The wire was actually the worst television series on television, but that's exactly what made it so amazing. It was more like an unwritten novel adapted to be broadcast as a television series. It even seams that if The Wire had a novel to base on it wouldn't have ruined it the way most television series do, trying to simplify the story, "cutting the fat", flattening deep characters to cardboard and sometimes even combining some.


After so many years that series like Law&Order and C.S.I hold the hegemony of crime TV David Simon and the other creators of The wire showed the world that you can make a TV show about crime that has a little more depth from Tom&Jerry.

Some people will point to The Wire's ratings and say, "No they didn't", but all the small reasons for the Wire's poor ratings, are the same things that made the show so great.

The first thing is that David Simon and the other creators of The wire had an agenda and even the aspiration to warp in a TV show. Generally you can say that if "Rome" is about the decay of the Roman empire, The wire is about the decay of the US empire.

The wire brought the poor violent reality of the Inner-City life to prime time TV. Not trying to suggest a solution, but from a need, a journalist need, to shake the puritan carpet that covers the inconvenient truth of Inner-City life in the US of A. The Wire showed how the criminals, the po-lice, the justice system, the politicians and the media are all playing a zero sum game, a game that deteriorates the society they so called serve, and in the same time keeps them in the various power positions they hold. Under the rules and the prism of this game the "bases" of those people learn how to judge their performance and thus they get promoted to a higher "position", but in their hands they only have the power to maintain the rules of the game.