are the key driver in making The Wire one of the best shows on television.

For all his success and accomplishment, he’s an angry man, driven in part by lovingly nurtured grudges against those he feels have slighted him, underestimated him, or betrayed some public trust. High on this list is his old employer The Baltimore Sun—or more precisely, the editors and corporate owners who have (in his view) spent the past two decades eviscerating a great American newspaper... He landed a job as a Sun reporter just out of the University of Maryland in the early 1980s, and as he tells it, if the newspaper, the industry, and America had lived up to his expectations, he would probably still be documenting the underside of his adopted city one byline at a time. But The Sun let David Simon down.

[I]n the show’s final season, which debuts in January, Simon will revisit the part of Baltimore that’s closest to his heart, The Sun. The season, more than any other before it, will reflect his personal experience. Given his long memory and his inclination to settle old scores, the difference between fiction and fact will be of particular interest to his former colleagues.