Rating  - So dark..............
The fourth season of The Wire is different to the other seasons as they have gotten away from the wire tap angles and are now straight out drama.
The series exposed the problems with Baltimore's schools and the political pressures that come from dealing with the citys issues.
There is no melodrama in this series and there is no glossing over of issues. People looking for an answer can look someplace else as the series does not give answers, it just poses questions.
Great, great series.
Rating  - After three years, this season is yet another disappointment from Simon and Co.
The Wire in its forth season suffers from both new and recurring problems from past seasons. While the forth season can be a smart docudrama with its numerous nuances of reality and the references to past seasons, it still fails to be a effective TV show; completely lacking dramatic effect. A educational drama, yes, but not great Tv show, not by a long shot.
In this latest season of HBO's The Wire, David Simon and Co. try to follow the footsteps of the past seasons into the schools and largely fail. Why?
First off, the Wire main case of the the school's ails is flawed and doesn't have the same dramatic execution of last season's legalization of drugs. Additionally the "hidden bodies" case that is exposed at the end of the season, does not match up to the great intrigue of past season's single investigations. Also, the school story is simply too complicated of a story to cover in a single TV season.
Secondly, as with the last seasons, the show never really delivers the satisfying emotional punch of a hit TV show which is sad considering this is the forth season of the show. Admittedly, dealing with kids provided plenty of heart wrenching moments, but they were far too few and between the usual babble of inner city politics and talking fare the show is notorious for.
Finally, if there was one thing I did love about the forth season of the Wire it was the new kids that single handedly carried the whole season; I just wish I loved the show nearly as much.
Rating - No Doubt!
The Wire, meaning the drug lords of the ghetto get their throwaway cell phones tapped. Much like Deadwood, the revisionism of the old West, Baltimore, a microcosm of modern urban myth gets its star turn. McNaulty, Bunk, the cops and DA's on one side, dance with the defunct Barkesdale's and the emerging Marlowe gang in an embrace of odd comradeship. The young white pol, Tommy Carcetti , wins the mayoral race over the Black huckster, Royce only to get his eyes opened, the city is in chaos and he has no chance to put his idealistic ideas in play.
Over the last seasons, the drug problem in the black community is shown realistically, the young street hoppers, cash bulging in their street clothes, they end up corpses soon enough along with the zombie-like addicts. Episodes of quasi-drug legalization in Season 3 actually reduce crime, a HBO experiment that says hey folks, violence will decrease, but your junkies are going to die. Well, they are anyhow, but that's what our moral leaders cannot face.
Oh, Omar, the gay murder machine, living between hell and devastation, what greater character and acting in all of television, no doubt.
Rating - Better understadings of the ailing, dysfunctional and complicated American urban systems
I stayed a little more than a year in Baltimore as a [foreign] postdoctoral fellow at the Johns Hopkins Hospital between the period of 1993-1994. Back then I just used to commute from the suburb to the campus without knowing what's happening in the inner city area as depicted in this TV show. Of course I heard about drug problems and prevalent drug-related violences as in every American urban region. When I first watched episodes of the 1st season of the Wire, I immediately realized how narrow-sided and superficial my view of the city has been. As the series went on, I became to feel that America still has hope and promises, judging based on the fact that this kind of masterpiece TV seires could be produced to illuminate people in the real world. This drama also seemed to have succeeded in revealing the broadest spectrum of African-American characters. I wonder why not-so-many American viewers watched [initially] this epic, and I think hopefully as many people in the world as possible should watch this series to appreciate the reality of human society in general.
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