This is god damn serious: The Wire is 
the best television show ever created. You like The Sopranos? This is better. You like Lost? This blows it out of the water. 
I could go on for decades, but before you lose interest in reading, let me reiterate: The Wire kicks the arse of anything you’ve ever seen. Call in sick tomorrow and marathon it.

While a one-line description of the series is inevitably “Baltimore police drama”, it’s really a show about society – why the drug war can’t be won, the death of the working class, the terminal weakness of the education system, and – most of all – how man contends with the institutions he’s created. The Wire is incredibly complex and difficult to penetrate at first (it seems like it doesn’t even want you to keep up in the first few episodes of each season), but once you’re in it’s ultimately incredibly engaging and infinitely rewarding.

Season Five moves to the newsroom of the Baltimore Sun to examine the process by which news does (and more importantly doesn’t) get reported. As always, the newsroom plot interweaves with the efforts of the police to crack the Baltimore drug ring, the efforts of the drug crews to keep ahead of the 
po-po and the efforts of politicians to keep climbin’ the ladder and screw everyone else over in the process.

It’s a steep learning curve for anyone unfamiliar with the characters, but regular viewers will be alternately entertained and then infuriated by the craziest of all crazy McNulty schemes, Carcetti’s oblivious slide into self-centeredness, Marlo’s quiet street war with Omar, and Dukie’s doomed quest to get a job. Plus Lester Freamon remains the smoothest operator in mankind’s recorded history (close second is The Bunk). By now the players are well established, and series creator David “Angry” Simon has well and truly accomplished his goal of crafting something unlike conventional TV – something more like a novel, something that transcends the one-episode-for-one-story chucklefest that is much 
of modern television.

While this final season has been criticised for its truncated length (ten episodes versus the usual 13 or so), the plot is satisfying and the series’ closing montage will rip out your heart and kick it square in the nuts. It’s an injustice that the series remained critically underwatched while on air (and an even bigger injustice that it was consistently snubbed by the Emmys), but that just goes to show that you have to be moderately intelligent and perceptive to get into The Wire. You have to be good poh-lice.  – Owen