The Greatest TV Show of All-Time - Non-Sports Rant of the Month(s)

I’ve finally finished watching The Wire, which is hands down the greatest show ever made. Yes, the series finale was broadcast on March 9, almost 2 months ago to the day.

Yet, I finished the series two days ago. What took me so long you ask? Well, I simply didn’t want it to end.

I was a late comer to The Wire. When it came out in 2002, I was deeply entrenched into a preference of only sports and music related television. I would turn to HBO occasionally, but only to watch a movie or Real Sports.

I came to college in 2003 and didn’t have HBO available in the dorms. Some of my friends from Baltimore talked about how realistic The Wire was, so when I went home I would catch an episode occasionally and was slightly intrigued at best.

Sometime in 2004, my mom got rid of HBO, taking away my primary source of The Wire. When I would visit my father in California, who had like 700 channels, I would check for The Wire and watch episodes.

So what happened up until recently was I only saw four or five episodes from start to finished, scattered between the first four seasons. As the fifth season loomed at the start of this year, I decided not to watch it and told myself I’d finally sit down and watch the first four seasons.

Sometime in February I started watching the first season. It started off fairly slow, in comparison to the series as a whole. However, watching The Wire is more like reading a motion picture book. Each episode seemed like a chapter, with each season playing more like separate volume in a series of books about the decay of modern American cities.

After the first five or six episodes of Season 1, I was hooked. It seemed like I would watch an entire season over the span of a weekend and in between homework, basketball games, and spending time with my girlfriend.

At the beginning of April, I was finally face to face with the start of Season 5. Instead of digging in, I waited. I faced the inevitability of the series’ ending and did my best to avoid it.

However, I finally gave in over the weekend and finished the show a little after 4:30 AM this past Tuesday. Yes, after finishing the penultimate episode near 3, I couldn’t go to sleep without learning the fate of McNulty and Freamon, Daniels and Carcetti, Mike and Dukie, and of course Marlo.

There isn’t much I can say about The Wire that hasn’t already been said. What I can say is that if you haven’t seen The Wire, the time is now for you to start watching it, especially if you live in a big city as the plots and subplots will surely hit close to home. If you’ve only seen bits and pieces of it, do yourself some justice and watch the whole thing.
I’m definitely not a TV person. I’ve never seen an episode of Lost, Desperate Housewives is too ridiculous, Reality TV is too fake, and all those CSI/Law & Order shows are about as believable as the stunts in GTA IV.

You won’t hear me endorsing a TV show often, especially a drama. This is definitely one major exception to the rule.