|
 |
 |
THE WIRE
( HBO )
This sprawling social drama has dozens of characters and, really, only one — Baltimore, Md. The fourth, finest and most heartbreaking season focused on four inner-city schoolboys, serenaded by the drug trade, failed by every institution meant to protect them and facing choices that will make or doom them for life. Meanwhile, it expanded on the show's novelistic tapestry of cops, politicos, junkies, bureaucrats, ministers and hustlers. The Wire does something that should be the death of good character-based drama: it is unapologetically a social critique, and its own creators admit that they prioritize the story — designed to dissect a different social ill each season — over character development. But because they are also passionately devoted to realism, what could have been a preachy TV editorial is instead a story of real people in all their unpredictable messiness.
|
|
|
