The Wire: Season Four

The impression I got from everyone else's old posts on season four of The Wire was that though the show gets really good in its third season, the fourth is when it really takes off and edges it's way into the "greatest of all time" discussion. That's high praise and I was hopeful that the season would live up to all that hype, and now that I'm through the season I can say I believe it did. Season four of The Wire, while building on the foundation of the previous three seasons, just clobbered them all easily in terms of quality. It seemed like in the past The Wire was at its best when exposing just how broken and fucked up systems in Baltimore are- be it politics, the war on drugs, or general drug-dealer operational infrastructure. Season four just hammers on these subjects hard, all season, and in addition takes on education as well. It's a show that by design wants to frustrate you- with every new lazy bit of hypocrisy in the school system, every time a politician solves a problem by creating one and letting the next guy figure his way out of it, every time a drug dealer chooses to kill a rival over short-term problems rather than think about the long-term effects, it just drives home the point that these systems are all completely fucked and no amount of idealism is really going to change things. Spoiler Alert: I knew that this season would focus on four middle-school boys and that its ending would leave me depressed, so naturally I assumed at least one of them would be killed. But no, that would be too easy. Instead all four live to see the next season, and a majority of them continue on a life that seems more depressing than a tv character's death ever could. So while I loved The Wire's fourth season like many others did before, the question remains: does it rank among the best of all time? This one I'm not so sure about. I can't get over how slow those first two seasons were, and while the third was great, I'm not sure if the excellent fourth completely redeemed that slow start. Some shows take a while to get going but it'd be hard for me to recommend the series to someone unless they were 100% committed to seeing it through to the end; it really takes a long time to get going. Still though the brilliance of season four has me also wondering if I missed a lot of subtleties in earlier seasons, so at some point after I finish off season five I would like to go back and rewatch the first season at least.