The Wire

There is a sense of unease about revisiting The Wire, long regarded as one of the best television shows ever made. How well can it stand the test of time when the technology on which it is based is so outdated?Forget the flip phones. The series remains brilliant, and more of an achievement now than back then because it towers over most of what has been made since. The tapped phone calls drug dealer D’Angelo Barksdale makes from the phone booth at The Pit in Baltimore in season one, where he and Bodie run a drug-running network from an abandoned orange sofa, feed into a complex and intelligent story about social decay that is so profound the technology becomes irrelevant.The Wire Season 1-5 Download.

It was made for next to nothing – one episode of The Sopranos cost as much as a season of The Wire – and it succeeded before social media or streaming on pure word of mouth. It was appointment television that for five seasons never flagged in the quality of its writing (creator David Simon was a Baltimore police reporter and his writing partner Ed Burns was a cop who became a teacher), its pioneering racial casting and acting talent.Simon confessed later that he pitched the show as a police procedural when its real power was in revealing the lost ambition of the Baltimore dealers, addicts and police, and the relentless undermining of good intentions by political chicanery and failed insight into what social order, education and local government should mean.

It treated its audience as intelligent. Things didn’t have to be explained, black street talk isn’t deciphered and plots go only as far as they should. Storylines and people overlap through the seasons, feeding in and out of the core stories of the police investigative team of Jimmy McNulty (Dominic West), his best buddy, the wonderful Bunk (Wendell Pierce).