As the smartest show ever to pop up on the fleeting ether of our televisions, The Wire has generated a lot of equallysmartcommentary. The series’ gritty, ultra-realistic, and blindingly multifaceted take on life in Baltimore almost demands that television writers bang out heaps of articles about it (especially as the fifth, final season begins to unfold).
Some of the best chatter about the show I’ve found comes from the group blog Heaven and Here. In entry after entry, the writers digest The Wire‘s meaning and intent from so many different angles that the site acts as an indispensable guidebook to the tangled streets of the show. It’s fitting that this ponderous hub of thoughtful posts is the best way to understand a work as vast and sprawling as The Wire: How else to grasp the minutiae of five seasons’ worth of dense dialogue, interlocking story lines, and Greek tragedy than with a barrage of interlocking blog posts, each taking a different look at the same show?
But hold back on reading too much until you’ve watched the whole body of David Simon’s opus–you don’t want to spoil any endings.
