you come at the king, you best not miss

In the middle of a ghetto courtyard in West Baltimore lies an orange couch. The couch symbolizes the center of the universe for the street dealers who sell the product in an orchestrated system and the addicts who pay or hustle for a fix.

Meanwhile in a dingy basement a mix of throwaway homicide and narcotics detectives assemble to take down the head of drug distribution in West Baltimore, a man named Avon Barksdale (Wood Harris). Our hero, homicide detective McNulty (Dominic West), is on no moral crusade to win the war on drugs or clean up the streets. He wants to win, even if it means that he must spit on his chain of command to get his way. As mentioned on the commentary tracks, the show deconstructs the mythic police pursuit of the bad guy. It’s simply a matter of McNulty’s ego against that of Barksdale and head associate Stringer Bell (Idris Elba), who insists on running the enterprise as a business to the extent that he takes economic classes at a local college. But there is so much more to the picture than those characters.

That’s right, HBO’s underappreciated cop show The Wire transcends the cops show genre by increasing its scope. Judges, lawyers, bureaucrats, police corruption, big dealers, children dealers, addicts—they’re all woven into this masterpiece of a television show. The 13 episodes of season one tracks a single case: the attempt to take down Barksdale. Most cop shows wrap up loose ends at the end of each episode. Some like FX’s The Shield contain story arcs that run through extended episodes. The Wire’s commitment to detail—both in plot intricacies and character development—is astonishing.

The makers of the show consider it a televised novel. Episodes often end with an unsatisfying feeling, especially at first. The pacing is methodical to allow the characters to breathe and story arcs to take form. This induces payoffs that resonate, unlike the recent seasons of 24 that contained an implausible amount of twists to satisfy the ADD-ridden souls of TV viewers for a single episode, which happened to be one-twenty-fourth (.014667) of a single day (note to people with ADD: do not take offense, it was a joke).

Fair warning: this show will bore the heck out of you if you’re not willing to invest careful attention with a delayed gratification mindset. Even then, the dialogue, acting, and cinematography are good enough to make every episode interesting. And of course, each episode must be watched in order, or else you’ll probably die.

McNulty and his homicide partner investigate a cold murder crime scene that may have a connection to a mid-level dealer. During the patient five minutes of observation and intuition that would have made Hercule Poirot proud, the detectives discover how the murder took place… by communicating through only the f-word and its close relatives (family members, if you will). Ingenious and hilarious, the scene also establishes another piece in a jigsaw puzzle of a case.

As one could gather by now, there is not a big shootout between the drug dealers and the cops at the end of the season. The case gradually escalates through wiretaps of pay phones near the courtyard (the one with the orange couch), for the dealers communicate through pagers and pay phones, and even that’s more complicated than it sounds.

Series creator David Simon had journalistic experience covering the crime beat in Baltimore, and co-writer Ed Burns used to work as a cop in the mentioned city. Which makes sense because…

The show drips with doomed realism. Dread is in the air. Its tone, scope and ambition reminded me of the film Traffic, which is not to say that the show overtly preaches against drug laws. Both possess an uneasy sense of emptiness and dissatisfaction in which complex, but mostly good people are screwed over by a system, be it cops worrying more about promotion than fighting crime or dealers valuing a code of violent justice over friendship. The systems can be compared, which is one of the intentions of the show. The heart of the show lies in the critique of the institution of urban law enforcement and the extent to which it suppresses humanity (i.e., the self-preservation of police captains takes precedence over real police work).

The ensemble fosters more three-dimensional characters than I can remember in a television series. A lieutenant whose checkered past inhibits his ability to stand up for what is right, a rival of Barksdale who becomes a loose cannon after his gay lover is brutally murdered, a junkie informant with a heart of gold, and a teenage dealer who acts as a surrogate father to a handful of poor children are just a few of the fascinating characters on display.

The DVD contains audio commentaries on the first, second, and 12th episodes. The first and last commentaries provide insight about the vision behind the show, why certain choices—the lack of music cues—were made, and why the show is so awesome in general. The commentary for the second episode included a number of prolonged spells without speaking, which sort of defeats the purpose.

It's not television. It's HBO. This show belongs in a museum.