The Wire Review

What Simon and his collaborators achieve is breathtaking -- creating a dozen parallel plotlines that slowly converge as the season progresses, all rooted in a totally organic world. There is drug kingpin Marlo (Jamie Hector), consolidating his hold on the streets; Det. Lester Freamon (Clarke Peters), who continues to follow the drug money despite his higher-ups' reluctance to stir the pot in an election year; and former cop Howard Colvin (the magnificent Robert Wisdom), who, after unilaterally decriminalizing drugs in season three, is recruited to research at-risk teens, intersecting with the aforementioned youths.

Even those descriptions hardly do the show justice, or capture small moments that resonate after each hour ends -- from a teen realizing the unwitting role he played in an older boy's death to the nagging realities of city politics, where diligence is seldom rewarded amid an endless cycle of poverty, drugs and violence. Nothing else on U.S. television -- including its myriad news and documentary channels -- addresses these matters with such unyielding clarity.

Simon essentially pleaded with HBO for this fourth season, though he didn't compromise his storytelling, which unfolds like a great novel and concludes this 13-episode flight with relatively little closure. Despite its unique business model, HBO isn't entirely immune from market forces, which can be as cruel on quality TV, in their own way, as Baltimore's mean streets.

In interviews, the producer has also chafed at suggestions that his creation is too complex and gritty to generate acceptable ratings even by pay TV's less-exacting standards, but there's some truth in the sense that the predominantly black cast and prevailing sense of hopelessness curb its mainstream appeal.

Whatever its commercial fate, however, "The Wire" has secured its place as one of the most demanding and thought-provoking series ever to grace television. For HBO, that is surely worth something. It's only too bad all the superlatives hurled its way can't readily be transformed into viewers.